CTIA show

Yahoo has gotten into the curious habit of releasing a preview version of a mobile app every six months at the CTIA mobility conference. This time around, it's OneConnect for iPhone and iPod Touch, an application that Yahoo hopes will showcase what it's calling its open mobile strategy. In layman's terms, OneConnect is an application that integrates your Yahoo IM account with your social networking accounts and also your iPhone contacts and camera.

(Credit: Yahoo)

OneConnect is following the herd of any number of iPhone application developers offering to post status updates and messages to various social networks, including Flickr, MySpace, and Twitter. However, Yahoo's effort contains some useful features that, along with its established base of Messenger users, could gain it traction in the competitive world of popular iPhone applications.

I got a close look at OneConnect in a sit-down with Yahoo Mobile's communications crew that builds on my colleague Stephen Shankland's coverage of the keynote speech given by Yahoo's Marco Boerries, Executive Vice President of Connected Life.

In its preview form, the social application has three drives: updating photos and a status message to select social networks, sending free IM and SMS messages to contacts via an IP-based protocol, and souping up the device's address book to show the contact's Yahoo presence and stage interactions with them if they're online.

I'm reserving final judgment until OneConnect becomes available from the iTunes App Store, but based on the demo: so far, so good. Yahoo has rightly carried over from its PC-based Messenger and Yahoo Mail a communications feature that sends a text instead of an instant message when a contact is offline. The IM experience is richer than the SMS, of course, with emoticons and an area for quickly inserting URLs, but that's no detriment to the SMS capability. By hooking SMS to the Internet, Yahoo can offer its brand of texting free of charge to iPhone and iPod Touch users. That's a notable advantage to the latter group--since the iPod Touch is not a phone, those users wouldn't otherwise be able to send text messages at all.

Also promising is the favorites feature, a shortcut that lets you surface certain contact details in the application's contact list, like a buddy's cell phone number, so you can send a text or place a call with a tap. There are also a few cosmetic enhancements that add visual luster, but no functional advantage. When you turn to landscape mode from the messaging view, for instance, your avatar and your friends' avatar communicate via speech bubbles. You'll also be able to dress up a pal's avatar for use on your phone.

As a very early preview, Yahoo's OneConnect is off to a good start, and the iPhone platform has been a good choice for quickly and easily sharing Yahoo's vision of integration. While Yahoo's representatives dodged questions of a time line, it's likely we won't be seeing OneConnect in its full glory on other mobile platforms anytime soon.

We hope that we will see OneConnect add other instant messaging protocols, which would round it out as a full-featured social app. This is Yahoo's stated goal, but another dodge to the time line question and a lengthy explanation of Yahoo's difficulty in integrating Windows Live Messenger contacts into Yahoo's desktop messenger suggests that the addition of more networks could be a long time coming. If that's the case, Yahoo users may continue to use an all-in-one IM iPhone application such as Palringo to reach the sum of their friends, and use OneConnect for its other social updating features.

Updated at 3:50 p.m. PDT with further detail and information about Blueprint programming tools for mobile devices.

Marco Boerries, executive vice president, Yahoo Connected Life, speaks at the CTIA Wireless show in San Francisco.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News )

"OneConnect allows everybody to keep connected to the persons they care about. It's a socially connected address book," said said Marco Boerries, executive vice president, Yahoo Connected Life, in a speech here at the CTIA Wireless show. "The address book now comes to life."

Yahoo is racing against Google and others to bring more applications to mobile devices in an effort to tap into the growth of mobile Internet use. Previous Yahoo applications such as OneSearch and Go compete against Google applications including Gmail, Search, and Maps.

One feature of OneConnect, called Pulse, "allows you to tap into everything going on with your friends," Boerries said. It pulls a news feed from "Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Last.fm--all the leading social networks--into one aggregated view."

A related "Favorites" feature lets people track or quickly contact the handful of people in a user's inner circle.

Another feature provides a unified hub of instant messaging, SMS messages, and e-mail.

OneConnect will be released in the U.S. initially, but "toward the end of the year will branch out to the rest of the world," Boerries said. Also coming will be versions for other phones. "The other ones will follow soon shortly," including BlackBerrys, Windows Mobile, and Nokia Series 60 phones, he said--but not for the Palm OS-based version of Treo phones.

OneConnect Pulse shows the activity of a user's social network.

(Credit: Yahoo)

Google, meanwhile, had its own news. It announced a new version of its Mobile App for BlackBerry users. This software lets people search the Web, with a boost from search suggestions and previous search history, and get links to Google Docs stored online. The company already had an iPhone version of Google Mobile App.

Monetizing mobile
Why all this attention to mobile devices? Because Internet companies are looking for growth, and the mobile phone arena is one place where that growth is spreading now that networks can transfer data as well as handle voice calls. Yahoo expects to make money through sales of advertising, not service fees, Boerries said.

