Yahoo talks mobile strategy

Yahoo is making agnosticism into a mobile strategy, with the firm saying it will support any OS that will allow it to scale.
Catching up with the firm’s VP of product management and connected life, Irv Henderson, at CommunicAsia in Singapore last week, RCR learned that while Yahoo did find Android an important platform, the firm was interested in working with any OS that gave Yahoo presence on phones.
Henderson noted that Yahoo already boasted 600 million users of its internet portal globally and hoped to bring those users into the phone space.
“Opening up APIs is part of the strategy, because Yahoo can’t support every single handset that comes out,” he noted, in a nod to the firm’s decision to offer Yahoo Messenger IM API in Asia Pacific for partners and third party developers to tinker with.
“Yahoo Mobile advertising is gaining traction,” announced Henderson, adding that the “big brands are starting to come to us,” although he cautioned “it’s still very early days for digital advertising in SE Asia.”
Yahoo says it wants to be locally as well as globally relevant, and is putting huge emphasis on making itself specifically relevant to a whole host of local markets across Asia, translating its content and filtering its news and search results to best fit the local preferences.
“The dynamics in APAC could really redefine our company,” Henderson told RCR, but added that Yahoo didn’t want to have to go it alone and therefore strove to partner with other firms to really advance Yahoo Mobile’s interests.
Introducing new local specific services – like Indonesian LBS Koprol –is key to Yahoo’s new local strategy, as is distribution of its services.
“Here’s our end game,” Henderson proclaimed to RCR, “80% of Indians already go to Yahoo on their PCs, but we really need to be findable on mobile devices.”
Henderson points out that Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter are also re-defining the mobile experience in Indonesia, with the Asian wide spread of 3G also playing its part in Yahoo’s favor.
“With 3G in India, tablets could become very interesting for education and a phenomenal gift to the world,” gushed Henderson, adding that it was all about connected devices and making connections relevant through social services.
“You can change the way people adopt services,” he posited, but cautioned that Yahoo would have to be more aggressive in its strategy. “We’re being smart,” he told RCR.
In terms of trends and baskets Yahoo may want to put its eggs into, Henderson said it was becoming abundantly clear that social gaming was becoming massive globally and even bigger in emerging markets. HTML5, he said, also offers good promise, but when it comes to all the hype around apps, Henderson isn’t convinced.
“Browsing trumps apps,” he declared definitively, adding “you can download a bunch of apps but only use two or three.”
Yahoo’s relationship is a little bit love/hate vis a vis Google, because on the one hand there appears to be lots of interest in the channel to preload Yahoo onto Android phones at very low $150-$200 handsets, but on the other Yahoo takes issue with Google’s constant pushing of its services as “free.”
“What ostensibly comes as ‘free’ actually comes with a whole bunch of pre-packaged services,” said Henderson, adding quickly that Google has played the game in a very clever and defensible manner so as not to get into any regulatory difficulties. Still, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, points out the VP.
Meanwhile, Yahoo has no plans to jump on the OS bandwagon, nor the phone wagon, despite releasing a device in conjunction with Alcatel.
What the mobile future holds for Yahoo remains to be seen, but for now, the firm is beefing up on the APAC front and is feeling confident.