Yahoo used 3GSM to make a very public pitch for new partners in the mobile handset and network space. On the eve of the conference, the portal announced it had tied up with premium advertisers to harness its Yahoo Go 2.0 application to place ads on handsets in 19 countries.
This afternoon, the company’s SVP for Connected Life, Marco Boerries, issued a related invitation to some of the 1,100 companies in Barcelona. “We already have joint customers,” he said. “We believe the mobile internet is not a free commodity – it takes a lot of money to build and maintain. Value that gets created jointly has to be shared jointly.” Music to their ears.
In his keynote, Boerries said Yahoo’s search application — already being rolled out thanks to partnerships with the likes of Vodafone and 3 — offered an easier mobile internet experience than the slimmed-down web pages offered by Google because it offered further optimization for mobile handset interfaces. Though many expect mobile advertising to boom in 2007, 3GSM