And mobile ads have personalization potential missing from those on computers, he said in an interview after his speech.

"We believe that because of the inherent personal nature of the mobile device," such as location information, "we should see significantly greater CPMs or CPCs," he said, referring to the cost per thousand impressions by which display ads are sold and the cost per click by which search ads are sold.

Blueprint's footprint
Yahoo also announced Wednesday it's increasing the profile of its Blueprint software foundation for developing mobile phone software. Blueprint consists of a "runtime" foundation tuned for each supported mobile device and software components programmers can use to build applications that run on that foundation.

Previously, Blueprint could only be used to develop "widget" applications that would run within the Yahoo Go mobile phone software. Now, though, it can be used to develop standalone applications that anyone can develop and distribute, Boerries said. Programmers wishing to do so can set their download sites so they transparently take advantage of Yahoo's back-end service to identify what phone a user has and to supply the appropriate Blueprint runtime, he added.

OneConnect lets users update Twitter, Facebook, and other sites with status messages.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Blueprint also works for developing software on an Apple iPhone--as long as you're a Yahoo programmer. "We are currently in discussions with Apple as to how we can work to make that available to other developers, but right now it's only used inside Yahoo," Boerries said.

The software is designed to ease the development difficulties of ensuring compatibility with hundreds of different devices.

"It's insane," Boerries said of the profusion of devices. "I do believe it'll be somewhat chaotic for the foreseeable future because of the size of the market. Blueprint hides that complexity."

Sun Microsystems, along with allies such as Motorola, has tried to accomplish much the same simplification through use of its Java software. Blueprint takes a different approach, though: instead of trying to provide interfaces that will make an application appear the same on every device, Blueprint tries to take advantage of what each phone can offer, so more sophisticated devices get more sophisticated options, he said.

Day two of CTIA 2008 is over, and it was quite a breather compared with day one. Our feet actually did not hurt at the end of the day! Here are some highlights from day two of the show.

Nokia kicks off the day by announcing two new basic CDMA/AWS handsets: the Nokia 1606 and the 3606, both of which are probably set for the entry-level to midtier market. Next, Senior Editor Kent German talks up the Samsung Alias, which we knew about before, but was officially trotted out at CTIA.

Sanyo also put out a few new devices, namely the Pro-200 and Pro-700, both are push-to-talk phones using Sprint's QChat service. It also introduced the Katana LX, which promises to be a shinier successor to the Katana II, plus it has a translucent OLED display. UTStarcom snuck in with a new basic handset as well--the CDM7126 is a AWS capable phone that will be available to both Cricket and MetroPCS in different designs.

On the smartphone front, rumors swirled around a phone that's not even at the show. Senior Editor Bonnie Cha waxed about the potential BlackBerry 9000 as well as a GPS-equipped BlackBerry Pearl 8110. And, as far as movie tie-ins go, the only product of that nature is the Iron Man branded LG Shine, which is clad with, we kid you not, a solid 18 karat gold battery cover. It won't be available for retail, and will only be available to a select few who are lucky enough to win it via movie-related contests. Which is fine, because we probably won't be able to afford it anyway.

In other news, Yahoo unveiled an upgrade to its OneSearch product, which CNET Download.com editor Jessica Dolcourt had the pleasure of trying out. Also, Vodafone CEO tells us something we already know--that the mobile Internet is for real and that consumers want it--not just some dumbed down version of the Web.

After the big Samsung Instinct announcement yesterday, Kent German wondered if the Instinct can truly take on the iPhone's dominance, and we invite you to chime in to provide your thoughts.

Rounding out the second day are SMS 2.0 (the capability to text in color), cell phones you can't have, and a pair of cute Samsung speakers. Stay tuned tomorrow as we try to wrap things up and let you know what we thought was the cream of the crop.

(Credit: Yahoo Inc.)

Vioce technology is Yahoo's big news of the day. While vocal search is one aspect of an enhanced version of Yahoo's oneSearch tool for mobile phones, it's the only aspect of the service that has been made available as a preview today. And the implementation has only been rolled out for BlackBerry phones.

Luckily, I happen to have one of those here at the CTIA Wireless conference in Las Vegas, where I met with Yahoo's director of mobile product marketing, Adam Taggart to discuss oneSearch 2.0 (see video).

Like Yahoo Go 3.0, oneSearch 2.0 opens with a slick interface. The idea is to make vocal input as good as manual input, Taggart said, but to remove the pain points of having to type a search when you could just as easily speak it.

