On the move in Asia

Posted June 16th, 2008 at 11:03 pm by Dave Ko, Yahoo! Mobile

 4 Comments / Filed in: Conferences/Events, Trends & News

Here I am again, writing to you from CommunicAsia in Singapore, where we’re making an even bigger splash than the last time you heard from me. As in other regions, we’ve been making massive inroads in the mobile markets in Asia over the past year.

We’ve definitely proven Yahoo! to be the partner of choice for mobile carriers around the world. How? By making our products mobile-first. From Yahoo! Mail SMS Alerts, which we just announced in India, to Yahoo! Go 3.0, we want to give users around the world the best possible mobile experience — no matter what mobile device they’re using.

Let’s start with mobile search. Today, we announced five new Yahoo! oneSearch™ partnerships with leading mobile operators in India, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Taiwan. With these partnerships in place, we now reach 95% of the mobile users in the Philippines and more than 50% of the mobile users in India, one of the fastest growing markets in the world.

We’ve also introduced an English version of Yahoo! oneSearch with voice that recognizes regional accents for India and Singapore. I’m also excited to announce the launch of Yahoo! Go 3.0 for India, Australia and Southeast Asia, including a local language version for Indonesia.

And we’re not stopping there. Today we also announced several new mobile widgets specifically geared to the Asian markets. We’ve got something for music lovers (MTV Asia), sports fans (Yahoo! Cricket), movie fans (Yahoo! India Movies Showtimes), and even one for fans of the hit Australian TV show “Home and Away” to name but a few of the widgets added to our growing roster.

For those of you wondering how mobile brings home the bacon, we’ve got big news there, too. Mobile operators around the world are looking to content and services for additional revenue growth. Enter mobile advertising, which will ultimately offer these carriers new revenue streams.

This brings me to my final announcement here at CommunicAsia. We’ve just added Malaysia’s Maxis Communications Berhad and India’s Idea Cellular Limited to our growing list of mobile advertising partners, which includes AT&T, T-Mobile International and Vodafone UK.

With mobile usage nearing ubiquity in Asia, we’re really pleased with the increasing array of services we’re offering this important market. And we believe these latest announcements show that we are on the right path. We’re getting ever more excited about where that path will lead us. Keep an eye out for what we do next.

Dave Ko
Managing Director and VP, Connected Life Asia Pacific

Photo from KarlMarx

Tagged: asia, conference, mobile

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4 Comments Add your own

gag | June 17th, 2008 at 10:44 pm

it would be nice to see phones here be more like a bionic hand which would help/guide people in manufacturing, agriculture and mass employment

ex
phone shows how much fertilizer to add
color patterns to paint a car
live auction rates of provision supplies

Mariano | June 18th, 2008 at 9:04 am

Mexico is a growing economy and countruy and has more than 50 million of cellphone users, I’m still waiting this kind of actions here, where Google has set an eye and doesn’t seems that want to lose.

Put your batteries on!! com’n you arrive here first, dont let them steal your market.

Greetings

a Mexico Yahoo! fan

Lenen Hypotheek | June 19th, 2008 at 8:00 am

Thank you for it..Yes It would be very good for Asian people..That’s really appreciates :)

I.Z. Reloaded | June 22nd, 2008 at 3:01 pm

It was a pleasure covering you guys at CommunicAsia!