Apparently nothing daunted by Microsoft's hostile bid to gain ownership of the company, Yahoo! has announced OnePlace, a bookmarking tool for mobile phones, at CeBIT. OnePlace will be launched in the second quarter. While bookmarks are hardly a new idea, according to a Reuters report Yahoo! argued that mobile phones need a different approach including a far greater emphasis on sharing. OnePlace enables users to mark links, news feeds or search results that lead them to fresh information on favourite topics when clicked.
It also exploits on two other Yahoo! mobile services, OneSearch (which provides information, rather than web links) and OneConnect, by tailoring the content behind the bookmarks to match the location of users and the preferences of contacts who also use the service.
'We're not reinventing forms of mobile content or getting into the content business, but there are places where you have stuff that you care about, that you're passionate about, that you follow,' said Marco Boerries, head of Yahoo!'s mobile drive.
Boerries told Reuters that customers would be able to access the service either through telecoms carriers who have deals with Yahoo! including Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica and Vodafone - or download it from Yahoo! Once installed, users will be able to gather their favourite web sites either by choosing them on their PC and then synchronising with their mobile or directly on the mobile phone itself.
Boerries added, 'There are 52 content types that OnePlace understands,' listing videos, cities, musicians, albums or stock prices as examples of categories. He added, 'For all of those types, we have implemented algorithms for what's most relevant for that type.'
Users can also choose automatically to direct content they mark in social bookmarks' manager del.icio.us, post on Facebook or star in Google newsreader to OnePlace, and can sort bookmarks by local relevance or popularity with friends and contacts.
Yahoo! might not be able to compete with Google in the online search and advertising world, but in mobile it is enjoying considerably more success than either Google or Microsoft, as Mobile Commerce's research recently indicated (www.mcproton.com/corporate). However, Mobile Commerce's CEO did acknowledge that both could do better.