One of the companies causing the most stir at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this week has been Yahoo, which has grasped the opportunity to articulate its mobile strategy far more clearly than in the past, to try to steal some of the initiative from Google. The search company is under pressure, with its stock at a four-year low, and is relying on the mobile market to revive its fortunes, though with a different approach from Google’s, and one that is far more collaborative with carriers and potentially with mobile giants like Nokia.
Yahoo has opened up its recently launched Mobile Developer Platform to third party applications, highlighting its strategy of trying to be all-embracing rather than to set the agenda and the standards as Google and Nokia would like to do. It also showed off a revamped version of its Yahoo Go platform, and unveiled its latest mobile advertising initiative.
The Go 3.0 application, now in beta test, is a downloadable application designed to serve as a front door to the wireless web, providing widget-based services from standard offerings like mobile email, calendar and news headlines, to third party apps and content from partners like MTV.
The Mobile Developer Platform is designed to show off what are clearly Yahoo’s strengths compared to Google ‘ its superior technology, in terms of mobility, developer functionality and maturity ‘ as opposed to its weaknesses, notably its poor marketing and market weight. Yahoo is far more advanced than Google in harnessing the popular technique of widgets for mobile applications development ‘ an approach also heavily favored by Nokia, something that could just as easily bring the two companies into partnership against Google rather than head-to-head with one another. Now Yahoo will offer third parties tools to write widgets once, for instant publication across the device ecosystem. Initial partners announcing widgets at CES include eBay, MySpace and MTV.
The timing is good. Not only is Yahoo better at mobile widgets than Google, but it appears to have unleashed an open platform that developers can actually use today, while Google’s Android initiative, which promises many of the same write once/publish widely benefits, has run into serious teething problems. The company has been widely accused of launching the Android software developers’ kit prematurely, maximizing marketing impact but delivering a system that is immature and ‘ because of the giant’s own ambitions to set the agenda and wrongfoot Nokia and Microsoft ‘ over-ambitious. Google was even forced to delay its hyped Android Developer Challenge after final testing turned up some significant bugs.
Yahoo’s main problem, then, is convincing the market that it has anything different to offer in a mobile vision that is virtually identical, in concept, to that of Google, Microsoft, Nokia and even RIM. It does not have technology ownership or leadership at the highest level, with no mobile operating system of its own, something that can be both a blessing and a curse. But the secret to success in this market will be developer support, something Nokia knows full well ‘ hence its investment of years of time and effort into the Forum Nokia developer initiative, long before it went public with any grand vision of mobile internet. Google, true to its nature, has taken the opposite approach, outlining the grand plan in some style, but struggling to put the practical pieces into place, and so risking losing the confidence of the developer community. Yahoo’s low profile in mobile internet cannot be credited to deliberate timing, like Nokia’s, but rather to weak marketing and a series of commercial setbacks. But since, amid these problems, it has continued to refine Go Mobile and the surrounding tools, it can now turn its weakness into strength by unleashing an impressive platform on the world. This should help build on its recent progress in carrier deals for mobile advertising and search/content, and should gain it the support of a strong developer base. Then it will just remain for Yahoo to borrow some of Google’s marketing skills to convince the market at large that it still has a good chance of being a major force in mobile internet.
There has been speculation that Nokia would partner with a search specialist such as Yahoo to strengthen its own capabilities, but in the meantime, the Finnish giant continues to enhance its search offering to try to fend off Google. The latest R&D project to gain the limelight in this area is the Point & Find service, which could be commercialized in 2010. This would revolutionize cameraphones, Nokia claims, by integrating photography and internet search.
A handset with Point & Find allows the user to take a picture ‘ for instance of an item in a store ‘ and simultaneously gain real time information from the web (such as availability elsewhere at a better price) using an image-based search. The service is technically quite complex, incorporating various elements such as GPS positioning, image recognition and artificial intelligence algorithms.
Like more immediate mobile internet services being offered via Nokia’s new Ovi portal, the processing would take place on its servers, which would optimize all search results for the format of the device. Nokia said the image processing could be used for many applications, even language translation.