Connecting to Customers on the Move
Have you noticed all those people sitting on the bus squinting at, rather than talking into, their cell phones? Probably not, because wireless Web access is still too new to have captured a mainstream following.
But the ubiquity of cell phones and the increasing popularity of hand-held computers has already lured millions of users in Japan, and Europe and the United States are starting to catch up. By 2003, an estimated 62 million people in this country will connect to the Web wirelessly, according to research firm International Data Corp. Within a few years, analysts say, the majority of Web access could be wireless.
Yahoo Inc., the leading Web portal, is one of many companies frantically cutting deals to lure users on the move.
Mohan Vishwanath, vice president of Yahoo Everywhere, the company’s wireless division, sat down with The Times at the company’s Santa Clara, Calif., offices to talk about the future of the mobile Web.
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Question: How would you describe Yahoo’s basic philosophy toward mobile users?
Answer: Access and device independence. . . . The whole story is built around [providing content and services on any device through any carrier]. That seems very obvious when you think about it, but most of the people who are competitors right now do not have businesses like that. We do not want to restrict our users, just like we didn’t restrict our users to only use Netscape or IE [Internet Explorer] for getting access to Yahoo, even in the early days when they were very different browsers.
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Q: How many different mobile phones do you support?
A: About 15 or 20 brands of phones. . . . By the end of the year, we expect about 20 million phones . . . where Yahoo would be pre-marked [listed on a menu of sites] on the phone.
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Q: How many people use mobile Yahoo, and for what services?
A: We don’t break out numbers based on different properties, [but] there are 6 million browser-enabled phones in the U.S. today and Yahoo is accessible to every one of them. We have deployed 16 applications now. Mail, finance and sports are the biggies.
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Q: Sports scores and stock quotes are logical because they are time-sensitive and don’t take up much room on a cell-phone screen. But mail seems more cumbersome. Do people send messages, or just read their mail?
A: Mostly read. . . . If it’s a PDA [personal digital assistant, such as a Palm hand-held computer], they send and receive, no problem. We have a lot of pre-canned messages that we’re putting in soon so people will be able to respond. Push a button--”Got your message. Thank you.” . . . We are very hopeful about Yahoo messenger mail [instant messaging] because in Europe there are 4 billion [phone-to-phone] messages sent every month.
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Q: They’re typing 4 billion messages on a phone keypad?
A: Unbelievable? Look at it this way: There are economic reasons. In certain plans, especially prepaid plans which constitute the bulk of European traffic now, it’s more expensive to make a voice call than to send an SMS [short messaging service--the protocol used for phone-to-phone text messaging] message.
[And] e-mail is very successful because of the asynchronous nature. I’m in a meeting, , if I get an SMS message, I can just look at it without anyone noticing. I just flash it and I see this message. I click “OK” [sending a canned return message]. So the asynchronous nature is very important.
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Q: How will mobile Web usage evolve differently from what people are used to on their PCs?
A: The key requirements are personalization, timeliness and localization. As the directories get smaller and smaller . . . it becomes more and more important that applications are personalized, that the applications have timeliness to them. . . . And you don’t want to have the Yellow Pages for New York when you’re in San Francisco.
Once you take these three characteristics, then you can classify the applications as communication applications like e-mail, address book, calendaring and messaging. Also, commerce applications like auctions and media applications like finance, sports, weather, news. Then we have registration and personalization, a separate area where you can get your MyYahoo information [such as a personal stock portfolio] on the phone.
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Q: There are many new Web-based voice portals starting up. Has Yahoo implemented the obvious advantages of voice access for mobile users?
A: Not yet. . . . We have handled 650 million page views a day now and we have deployed in 23 countries. So scalability is crucial. . . . The thing we’re not going to do is hype up a voice site way too much, because our biggest fear is that suddenly 10 million users will hit us.
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Q: How are you planning to make money on mobile services?
A: For us, the incremental costs to enable the users to get their stuff on mobile devices is very low. . . . We don’t know if the users will take advertising on the phone. Coupons and promotions, maybe. We don’t know. We are still working it out.
There is an alerting service where you can go to a Yahoo mobile site called Mobile.yahoo.com and . . . and [tell it to] “alert me whenever this quarter ends or when a goal is scored,” and so on. When we send those alerts, at the top of the alert we say, “sponsored by [a particular advertiser].”
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Q: A lot of mobile computing devices are sold as productivity enhancements, yet sometimes seem more like obnoxious time wasters.
A: Productivity is one factor which might be important in the U.S. for a certain part of the population. The moment you hit the youth market, it becomes irrelevant.
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Times staff writer Charles Piller can be reached at charles.piller@latimes.com.
