MWC: Yahoo! Announces oneConnect with Location Awareness

Yahoo! Inc. has a knack for picking its moment. Last year at 3GSM the search firm introduced Yahoo! oneSearch, an optimized search experience designed for the mobile device, which today claims 29 operator relationships and coverage of 600 million subscribers. On Tuesday, amid the furor surrounding Microsoft Corp.'s hostile takeover initiative, it once again took the press conference stage in Barcelona, speaking to a packed crowd to announce oneConnect, an open architecture for developers that aggregates basic mobile communications tools – e-mail, IM, text messaging and social networking.

The event didn’t live up to expectations for some in the room, judging by the ripple of disappointment that coursed through the crowd after it became apparent that Microsoft, Google Inc., funding, investors or any combination thereof would not be on the docket. But for those interested in mobility the announcement factors into an ongoing theme at Mobile World Congress – the idea of openness and customization, and of people taking charge of their own mobile destiny. Consider the show news so far: Microsoft´s Zumobi partnership, which is a widget application that allows users to place small tiles on the phone top that can be clicked to zoom in to full screen; Nokia´s reiteration of Ovi as the door to all mobile consumer services; legions of prototypes built on the Google Android platform; and so on.

As for openConnect, it will use widgets to provide users the capability to access e-mail from Yahoo! Mail, MSN Hotmail, Gmail and AO. It’s also in discussions with DataViz, a company that provides access to corporate Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Office, to work together on widget versions of the DataViz services, RoadSynch and Documents To Go. It also will have integrated SMS and access to popular social networking sites. {vpipagebreak}

So far, so what – there are applications that already do all of that. But the core part of this strategy that is of interest is Yahoo!’s acknowledgement that mobility isn’t simply about having always-on access to what people are used to from the PC. {vpipagebreak}

Beyond just taking the Internet mobile, oneConnect is leveraging the location awareness inherent in mobility to provide a way to locate, chat with and exchange contact information (openConnect contains a calling card service) with nearby Yahoo! oneConnect users. Proximity alerts will notify consumers when a contact enters their vicinity. There are applications like this in Japan, but now Yahoo! is going to run it by less mobile-savvy Westerners.

The service also automatically synchs with a user’s social networking site of choice, so users can view status updates, photo uploads and the recent activity (dubbed "pulse") of contacts across all their networks. Any changes are also automatically broadcast out.

Yahoo! oneConnect will be available as part of Yahoo! Go 3.0 and on Yahoo!'s new mobile home page in the second quarter.

Share this article: Email, Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Yahoo!MyWeb, Windows Live Favorites, Furl
Add this article feed to: RSS, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Bloglines