Microsoft and Yahoo are competing again, but this time it’s not about a takeover but the mobile Web. While Microsoft has partnered with Nokia to put its Silverlight platform on mobile phones, Yahoo on Tuesday unveiled onePlace, a mobile-content management tool.
Marco Boerries, executive vice president of Yahoo’s Connected Life, said onePlace is an essential component of Yahoo’s mobile products. “Yahoo onePlace is where users will be able to find what matters to them the most, no matter where their interests, passions and information come from,” he said. “Yahoo onePlace will provide mobile users with a rich and dynamic content experience.”
Hypercustomized Content
Yahoo aims to personalize the mobile Web. Its onePlace tool organizes content, keeps it current, and serves it according to consumer preferences. Yahoo is calling it “hypercustomized” to consumer tastes.
Yahoo thinks onePlace will be easy to adopt because it uses bookmarks to link to Internet content, including news feeds, Web sites, videos, images, e-mails and search queries. The tool’s task is to keep that content updated — be it the latest game scores or stock prices — and assign categories and tags. Users can place the content into customized collections.
Yahoo offers the example of a user planning a holiday to Paris in June. The user could create a “Paris” collection and begin linking it to any useful information — weather conditions, city guides, restaurant reviews, hotel reservations, walking maps, songs of Edith Piaf, English-French dictionaries, winery recommendations, etc. If the flight times change, onePlace automatically updates that information.
Yahoo expects to release onePlace in the second quarter.
Eliminating Mobile Pain Points
Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence, likened onePlace to MyYahoo adapted for a mobile setting. The concept is also similar to RSS feeds. While “favorites” have largely disappeared from users’ desktops because people just search for what they need,…