Anyone looking for more talk of interplanetary colonization during the Day Two keynote surely was disappointed.
Wednesday’s speakers eschewed Richard Branson’s April Fools’ Day hijinks in favor of a more traditional approach. Marco Boerries, who heads up Yahoo Inc.’s mobile efforts, used the platform to tout a new version of the company’s oneSearch offering, while Vodafone Group CEO Arun Sarin issued a call to arms for mobile operators looking to compete – and cooperate – with Yahoo and its fellow Internet brethren as they expand into wireless.
Yahoo is adding voice functionality to oneSearch, Boerries said, and is opening the application to allow publishers to integrate relevant content. Results from a search for nearby restaurants could include information from OpenTable.com, for instance, or a query for a person could turn up a category of pages from social networking sites, among other information. The goal is to provide “answers, not just Web links.”
“The way we’re going to do this, the way we’re going to get better answers, is by opening up,” Boerries told a typically sleepy crowd. “We don’t believe that anyone – not
Yahoo, not Microsoft, not Google and not a carrier – can really drive that alone.”
Yahoo launched oneSearch last year, and the application has gained impressive traction around the world. More than two dozen carriers offer oneSearch – including T-Mobile International, which earlier this year ended a three-year relationship with Google’s mobile search offering in favor of Yahoo’s product – covering more than 600 million mobile consumers.
The voice-enabled version of oneSearch is available now for some BlackBerry devices in the United States; Yahoo said the application will support other handsets and come online internationally in coming months.
The feature is powered by Vlingo Corp., a Cambridge,Mass.-based startup that this week announced a $20 million round of funding. Yahoo led the funding round and has struck an exclusive licensing deal for the technology, Boerries said.
While speech-recognition technology has been around for years, mobile consumers have been slow to embrace the feature. But the space has become white-hot recently and has the potential to be a key component of mobile search services. Voice-driven searches account for as much as 30% of all searches powered by Medio Systems Inc., which handles search for Verizon
Wireless and T-Mobile USA, CEO Brian Lent said earlier this week.
Boerries followed Sarin, who quickly set a serious tone. “I have to remind you, today is April 2,” Sarin said with a wry smile. “We’re going to get down to business right away.” Sarin then waxed optimistic about the future of mobile, but warned carriers and their partners to tread carefully as Webbased giants continue to lumber onto the mobile playground.
“Internet on the mobile is the new thing in the industry, it is real, and it is happening now,” Sarin said. “We must partner and compete (with Google, Yahoo and others) at the same time.”
Sarin also called for the industry to pare the number of operating systems and platforms down to a few – “I’m not saying one, because we’ve seen that movie before,” he said, drawing laughs – and spoke of opportunities in emerging markets. In the most pointed remarks of the morning, the CEO urged the industry to rally behind a single 4G standard.
“What we need to learn from our history is the need for a common encompassing standard,” Sarin opined, citing the CDMA/TDMA battles of the early 1990s. “It would be good to have WiMAX find a home in the TDD section of LTE. The last thing we need is dueling standards to take resources away from developing something that is in the common interests of the industry.
