Yahoo and Samsung are expanding their partnership so that mobile services such as Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Search will be preloaded on Samsung phones running the proprietary Bada and Google Android operating systems. Yahoo has been inking agreements in the mobile space of late, including a March deal to make Yahoo the default search provider for the Motorola Backflip, which runs Android. Yahoo is locked in fierce competition with Google and Microsoft for online market share, even as it prepares to have its back-end search apparatus taken over by Microsoft's Bing.
Yahoo will preload its mobile services on Samsung phones running the
proprietary Bada and Google Android operating systems, according to an
agreement announced April 26. Under the terms of the Yahoo-Samsung
agreement, services preloaded on the devices will include e-mail, calendar and
instant messaging.
"We're thrilled to deepen our relationship with Samsung and look
forward to continuing to drive the global adoption of mobile Internet
services," David Ko, Yahoo's senior vice president of audience, mobile
and local, said in an April 26 statement. "By making our most popular
Yahoo services available on Samsung mobile devices around the world, we're
providing consumers with personally relevant mobile Internet experiences that
make it easy for them to stay connected to what's important to them."
Those services-such as Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Contacts and
Calendar, Yahoo Mobile Front Page and Yahoo Search-will be ported onto millions
of Samsung phones starting in May. In a joint news release, the companies
called the current agreement an "expansion" of a relationship that extends
back to a 2007 partnership.
Yahoo has struck deals with several other mobile companies lately, including
AT&T, whose Android-running Motorola Backflip will nonetheless use Yahoo as
its default search provider. That deal was seen as the fruit of the relationship
between Yahoo and AT&T, but Backflip users could still switch to another
search engine with a few seconds' typing.
"We are happy that AT&T has chosen Yahoo Search as the default
mobile search service on the Motorola Backflip, AT&T's first Android
device,"
an
AT&T spokesperson told eWEEK in March. "We have a longstanding
relationship with AT&T and more than 80 carrier partnerships around the
world for our award-winning mobile search experience."
Yahoo
continues to face substantial challenges in the search space. According to
ComScore, Google occupied 65.1 percent of the U.S.
search market in March, with Yahoo at 16.89 percent and Microsoft's Bing at
11.7 percent. However, Yahoo experienced only incremental monthly growth of
0.08 percent after 13 consecutive declines, suggesting that the company's
massive advertising push in late 2009 had achieved only negligible results.
Microsoft and Yahoo signed a 10-year deal in July 2009 that would see
Microsoft power Yahoo's search engine, while Yahoo operates the two companies'
worldwide search-advertising sales force. However, Yahoo executives have
continued to insist that Yahoo has the potential to remain a robust force on
the Web. During an August 2009 press conference, Yahoo rolled out several new
features for its core properties, including Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Messenger,
designed to keep users on its sites longer and thus attract increased
advertiser revenue.
"Background search is much like an Intel chip," Yahoo CEO
Carol Bartz told assembled media during a September event at NASDAQ MarketSite
in Times Square. "Thank God they've done their
R&D and gotten it out into the world; but the experience that Dell wraps
around their chips, and HP wraps around those chips, is different."
Bartz
has also insisted that Yahoo can be brought back to strength, but such a
process will take time: "I know people want to see magic things happen ...
The magic things happening are deep inside our little system here."
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