Cellphones & Smartphones Form Core of "Yahoo Anywhere"

Computergram International, August 13, 1999

Cellphones and smartphones will form the core of Yahoo Inc's target market as it rolls out more of its "Yahoo Anywhere" strategy over the course of this year. Yahoo launched the first tranche of this service this week, unveiling a mobile Yahoo service for Palm pilots and Windows CE devices.

The interactive service enables users to tailor content for handhelds in the a similar way to the existing "My Yahoo" service. PDA users connecting to the internet via a PC cradle or wireless modem can download email, calendar and address book information, stock quotes and travel information for the mobile Yahoo site. However, this is just the start of the "Yahoo Everywhere" plan. The company's intention is to start "notification" services for cellphones, smartphones and pagers over the next few months. So, instead of logging onto the Mobile Yahoo site information will be pushed at the user via the carrier network.

Mohan Vishwamth, vice president of Yahoo Everywhere is taking trends in Europe and Asia as a sign of how the Yahoo notification service will go. He says that between 5% and 15% of all mobile traffic in Europe and Asia is data. However, both Europe and Asia have settled on versions of GSM as the standard for their cellular networks - networks in the US still run on variety of different standards. "We would love to see all those standards," Vishwamth admits, but says that Yahoo hopes to get around the problem by signing deals with nationwide carriers such as Sprint PCS. He said that further carrier deals where in the pipeline. Yahoo is also banking on the wireless application protocol being as big a success as has been predicted. Vishwamth notes that Sprint already ships its phones with an HTML microbrowser. The industry expects that customers won't be able to buy a phone without a WAP browser this time next year. "Our content will be available on WAP, HTML and [Palm Computing's] web clipping service," Vishwamth said.

However, one question remains, how will Yahoo make money off the services? The desktop service draws in ad revenues but the small screen size and limited time people spend online with handheld devices make ads a less attractive proposition. Vishwamth will only say that Yahoo has cut some "very creative deals" with the carriers for the new services. He would not reveal if they were subscription-based, involved a per-transaction rate or still relied on pushing ads at consumers with the service.