The top internet players’ battle for supremacy moves on and towards the mobile industry as the Mobile World Congress 2008 kicks off in Barcelona, Spain. While Google has reached a mobile search agreement with Nokia and Microsoft announcing a buyout deal for mobile service provider Danger, Inc., Yahoo is not to be outdone just like that. For its part, Yahoo has teamed up with mobile service provider T-Mobile that would bring Yahoo’s mobile services to millions of T-Mobile’s European customers. Under the said agreement, Yahoo’s oneSearch will become the exclusive mobile service for T-Mobile customers.
Yahoo Connected Life executive vice president Marco Boerries said that T-Mobile’s desire to partner with Yahoo illustrates the strength of the company’s mobile search service and its ability to provide customers with the best possible mobile internet experience.
“Just one year ago we successfully reinvented mobile search with Yahoo! oneSearch and we have delivered on its promise as we work to establish Yahoo! as the starting point for the mobile Web. Soon we will bring this compelling experience to T-Mobile’s millions of consumers across Europe,” says Boerries.
T-Mobile’s Group Products and Innovation Officer, Christopher Schlaffer on the other hand said that the deal was part of T-Mobile’s service of giving their customers instant and direct access to all available internet services such as information, content and communities.
“With Yahoo!, we combine our joint innovation power to bring the mobile Internet even closer to our customers. oneSearch, the best search product on the market, is a prime example here,” says Schlaffer.
Similar to the Nokia-Google deal, Yahoo’s oneSearch will be the default mobile search engine for T-Mobiles European customers. Yahoo oneSearch will give T-Mobile customers with relevant results and instant answers to search queries and access to news, financial information, weather conditions, photos, web images and web and mobile web sites. The two companies also agreed to develop a different Yahoo oneSearch experience made specifically for T-Mobile.
