Mobile 3.0 By Yahoo! Gets CES Closeup

By David Erlich -- TWICE, 1/8/2008

LAS VEGAS — Yahoo! CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang unveiled the company’s latest effort to expand its reach to billions of mobile devices with the new Yahoo! Mobile 3.0 software.

During his Industry Insider presentation at the Hilton Theater Monday, Yang and Marco Boerries, executive VP of the connected life division, (along with a handy tech expert) showed the crowd the new mobile interface that’s currently in beta.

The major announcement from the pair was the fact the new software would be open to a wide variety of third-party developers with the introduction of the Yahoo! Mobile Developer Platform. In order for as many users as possible to use the system Boerries said: “We believe that to succeed on such a scale the best strategy is to open our mobile platform in order to tap the innovation and talent of the world’s developers and publishers.”

A key to Mobile 3.0 are the widgets third parties would develop for use on the carousel user interface. Boerries and Yang showed examples where “preview bubbles” would appear (for emails, weather info, eBay bids and so on) that would help users more easily use the mobile Internet. Boerries said any mobile device with a HTML or XTML browse could work with Mobile 3.0. He noted companies like Motorola and LG will have 3.0 built in to future model phones. Since advertising makes the world go round, they said tools for advertisers would be created so they could create rich mobile ad experiences (and you thought there was a free lunch!).

Once this demo was concluded, Yang offered a blue-sky vision if Yahoo! was to open its platform to third parties. Unlike some other demos at International CES, this one worked. At the end of the presentation Yang was joined by fellow billionaire and Yahoo! co-founder David Filo. Their hope was to make the Web experience even simpler.