CES: Yahoo! Go 3.0, Widgets and new home pages

Rating: Don’t Go, Come back

Yahoo has announced several major changes at CES.

Why?

The company hopes to accelerate the growth of mobile.

What are the changes?

1. Enabling developers and publishers to mobilize services fast. A Mobile Developer Platform will be launched to introduce a one-stop solution for developers to create Mobile Widgets.
2. Yahoo has revamped the Yahoo! Mobile home page.
3. Upgrades Yahoo! Go to 3.0 focusing on widgets and “the best of the Internet” strategy.
4. Yahoo! is creating a monetization engine – allowing publishers to monetize services and advertisers to reach target audiences. This is via mobile display advertising.

What we think?
After one year, Yahoo! has woken up and smelt the coffee. I have written about how Yahoo! is too monolithic for its own good with a vengeance this past year. Now it seems its embracing this to try and open up and instead of creating its own portal, enabling one where users can upgrade and download their own widgets and services to personalize the Yahoo! Mobile experience.

This sounds great – but actually very little has changed.

I have now read the press release several times with different hats on and at the end of the day what strikes me is that this is all a cover-up of the complete flop of a year Yahoo! has had over the past year. oneSearch and Go! made insignificant blimps on the radar and all in all – uptake has been slow and even more slow.
Changing the website design is a good start at mustering up more excitement. (haven’t seen it yet, is not working on my Sony Walkman will change devices and report back later).

But isn’t Yahoo! jumping on the back end of the bandwagon with its Widgets announcement. Widgets are already everywhere and by the sounds of its; Yahoo! is going to make everyone money by pushing display advertising in, on and around these widgets. The goals of monetization are apparent but the means in which Yahoo! hopes to achieve them is tried, old, tested and quite frankly the only way in which Yahoo! can make money in mobile – via advertising.

Related News:

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2. att.net powered by Yahoo! Ad-Funded content rules.
3. Mobile 2.0: Yahoo!
4. Yahoo! and WPP Forge Multi-Year Strategic Partnership
5. Mobile Asia congress – Yahoo! Go(es) Chinese, adds operators and focuses on consumers