Yahoo! The branded white label mobile search company?

Rating: I fell off my chair
Today I am at the Informa Mobile Search event at the Crowne Plaza in Central London. It’s a niche event and many of the people here I know or have interviewed in the past year. I was delighted to meet Graham Ferguson again.

Graham is ex-Vodafone and I met him two years in a one of the interviews that I will always remember when he told me that the Google model was the best thing for Vodafone! But that was then and this is now and he is a self-confessed “sceptic” in the mobile search space.

Anyway, as usual some presentation were better than others and the old boring argument of white label vs branded mobile search hit the top of the agenda. The most exciting presentation so far has come from Yahoo!’s Michael Bayle. I met Michael at 3GSM and he is connected; but his comments were on the verge of scary in terms of white label vs branded.

He said, “we don’t care so much about the brand”? Hello. Yahoo! Doesn’t care about the brand?
Apparently, Yahoo! bends to operators’ needs and is eager to please. It is will be willing to reduce the push on its own brand in order get in with mobile operators and manufacturers.

For Yahoo! Getting on the device is essential. Michael gave the example that when it got on the mobile device in Japan; its hits for mobile search increased by 1000%. Michael also cited its relationships with 3 and Softbank to prove its ability to hear and respect the mobile operator argument.
I find this very hard to swallow.

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3. Yahoo! Mobile Content Mobile Search?
4. Yahoo! Japan deploys white label mobile search from MCN Mobile Content Networks
5. Mobile Search: Verizon Google? Has the world gone mad?