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Wednesday at the CTIA show in Las Vegas, Yahoo Mobile’s President Marco Boerries will be giving a keynote speech “articulating the company’s vision for leading and enabling the global mobile ecosystem.” According to the early press notification I received, Boerries will talk about new “game-changing” innovation to Yahoo OneSearch.
Below is a live-blog account of the keynote:
9:50–Today PC Internet dwarfs mobile Internet 10 to 1. How to turn this around? Yahoo is creating a mobile platform to create mobile services that run across all devices. Yahoo Widget platform reaches million of users. How to make money? Yahoo Advertising Platform to drive traffic to advertisers. Our services are all about the consumer, so we need to build services they will find indispensable.
9:53–Designed to run on mobile devices. Want the new Yahoo homepage to be the homepage to millions of users, so it has to be open. You can get access to Yahoo content or that from others, be it Google or Microsoft.
9:57–OneSearch Yahoo’s most successful service to date. Simple mission: provide answers. Now we have 600 million subscribers and 29 global partners to date that have trusted us to deliver this unique solution.
9:59–Will open OneSearch to all publishers and content owners to drive traffic back to their content. Rather than a link, we will show relevant metadata. And extending APIs to expand the semantic Web.
10:01–We also need to make input easier. Search Assist. Not just text completion but slotting in relevant contextual data.
10:02–Demo showed a Yahoo search for a person. It pulled up social networking profiles for the name at Facebook and LinkedIn. A restaurant search pulled up links to Yelp reviews and OpenTable reservations. Great contextual links, giving the information people want when they do a mobile search.
10:07–Introducing voice input. Some competitors have voice search clients, but they are limited to local listings or special grammar. Our announcement, you can say anything and get your answer. Speak what you want and Yahoo will deliver the answer as we learn your voice. Press Green Call button, say “21” and it gives local theater times for the movie. Say “British Airways 287” and it pulls up the flight status. “March Madness” pulled up basketball scores for the tournament. Saying an address gives one click to a map, or with a GPS-enabled device, directions. “Where is the best place to play craps in Vegas” pulled up a wiki article on craps, then a series of Yahoo Answers answering the question.
10:14–Can download OneSearch to your phone, and also working with partners to integrate it into models. A demo showed a Windows Mobile phone with a widget on the front screen.
10:16–Will roll out summer 2008 with partners, but you can download a technology preview for OneSearch Voice on BlackBerrys right now here.
I happen to have the new AT&T BlackBerry Pearl 8120 with me this week, so I will try to get some screen shots up shortly.