Can you remember when a mobile phone was just used for making calls? Did you ever think that you would have access to the Internet, photos, video, music, and more in something size of a deck of cards? For technology companies, advances in mobile have created playgrounds for building some pretty amazing consumer experiences – the kind that make you forget you’re not sitting in front of your PC.

Today we’re taking a huge step in bringing more of Yahoo!’s most popular properties and services to mobile devices around the world. You can now have Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Fantasy Football and Flickr, with much of the same interactivity as on the PC, on your iPhone or iPod touch (via the App Store) and select BlackBerry models (Bold, Tour, and 8900 series). It’s all part of our effort to help you stay connected.

The new Yahoo! Finance app, available on the iPhone or iPod touch and compatible BlackBerry models, helps you stay on top of the market, your portfolio, and the latest news, research, and analysis with powerful interactivity. The app lets you:

• Follow the broad market indices or a specific company
• Access the top financial news stories
• Follow your personalized portfolio from Yahoo! Finance
• Drill down into specific company information (news, chart, financial metrics)
• Get currency conversions on the go
• Watch streaming video from Tech Ticker

The new app is available in English for the U.S. and Canada and we expect to support more languages and countries in the near future, so stay tuned!

The new Fantasy Football app, available on the iPhone or iPod touch and compatible BlackBerry models, ensures that when you’re away from your computer or TV, you’ll still be in the know when your team puts points on the board. You’ll have up-to-the-minute access to rosters, players, live scores via Stat Tracker, and the latest expert analysis and news. The new app lets you:

• Edit your bench (add and drop) directly from your phone
• View matchups, standings, player and team stats, etc.
• Get live scoring just like on the PC
• Get news and expert advice just like you’re used to on the PC

This app is available in English for the U.S. and Canada – those football-loving nations.

Flickr fans will be amazed by the functionality in their new Flickr iPhone/iPod touch app – starting with the Ken Burns-effect on famed Flickr images when you first launch it. In addition to being able to share and discover photos and videos, you can also take advantage of location-based information when uploading new stuff. The new app lets you:

• Easily upload and tag photos and video while on the go
• Automatically geo-tag before you upload (opt-in required)
• Add and view photos and videos by tags & sets
• Share photos with friends via email
• Search photos and videos from the Flickr community all over the world by subject, people, or places
• See your contacts’ recent photos and activity
• Make comments and mark photos as favorites

The new Flickr app is available in English, French and traditional Chinese for the U.S., Canada, UK, France, Hong Kong, and Singapore – with more to come.

And don’t despair if you don’t have an iPhone/iPod touch or one of the compatible BlackBerry devices. You can always access these three popular services from the mobile web – just head to Flickr (http://m.flickr.com), Yahoo! Finance (http://m.yahoo.com/finance), and Fantasy Sports (http://m.yahoo.com/fantasy). And be sure to visit the new Yahoo! Mobile Homepage (http://m.yahoo.com) and personalize it with your favorite content and services from across the Internet.

Keep an eye out for additional mobile offerings across a lot more devices as we continue to bring the best of Yahoo! to mobile users around the world.

David Ko
SVP, Yahoo! Mobile

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

Greetings from Asia, where mobile phones are as ubiquitous as shoes. And where Yahoo! just got a tremendous leg up in the mobile Internet market.

I’m writing from CommunicAsia 2007 in Singapore, where I just finished a full-day of meetings with press, analysts, and partners from across Asia. We all spent the day fixated on the future of mobile search and agreed that that the next phase is dependent on a consumer-friendly, intuitive service designed specifically for the mobile device.

We’ve created such a service with Yahoo! oneSearch. And as of today, 100 million more mobile phone subscribers in Asia have access to this service through partnerships we’ve struck with six major operators. Searching and finding via mobile phone got infinitely easier for people in the Philippines, India, Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Taiwan.

These carrier agreements make oneSearch the default mobile search service on our partner WAP sites and reinforce our leadership in markets where mobile phones are incredibly pervasive and where there’s an increasing demand for mobile Internet services.

Since launching oneSearch at CES in January, we’ve worked hard to localize it for this important region. We know that PC search is not mobile search and PC browsing is not mobile browsing. People want faster results, easier navigation, and local relevance. OneSearch addresses that gap and now it does so in 14 countries around the world.

We’ll also launch localized beta versions of Yahoo! Go 2.0 this Friday, bringing the cool mobile Internet app to 13 countries in Europe, Asia and the Americas.

This all gets us closer to our big audacious goal to eventually connect 1 billion mobile users worldwide. And think we’ll reach it down the road with more news like this.

Dave Ko
VP & GM, Connected Life, Asia