Yahoo is moving to secure a position on the next Internet battleground: Web search and advertising on cellphones.
The company was set to announce yesterday that it was creating a mobile advertising network that will allow marketers to place ads not only on its mobile services, but also on those of other online publishers. And Yahoo is offering tools to help publishers customize their content for easier use with its mobile search service.
Yahoo's network of publishers at this point is tiny -- three Web services, including MobiTV, a video service to be used with cellphones; Opera, a maker of Web browsers; and Go2, a Yellow Pages site. But the company said it planned to expand the network quickly over the next few months.
"We are being very aggressive on mobile and moving extremely fast to get the building blocks in place," said Steve Boom, Yahoo's senior vice president for broadband and mobile. "We felt that business services for publishers is something that was lacking."
Yahoo, which has fallen a distant second behind Google in Internet search and search-related advertising, has been busy promoting new mobile search software, which it introduced in January.
The software, called oneSearch, is intended to allow users to quickly find information like sports scores and weather reports without scrolling through a long list of Web links.
"One area where Google has not outshined Yahoo is mobile search," said Kevin Heisler, an analyst at Jupiter Research.
By focusing on publishers and advertisers, Yahoo is courting groups that are essential to its success on the mobile Internet. The company hopes to start delivering text, display and video ads on third-party mobile Web sites by the summer, Boom said. Last month it announced that it would deliver graphical ads on its own mobile Web service.
Advertising on sites arrayed for mobile phones is a tiny market, but it is expected to grow quickly, and a number of companies, including the leading wireless carriers, are jockeying for position. Yahoo and Google have both been delivering ads linked to search results on cellphones since last year, but Yahoo is the first of the major Internet firms to introduce a mobile ad network.
A few start-ups jumped into this market early. AdMob, a closely held mobile network based in Silicon Valley, announced Monday that it had received US$11 million in second-round financing. One of its principal backers is Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm that financed both Google and Yahoo early in their development.
Another start-up that has developed a mobile ad network, Third Screen Media, is in conversations to be acquired by the AOL unit of Time Warner, according to people familiar with the talks. Third Screen and AOL declined to comment. The discussions were first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Analysts say the market for mobile search and advertising is so young, and the relationships between technology firms, advertisers and carriers so fluid, that no real leader has emerged.
"Yahoo has plunged aggressively into the business in the last few months," said Gary Arlen, president of Arlen Communications, a research firm. "But it's so new, nobody is ahead."
ROLLER-COASTER RIDE: More than five earthquakes ranging from magnitude 4.4 to 5.5 on the Richter scale shook eastern Taiwan in rapid succession yesterday afternoon Back-to-back weather fronts are forecast to hit Taiwan this week, resulting in rain across the nation in the coming days, the Central Weather Administration said yesterday, as it also warned residents in mountainous regions to be wary of landslides and rockfalls. As the first front approached, sporadic rainfall began in central and northern parts of Taiwan yesterday, the agency said, adding that rain is forecast to intensify in those regions today, while brief showers would also affect other parts of the nation. A second weather system is forecast to arrive on Thursday, bringing additional rain to the whole nation until Sunday, it
LANDSLIDES POSSIBLE: The agency advised the public to avoid visiting mountainous regions due to more expected aftershocks and rainfall from a series of weather fronts A series of earthquakes over the past few days were likely aftershocks of the April 3 earthquake in Hualien County, with further aftershocks to be expected for up to a year, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Based on the nation’s experience after the quake on Sept. 21, 1999, more aftershocks are possible over the next six months to a year, the agency said. A total of 103 earthquakes of magnitude 4 on the local magnitude scale or higher hit Hualien County from 5:08pm on Monday to 10:27am yesterday, with 27 of them exceeding magnitude 5. They included two, of magnitude
CONDITIONAL: The PRC imposes secret requirements that the funding it provides cannot be spent in states with diplomatic relations with Taiwan, Emma Reilly said China has been bribing UN officials to obtain “special benefits” and to block funding from countries that have diplomatic ties with Taiwan, a former UN employee told the British House of Commons on Tuesday. At a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee hearing into “international relations within the multilateral system,” former Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) employee Emma Reilly said in a written statement that “Beijing paid bribes to the two successive Presidents of the [UN] General Assembly” during the two-year negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Another way China exercises influence within the UN Secretariat is
Taiwan’s first drag queen to compete on the internationally acclaimed RuPaul’s Drag Race, Nymphia Wind (妮妃雅), was on Friday crowned the “Next Drag Superstar.” Dressed in a sparkling banana dress, Nymphia Wind swept onto the stage for the final, and stole the show. “Taiwan this is for you,” she said right after show host RuPaul announced her as the winner. “To those who feel like they don’t belong, just remember to live fearlessly and to live their truth,” she said on stage. One of the frontrunners for the past 15 episodes, the 28-year-old breezed through to the final after weeks of showcasing her unique