Over the past year, Yahoo has inked deals with mobile carriers all over the world to deliver mobile content and advertising to the masses, and they’ve just gained access to over 90 million more with a recent deal with T-Mobile Germany. T-Mobile switched from their alliance with Google to Yahoo to deliver their mobile web services. They’re already playing catch-up with Google snagging a deal with Nokia to deliver web search on their handsets. Nokia, by the way, sells almost 40% of the world’s handsets.
A new service dubbed oneConnect aims at bringing together social networking connections with mobile phone users.
“Today, most people have too many forms of communications,” said Boerries, executive vice president of Yahoo’s Connected Live division. “To keep in touch with all of them you have to go to all of these different Web sites.”
OneConnect scours the web to find contact details of your friends at different social networking sites like MySpace, AIM, Bebo, Xing, Friendster and Orkut and combines that information with your mobile phone’s address book. Users can then communicate via different methods without breaking the conversation. For example, user’s can communicate via text message, and then transfer to mobile instant messaging for a longer conversation seamlessly without incurring per-message charges. OneConnect can also fit snippets of other web-services such as Google and Facebook onto mobile devices in a nice organized fashion. The service aims at bringing together all of your on- and off-line contacts to make it easier for you to connect and communicate at anytime and anywhere via your mobile device. Yahoo plans on developing version of oneConnect that are specific to the iPhone and BlackBerry.
Once the service is well received and well established, Yahoo plans to incorporate small discreet advertising in parts of oneConnect and share some of the revenue with the mobile carriers that serve the technology. It’s another attempt to gain exposure in the vast and emerging mobile marketing arena, that Yahoo has fell so far behind Google in. The service will become available in the US in the second quarter of this year.
