Cian Gomo, Gomonews.com
Topics: Yahoo, iPhone, IoT, Comm Tech
Transcript Excerpt
Keith Saft, director of global products for Yahoo mobile, is interviewed and discusses a brief overview of its mobile program and the position it is in, regarding its new homepage, markets, apps, and products that involve Facebook, Myspace, and Flickr. In the spring, it brought forth a new homepage that was out on 400 devices, in about 17 markets. Today, it is up to 1900 devices including, smart devices like the iPhone in 32 minutes and has been expanding to the breadth and depth of what the new home page is looking at. It is also reaching more mid-tier devices to increase the experience on high-end phones, especially on HTML5. Things like the iPhone touch. Developers can make some devices work in HTML5 but now, every device works on it and there is no device with specific coding anymore. Going from device to device, each manufacturer has slight differences in the kinds of things that are done. There may be a web kit or a specific kind of tag. But Android does not have that same tag. Yahoo designs its own pages in a way that can get them to an abstracted layer and have the renderers optimize each individual handset. Regarding manufactured handsets, to get the product integrated, older handsets have lower costs and manufacturers shave pennies on them but make shortcuts on the browser to accommodate them. It is a little more challenging to work with a basic philosophy because if a user had that phone in their pocket, it would want the user to have a great experience. Due to this, they make their stuff work for the phone, aside from the new homepage. Everyone is excited about this. One of the big news announcements for It is that there is a new enhanced homepage. There were other announcements in the last couple of weeks where new apps were put out for both the iPhone and the BlackBerry, like Fantasy Football, Flickr, Yahoo Finance, and more exciting apps. These apps have been number one in their category and in the Apple store. It is constantly bringing new stuff out, which they are proud of. The finance portion of the conversation has really gone wild this year with banking, integrating, and making massive strides forward in the information-based sectors, around tracking and financial headlines that has been the direction it has gone in. Yahoo will also start doing micropayments and plans to advance in the right direction for the future with customer interaction and better app designs.
