Yahoo CEO stakes out mobile phone market strategy

By Eric Auchard

LAS VEGAS (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc's Jerry Yang will seek on Monday to demonstrate in his first major speech since taking over as chief executive in June the inroads the company is making putting Web services on mobile phones.

In a speech at the Consumer Electronics Show, an industry agenda-setting conference taking place in Las Vegas this week, the Yahoo co-founder will highlight a series of enhancements the company is making to its Internet services to optimize them to run on hundreds of millions of existing mobile phones.

Marco Boerries, the executive in charge of Yahoo's division supplying Web services for phones, TVs and other devices beyond PCs, told Reuters in an interview ahead of Yang's speech that Yahoo wants to play a big role in these new markets while staying true to its roots as an Internet services pioneer.

Yahoo needs to show it is making progress under Yang in entering new markets like phones after suffering setbacks in recent years in its core Web search and advertising businesses. These missteps had led to the recent management shake-up.

Among the new services the company is set to begin offering in a trial mode on Monday is a new Yahoo.com home page that is optimized for mobile phone users but which will differ in layout and content from what computer users see at Yahoo.com.

"The purpose of the new Yahoo mobile phone home page is to be your starting point to the mobile Internet," Boerries said. The mobile Internet is a subset of the Web sites computer users see, typically optimized to be viewed on small phone screens.

Yahoo is also introducing a new way for consumers to grab personalized "snippets" of content from either Yahoo's network of Web services or thousands of independent Web sites ranging from MySpace to YouTube to public messaging service Twitter.

Yahoo's latest mobile push will borrow features that have grown popular on so-called social network sites such as MySpace or Facebook or its own Flickr photo-sharing site. The features encourage users to share personal details with select friends.