Mobile links, bits and bobs

Last week was a busy busy week so there was little time for posting. However, here’s a quick roundup of some stuff I noticed in our mobile utopia.

The Yahoo Advanced Products Group have launched Mixd – a social “experiment” targeted at the US college demographic. The service enables users to send a text to multiple people and to share photos, arrange a party etc. Similar to 3Jam, it enables reply-to-all on text-messaging facilitating a multi-party chat conversation. Zingku has something similar currently in beta. Zemble also.

Shortly following a post I wrote about mobilizing YouTube content, the provider TinyTube I mentioned was asked to remove access to YouTube content. I thought Googles mantra was “don’t be evil”?

The W3C initiative is aggregating a number of mobile focused blogs at Planet Mobile Web.

CScout has an article here on the trend that Social Network sites are going mobile. The article covers YouTube, MySpace, Hookt and AirG.

And finally, the Economist did a great article on what the future of the mobile phone may look like in their Quarterly Technology Review. Go here

Yahoo eats del.icio.us

Oooh - del.iciou.us got bought buy Yahoo last Friday. Dunno for how much, but its clear that Yahoo understands how tagging is going to make our web so much easier and intelligent to navigate. I've noticed a couple of months back how my search preference for particular topics was increasingly moving over to del.icio.us. If it was/is a topic related to technology, internet or mobile I would tend to go to del.icio.us first.
The Yahoo acquisition now has the capability to make the del.icio.us experience avaialble to everyone and to grow the topic and tag spread away from the geekish to more mainstream common requests. This in turn will feed a more time sensitive, friend relevant and context targeted search experience which may just be enough to tackle Google?

One other thing - the Yahoo M&A team are doing a damn good job - Oddpost, Flickr, Dialpad, Del.icio.us, all in under 18 months. They dont appear to be paying over the odds, and these targets are all examples of high growth synergistic (is that a word?) complimentary businesses that can add real value (usage data, IPR, engineering and product knowledge) to the Yahoo product stable. Yahoo brings a mass market productisation engine and an exit!

previous posts:
15/06/05 Yahoo buys Dialpad
04/05/05 Intelligent Bookmarks
08/07/04 Yahoo eats Oddpost

IM to Voice

I saw this ad banner for Yahoo Messenger today that reads; "stop typing, start talking". Yahoo are promoting new voice support within their IM client (following DialPad acquisition) and it got me wondering if people will easily migrate from IM to voice? Its a different type of communication with a different associated psychology. How much substitution will happen, or how much additional traffic will be generated will be interesting to watch. Will the IM user base hurl their keyboards out the window and replace them with USB headsets - or will they compliment their heavy IM usage with the occassional phone call.
Yahoo are going to approaching this in reverse to Skype - Skype built a heavy voice usage base and complimented this with IM (I personally found that I discarded my other IM clients in favour of skype because Skype had the the most valuable contacts - probably because Im bothered to call them, rather than IM them). So then, may be we can judge the value of a relationship by the type of communication bearer we use to interact with it?

Yahoo buys DialPad

Yahoo has acquired DialPad in a move to strengthen their VOIP play. Who's next to be eaten up? Skype, Teltel, Vonage, Yak, Net2Phone???
Om Malik broke it yesterday, press release here
Update 06/09 - teleo just got bought by Microsoft

Nokia/Yahoo

Yesterday, Nokia announced a partnership with Yahoo to pre-install a range of Yahoo Internet services (email, search, entertainment) on Series 60 devices. This is the first significant step I have seen from a device manufacturer to include content services in the device., which until now has been traditionally controlled by the operator. For Yahoo, it is clearly an excellent distribution route, and I suspect we will see further announcements with other device manufacturers. Maybe they will go a step further and start an MVNO. And why not - if EasyMobile can be up and running with 40 people on the pay-roll, this route is low-cost and just extends Yahoo's market reach. Yahoo Email customers are likely to have a closer brand affinity and realtionship with Yahoo than they might with O2, T-Mob or Vod. Then maybe AOL and MSN will follow suit? Would do the world of good for mobile data services....

07/11 - Yahoo! to launch own phone on Cingular