Yahoo’s deals to provide its Internet search and other online services to nine more Asian mobile phone operators illustrates what surely is Google’s greatest fear and probably the motivation for its possible interest in buying wireless spectrum, launching its free-to-all Linux-based Android operating system for mobile devices and organizing the Open Handset Alliance for the purpose of building mobile service networks and devices that will allow it to run its software, services and, most importantly, its advertising network.
Yahoo already had deals with another seven Asian wireless operators. Together they give Yahoo access to about 40% of all Asian mobile phone users. Yahoo’s total worldwide deals for mobile search and services are 20 mobile operators in 19 countries.
Imagine, all of those mobile phone users could be denied access to Google’s search and other services and consequently not see the ads that Google is running for advertisers on its mobile advertising network.
If search on mobile devices is going to be bigger than search on PCs, and if Asia, sorely lacking in wireline broadband infrastructure, is going to be the biggest mobile market, then Yahoo has a lead in what could be the biggest market of them all.
Yahoo estimates that the global mobile Internet search market could grow to between $4 billion and $16 billion by 2011. No figures on the current market size are available.
It is Yahoo, not Google, that will provide the nine Asian cellcos with Internet search, e-mail, mapping and photo-sharing services for their end users. The nine are Aircel, BPL Mobile Communications and Bharat Sanchar Nigam in India; PT Excelcomindo Pratama, PT Hutchison CP Telecom Indonesia and PT Indonesian Satellite in Indonesia; DiGi.com in Malaysia; StarHub in Singapore; and PCCW in Hong Kong.
Yahoo shares advertising revenues with the mobile services. It does not provide the exact revenue sharing percentages.
Google won the PC-centric Internet advertising war, but Yahoo doesn’t want to get left behind in mobile advertising. Neither does Microsoft, but that’s for another report.
The latest deals bring the number of agreements Yahoo has with mobile services in Asia to 16. Prior agreements were with Globe Telecom in the Philippines, Idea Cellular in India, LG Telecom in South Korea, Maxis Communications in Malaysia, PT Telekomunikasi Selular (Telkomsel) in Indonesia and Taiwan Mobile.
Asia is considered the market with the greatest potential for mobile devices and mobile search. After all, it has the world’s largest population and the least wireline infrastructure per person.
According to the AP, Steve Boom, Yahoo’s senior VP of broadband access and bundled services, said, “Asia is a critical market because many customers may have no other means of accessing the Internet. The penetration rates of personal computers in Asia is still lower than those in the US and Western Europe.”
Boom said Yahoo is in negotiations with other Asian mobile services.
Yahoo also has a Chinese language version of Go 2.0, which provides a suite of widgets, including instant access to services such as Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News and Flickr that’s available for download to mobile phone users in Taiwan.
Could it be that by the time Google gets Android-based phones to market, it will find Yahoo already there, firmly entrenched with mobile phone operators?
Yahoo launched its “oneSearch” mobile search service in March. Mobile phone users can look up weather, local listings, directions, movies, currency conversion and flight information, access Web and mobile Web sites such as Flickr and get content. Yahoo says oneSearch can be accessed by over 85% of mobile phones that can connect to the Web.
Because mobile phone screens are much smaller than PCs, oneSearch shows results on the first screen users see, so they don’t have to click through pages of links to find what they want. Yahoo promises “instant answers,” not just a list of links.
OneSearch provides relevant results – headlines, images, business listings ‘
plus links to other Web sites. The example that Yahoo gives is a consumer who wants to see a particular movie and searches for it by name. The search results would first list the movie, including a user rating, local theaters where it’s playing, news headlines related to the movie and such. To dig more deeply into the results, a consumer would simply need to click on any item or category. For example, to see all the movies playing at a specific listed theater, just click on the theater name.
Bruce Stewart, VP and general manager, Connected Life Americas at Yahoo, said, “Yahoo oneSearch has changed mobile search by fundamentally improving the way consumers access and use the Internet on their mobile phones.”
OneSearch offers sponsored search results and display ads. According to Yahoo, that increases the reach of its advertising network to the mobile market and allows advertisers to reach consumers on their mobile devices.
The company has also been running tests of oneSearch in local languages and with local content in Latin American countries such as in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, where users can access content in Spanish and Portuguese.
Last week Yahoo formally launched oneSearch in those three countries – Latin America’s largest mobile markets.
“By extending the premiere mobile search service tailored to the unique needs of the Latin American consumer, we’re providing compelling mobile experiences to millions of people and driving further usage of mobile Internet services in the region,” said Stewart.
In an ideal world, Yahoo would like to do deals with the mobile phone services to get them to offer their subscribers a set of Yahoo Internet services on the phones they sell.
Yahoo also has deals with Telefonica in several European and Latin American markets. The agreement could give Yahoo’s mobile advertising network to more than 100 million Telefonica phone subscribers.
Perhaps taking a shot at Google and its attempts to further an open-source mobile phone and potentially build its own mobile network in competition with other mobile services, David Ko, VP and general manager of Yahoo’s Connected Life Asia, said, “Fostering and developing high quality partnerships is a cornerstone of our mobile strategy. Today’s partnerships with leading operators across Asia add to Yahoo’s incredible momentum in mobile and underscore our leadership in this important and growing market.” It’s more than likely that those references to “incredible momentum” and “leadership” are taunts at search leader Google and its efforts in the mobile market.