@ CES: More On Yahoo's New Mobile Offerings

Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) made some significant announcements about new mobile services Monday at CES, saying it was opening up its mobile offerings to third-party widgets. Yahoo’s VP of global mobile products, Ojas Rege, gave us some more details on the company’s plans and strategy in an interview on the sidelines of CES.

Yahoo will support mobile operating systems, not create them: Yahoo’s plans will inevitably be compared to Google’s (NSDQ: GOOG) Android platform, but Rege said Yahoo doesn’t think the way to move forward is to create another operating system. “The market is so fragmented, fragmenting it more doesn’t help,” he said. Yahoo is focusing on reducing pain for developers by doing the heavy lifting of testing applications and web services to work on different handsets. By developing widgets for the Yahoo mobile platform, their content and services will be available on a very wide scale to a large addressable user base. As for which operating systems and platforms Yahoo will support, Rege said, “If it has users, we’ll support it.”

Simplicity for users is key: Consumers want to be able to choose from a wide array of mobile services, and they want to be able to access them easily, Rege said. Yahoo capitalizes on this with its multi-pronged application/web approach, and by focusing on delivering the best possible experience to a user, regardless of their device or operator. “A user shouldn’t have to think about access,” he said. “If a user comes to http://www.yahoo.com on their mobile, we’ll figure out how to give them the best experience.” This means offering them a chance to download Go if they’re using a compatible device, or serving them web pages optimized for their device.

On the development experience: While Yahoo desktop widgets won’t be seamlessly compatible with its moble platform, Rege says the development process will be similar and familiar for people who have developed widgets for the desktop. The key thing Yahoo is offering developers is the ease with which they can target a large audience; that should prove attractive to the 3000+ developers that have made desktop widgets for its platform, but should also attract a lot of new ones looking to target mobile users.

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