Telefonica bring Yahoo! to 100m mobiles
Telefonica – parent company of UK mobile network O2 – yesterday announced a deal to bring Yahoo! oneSearch, Yahoo! Mail and photo sharing community Flickr to more than 100 million mobile customers in 15 countries.
Yahoo! oneSearch is specifically designed for mobile devices, delivering results directly in the first screen and thereby removing the need for consumers to navigate through a sea of links to PC Web sites to find the information they want. Yahoo! oneSearch gives consumers access to news, financial information, weather conditions, Flickr photos, Web images, as well as Web and Mobile Web sites.
Together, Telefonica and Yahoo! are enhancing the search experience for consumers on mobile phones, while providing both companies with new revenue streams through mobile advertising.
Julio Linares, Telefonica’s general manager for Coordination Business Development and Synergies, said, “Partners are essential to our mobile strategy and these key relationships, like the one we are announcing today with Yahoo!, will continue to evolve and deliver state of the art Internet experiences to our customers at home or on the go.”
“Yahoo!’s new partnership with Telefonica furthers our leadership in mobile and demonstrates our commitment to working with partners to enhance the Internet experience for customers on their mobile phone,” said Marco Boerries, executive vice president of Yahoo!’s Connected Life Division. “Together we can grow usage of mobile Internet services and create new revenue streams through mobile advertising.”
Telefonica customers will also enjoy the benefit of direct access to Flickr, one of the world’s leading online photo sharing communities. The inclusion of Flickr in Telefonica’s mobile services will allow customers to easily view and share their photos, view their friends’ pictures, view and create comments on photos and browse or search more than one billion images posted by the Flickr service, all from the mobile phones.
Additionally, Yahoo! Mail will be seamlessly integrated into Telefonica’s Mail Express service, providing Yahoo! Mail users with the ability to receive their Yahoo! Mail messages directly on their mobile phone via MMS messaging, enabling customers on the Telefonica network in Spain and Latin America to stay connected to their community even when they are away from their PC.