In the cacophonous conference hall, not every request came out clearly, but it's easy to see how this feature will form the basis of hands-free search. Additionally, the recognition technology is adaptive, Taggart explained, interpreting from a range of accents and inflections, and learning your vocal patterns after a few sessions.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

That's not all oneSearch will learn. With a little use, it's also meant to interpret your search patterns, which will help the app return more customized results. The vocal recognition isn't perfect every time, so Yahoo has embedded drop-down boxes to fill in the unclear search terms.

Going forward, phones will also receive relevant proximity-based search results, which will offer suggestions for listings close to your current location. GPS is the most precise, but mass market phones should also be able to take advantage of cell tower triangulation, which is effectively put to use in the My Location feature of the latest iteration of Google Maps. When in doubt, there's always adding your city or zip code manually.

Windows Live Search with voice announced something similar last November at CTIA's fall show in San Francisco. The big difference here, Yahoo emphasizes, is that oneSearch isn't just about dishing out local listings. You can also search for flights, Web sites, zip codes, videos, and so on, by pressing and holding the green talk key for as long as you speak your query. No need to shout or slow your speech. The app works best when you present your normal cadence and tones.

Currently the talk feature of oneSearch 2.0 is available for BlackBerry, with predictive search features and all the rest coming in a few months. Get the link by pointing your BlackBerry browser to m.yahoo.com/voice.

>>Catch the latest news in cell phones and mobile software from CTIA 2008 in Las Vegas.

Updated 2:30 p.m. PDT with comments and photos.

LAS VEGAS--Yahoo announced upgrades to its Yahoo OneSearch product at the CTIA trade show here Wednesday that it says make mobile search smarter, more relevant, and easier to use with voice-activation technology.

Marco Boerries, the company's executive vice president of "connected life," introduced the new Yahoo OneSearch 2.0 during a keynote address, promising "instant answers to any query, not just Web links." This means that search results will expand from traditional hyperlinks into other media--a search for "New York" could yield subway schedules, for example, or a search for local sushi restaurants could bring up Zagat's ratings and reviews along with one-click reservations. And searching the name of a friend could provide links to the social-networking sites that the friend uses.

Yahoo is leveraging technology that it's used in a project for its PC-based search tool called "Search Monkey," which consists of a set of open-source tools that allow users and publishers to annotate and enhance search results associated with specific Web sites. The two applications share the same APIs (application programming interfaces), and Boerries said he expects some 1,000 publishers to work with them to help make search more relevant.

Also central to OneSearch is voice-enabled technology. "Consumers can search for anything, including flight numbers, locations, Web site names, local restaurants, and more, by simply speaking," a release from Yahoo detailed. The voice-activation software is now available for download on a number of Research In Motion's BlackBerry devices, and Yahoo has said that over the next few months it will be compatible with more handsets.

Yahoo OneSearch 2.0 combines search results with other published information.

(Credit: Marguerite Reardon/CNET Networks)

Yahoo is using voice-activation technology from Vlingo, which announced Wednesday that Yahoo is the lead investor in a $20 million Series B funding round. As part of that investment deal, Yahoo has exclusive rights to the technology.

"We liked the technology so much that we invested in the company," Boerries said during a press conference following his keynote speech. "But we made sure that our competitors can't use it."

Boerries also said that Yahoo's voice-enabled search is different from Microsoft's more limited voice-enabled search because Yahoo's service allows people to find results no matter how they say a term or phrase.

OneSearch also includes a download called Search Assist, which encompasses recommended search results, predictive typing technology to speed up the amount of time it takes to enter a query--a key feature for small mobile keypads. Currently, this is only available for Apple's iPhone.

Yahoo plans to update OneSearch in the second quarter of 2008 with something that it calls an "idle screen search service," so that people can access the mobile Web and the search technology without needing to open their cell phones' Web browsers.

OneSearch 2.0 is Yahoo's latest attempt to stay ahead of rival Google in the mobile market. At the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year, the company unveiled its Yahoo OneConnect mobile messaging and social-networking platform, which still has yet to debut publicly.

Yahoo pushed out the original OneSearch product at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last year.

"With the launch of Yahoo OneSearch in 2007, we revolutionized mobile search by recreating search specifically for the mobile phone," Boerries said in Wednesday's keynote address, adding that a total of 29 carriers worldwide are now OneSearch partners. "With Yahoo OneSearch 2.0, we are fundamentally changing the way consumers use the Internet on their mobile phones."

News.com's Marguerite Reardon contributed to this report.

Influence is tough to measure, but it's one of those things where you know it when you see it.

Apple's influence on the mobile phone industry after just over 90 days as a player was evident at the CTIA show Tuesday. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer didn't mention the iPhone specifically in his keynote address, but noted that Apple "has done some nice work." After Ballmer's keynote, a friend of some staffers in Microsoft's booth enthusiastically demonstrated his iPhone for an audience checking out the latest Windows Mobile phones. And a panel of five mobile executives spent 90 minutes discussing the impact of the iPhone on their businesses and the future of the industry.

