Rogers and Yahoo! expand and grow mobile search, oneSearch, Go! and broadband
Rating: did the earth move for you too?
by Bena Roberts
Canadian mobile operator Rogers Wireless is to offer Yahoo! Go and oneSearch services to customers across Canada.
From the press release
“We are excited to extend our strong relationship with Yahoo! to bring the best in broadband and mobile experiences to Rogers customers,” said Mike Lee, Chief Strategy Officer, Rogers Communications Inc. “Furthermore, when we looked to integrate our internet and mobile service, Yahoo presented the best-of-breed services through their mobile search tools and Yahoo! Go.”
“We look forward to the expansion of our partnership with Rogers as their partner of choice for broadband services, search, advertising and mobile services,” said Bruce Stewart, Vice-President and General Manager, Connected Life Americas, Yahoo! Inc. “By expanding the scope of our partnership in the mobile arena; we are pleased to offer industry-leading products including Yahoo! Go 2.0 and Yahoo! oneSearch to the millions of Rogers’ customers to allow them to access their content anywhere, anytime, on any device.”
What we think?
Yahoo! Go is an on device portal, monolithic to Yahoo! and full of its own services; but it has some OK features. It will only be available on a handful of high end business devices (so not the Yahoo! Go target market and unlikely to set the Flickr mobile use on Fire.
oneSearch is the search engine for the mobile Internet. The press release states it will be the exclusive mobile Internet serch on the Rogers Wireless mobile portal.
Hmm. Now this is where it gets a bit tricky.
JumpTap provides white label mobile search for Rogers content service and has done since about 2004. So this “exclusive” is it a lie?
Well – I put in a call to CEO of JumpTap Dan Olschwang and he said the JumpTap was still very much providing mobile search for Rogers Wireless so perhaps the “exclusive” is just for the branded players.
This is the response from Yahoo!
As stated in the release, Yahoo! oneSearch will be the exclusive mobile Internet search service for Rogers’s mobile customers (on the WAP deck). oneSeach is also available to users from the Rogers Zone.
So?
Either way the gloves are coming off and I predict fisty cuffs between the mobile search guys soon enough.
BUT if this is a mirage of the truth from Yahoo! then its not the first time. It said a few months ago it had gained 100 million subscribers by adding several new Asian markets. When I did the maths – it was only 70 million. But I do like the oneSearch user interface..
But anyway – there is a great table in Mobile Entertainment (provided by BKI Media) uncovering the mobile search leader which everyone should take a look at.
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One Response to “Rogers and Yahoo! expand and grow mobile search, oneSearch, Go! and broadband”
Hmmm, I think JumpTap will still be around. JumpTap is used for on-portal search and it’s good at doing so. OneSearch is used for off-portal search. But let’s not forget that Yahoo has announced it will launch a mobile content search service, so theoratically, Yahoo could do both… Let’s wait and see.
Comment made on November 3rd, 2007 at 12:12 amLeave a Comment