Gerry Purdy suggest when the new owner of Yahoo is determined, they will need to provide more cross mobile integration
When Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer declared mobile would be one of the keystones that would play out across their strategic media outlets that included Search, Mail, Tumblr services and news, sports, finance and lifestyle content, I expected to see great mobile components in each of these services and content delivery apps. Further and perhaps more importantly, I expected to see each mobile app provide cross app integration.
Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened. While Yahoo had done a great job of building native mobile apps, mobile access to Yahoo mail and enhance Tumblr (which was mobile to begin with, but now includes advertising and a desktop version), they have not provided any easy way to for any of these apps to talk to one another. I’ll show you an example of what I mean, but first, take a look at “figure 1” that shows the major strategic elements for Yahoo.
From this, you can see their three main service components on the top row: Search, Mail, Tumblr, and four sources of content below: News, Sports, Finance and Lifestyle.
In Search, Yahoo has made it work better in mobile. In Mail, Yahoo had greatly improved their mobile mail product by enabling it to be a solid mail client that can read mail from multiple sources such as Exchange, Yahoo itself, Gmail and POP/IMAP rather than just being a standalone email service. And, Yahoo has enhanced Tumblr – their micro blogging platform – to add advertising so that it now provides revenue for the company.
In the News, Yahoo has developed a very good News Digest app that provides news updates twice per day. The content is excellent and is clearly well curated by the Yahoo team. Yahoo Sports has grown to become one of the best offering for sports in mobile – right up there with Sports Illustrated and ESPN. Yahoo Finance has always been a solid source of financial content on the web, but now has a solid offering in mobile. And, Lifestyle in mobile has also become a solid offering.
Now, if you look inside each of the mobile offerings you’ll generally see that while the particular app/content or service is an excellent offering, they each operate more as a silo than as members of family. You can see that the product is excellent by itself, but you’ll also notice the mobile apps do provide any easy way to jump to the other Yahoo mobile apps (except for News Digest). However, these apps are not integrated from a content perspective that would make them more valuable. For example, when News Digest offers a top story in Sports, it doesn’t highlight other sports stories and offer a way to drill down on them via a link to Yahoo Sports.
Figure 2 and 3 shows some of the sample screens from the News app. It’s designed well. You can easily go from the overall titles to the detail with one touch. You can circle back and see what you have read and not read. And, you can slide from one story area to another with a slide to the right in the photo. Thus, this is a very cool, well-designed mobile app for News.
Notice, however, there isn’t any advertising. Surely they could have integrated some advertising in an acceptable manner in the app. But, more important, notice that there’s no dropdown menu anywhere to allow you to jump to, say, Yahoo Sports or to go to Yahoo Mail like the other Yahoo mobile apps provide. Even better would be to integrate a “breaking news” element in which a major story would flash in the News app that would, with one touch, take you to Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Financial or Yahoo Lifestyle.
Thus, I would love for Yahoo to build a family of services and apps that are all great standalone (as they have done so far), but also add capabilities to go from one family member to another based on content, not just a pull-down menu as shown in figure 4. Notice that you can jump from Yahoo Sports to Yahoo News Digest, but not back. I’m sure they will add that in an upcoming release. What would be great is to provide content based branching.
Hopefully, as Yahoo migrates into (likely) new ownership, they will continue to build the mobile apps so that users will find them to be the best sources for content on mobile.
J. Gerry Purdy, Ph.D. is the principal analyst with Mobilocity LLC and a research affiliate with Frost & Sullivan. He is a nationally recognized industry authority who focuses on monitoring and analyzing emerging trends, technologies, and market behavior in mobile computing and wireless data communications devices, software and services. Dr. Purdy is an “edge of network” analyst looking at devices, applications and services as well as wireless connectivity to those devices. Dr. Purdy provides critical insights regarding mobile and wireless devices, wireless data communications, and connection to the infrastructure that powers the data in the wireless handheld. Dr. Purdy continues to be affiliated with the venture capital industry as well. He spent five years as a venture advisor for Diamondhead Ventures in Menlo Park where he identified, attracted and recommended investments in emerging companies in the mobile and wireless industry. He has had a prior affiliation with East Peak Advisors and, subsequently, following their acquisition, with FBR Capital Markets. Dr. Purdy advises young companies who are preparing to raise venture capital. Dr. Purdy has been a member of the Program Advisory Board of the Consumer Electronics Association that produces CES, one of the largest trade shows in the world. He is a frequent moderator at CTIA conferences and GSM Mobile World Congress. Prior to funding Mobilocity, Dr. Purdy was chief mobility analyst with Compass Intelligence. Prior to that, he owned MobileTrax, LLC and enjoyed successful stints at Frost & Sullivan, Dataquest (a division of Gartner) among other companies.
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