Surrounded by Windows Mobile phones, a friend of the blue-shirted staffers at Microsoft's booth shows off his iPhone.

(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET News.com)

That's not because they're scared Apple is eating into their piece of the pie, observed Motorola's David Ulmer, senior director of entertainment products. Apple may have sold over a million iPhones last quarter, but "some of us sold that many before breakfast," he quipped: The entire mobile phone industry ships well over a billion handsets a year these days.

Instead, panelists recognized the iPhone as bringing two major changes to their industry. First, the iPhone is the "first mass-market non-carrier controlled event," said Adam Guy, general manager of the telecom and media practice at Compete, a market research firm. Apple owns the experience and the relationship with iPhone users, not the carrier, and that's a feat the other hardware companies have yet to pull off.

The iPhone also is a new way of looking at smartphones: Is it a computer? A phone? An iPod? Lee Ott, director of product management for Yahoo Mobile, said, "The iPhone is the first phone that puts the Internet and data right up on a par with calling," explaining that while there are plenty of phones out there capable of browsing the Internet, few of those products emphasize data as much as they do voice calls. In fact, the iPhone is already one of the top five devices in the world that accesses Yahoo Mobile on a daily basis, he said.

Well then, why didn't the established players figure out that formula? Given the lack of a carrier representative on stage, panelists spent a fair amount of time discussing the sins of the carriers. Ulmer said that Motorola sells tons of touch-screen capable phones in China, but when they approached U.S. carriers with similar designs two years ago, they were rebuffed by executives who said, "Come back when you've got a keypad."

He also noted that in the past, it was more profitable for carriers to emphasize voice and text messaging on bandwidth-constrained networks over interesting video or data applications, so that's what they did. That's changing as 3G networks become more widespread, but helps explain why the iPhone caught the industry flat-footed.

But these are companies with deep pockets and enough experience to know which way the wind blows. All major U.S. carriers and most major phone manufacturers will have an answer to the iPhone available by the end of this year that emphasizes a better user experience, said Sam Altman, CEO of Loopt, a start-up that lets friends track each other's whereabouts through their mobile phones. "Even for people that don't have iPhones, they expect their phone to behave like that."

Sometimes, it takes an outsider to remind an industry where it needs to be, said Cyriac Roeding, executive vice president for CBS Mobile. "For the first time, you have a Silicon Valley company disrupting the entire (mobile) market. The fact that we are sitting here talking about the iPhone, and that Motorola is joining us to talk about the iPhone, shows the power of the iPhone. It's an awesome version 1.0."

AOL may have been one of the first mainstream services to really make its way onto most consumer telephones (with AIM), but the rest of its mobile services haven't exactly been keeping pace with Google and Yahoo's efforts. Today they're trying to change that with several mobile incarnations of AOL services that have been custom tailored for entry level handsets and smart phones running Windows Mobile.

For users with phones that aren't running a "smart" operating system there are two services that have been specially tailored for you. The first is a new WAP portal that serves up news, AOL and AIM Mail, Mapquest, weather, and various other sections of AOL's front page in byte-sized pieces. The other is a new SMS short code version of AIM that lets user sign on and message buddies using their SMS text messages--similar to what carriers offer with built-in AIM apps, sans the actual program. To try it out on your own phone, send a text message to 'AIMAIM' (246246).

AOL's new MyMobile app for Windows Mobile smart phones bundles together several services in one.

(Credit: AOL Inc.)

Windows Mobile users are getting a slightly better end of the deal with a new application that's a lot like Yahoo's Go service. It's called MyMobile, and it's home to a handful of AOL's services like search, Moviefone, Mapquest, and mail. The app will remember your history, so you can speed up searches on the go with your zipcode or address. Users of other Palm and Symbian phones have had something similar for some time now in AOL's software store. AOL intends to release the app "by the end of the year" and make it free with integrated advertisements.

Also of note is a new widget for WHERE users for tracking where your AIM buddies are online. This requires a GPS-enabled phone, and works using Mapquest to let you post your location without having to look up or type out an address--a little bit like Sprint, Boost Mobile (with Loopt) and Helio have done.

AOL is also officially launching their Winamp Remote mobile service, which lets you access music and videos from your Winamp library while on the go. The service is powered by Orb, which is capable of doing similar things with their standalone app on most mobile handsets and modern-day gaming consoles.

The most exciting bit of all of these is the new Windows Mobile app, since it will take some of the work out of using these services outside the confines of your mobile browser. I'm also a fan of Winamp Remote since Orb is one of the more user friendly personal streaming services out there, yet it's highly customizable for advanced users. I look forward to seeing it integrated into other services.