Yahoo! signs 6 mobile deals across Asia Pacific
Kenneth Liew
21/06/2007

Yahoo! has announced that it has signed partnership agreements with six major mobile operators across Asia, representing a combined subscriber base of nearly 100 million. These new partnerships focus on distribution of Yahoo!'s mobile search service, Yahoo! oneSearch, which launched in Asia in May this year.

The six mobile operators are Globe Telecom (Philippines), Idea Cellular (India), LG Telecom (Korea), Maxis Communications (Malaysia), PT Telekomunikasi Selular "Telkomsel" (Indonesia) and Taiwan Mobile (Taiwan).

By distributing Yahoo! oneSearch, these six major operators will make it easier for people to search for and find better results and instant answers on their mobile devices. It gives consumers access to news, web images, financial information, weather conditions, Flickr and web and mobile web sites, as well as makes it easy to navigate to other web sites.

"Partners are essential to our consumer-centric mobile strategy and key relationships will continue to evolve and deliver great Internet experiences to our respective customers," said David Ko, vice president and general manager, Connected Life Asia, Yahoo!.

Yahoo! oneSearch is now available in 14 countries around the world (Canada, France, Germany, Indonesia, India, Italy, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Spain, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States and Vietnam) and will soon be available in Korea and Taiwan. It was first launched in the United States in January 2007.

Yahoo! has also launched Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0, a new application that has the ability to personalise with content from the entire Internet and a reinvention of mobile search. It will launch in beta for consumers in Singapore and 12 other countries around the world tomorrow. Yahoo! will also launch Yahoo! Go 2.0 into general availability in the United States.

For the first time, it will deliver a fully localised experience to millions of consumers in Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Spain, United Kingdom, Thailand and Vietnam.

The localised beta version of Yahoo! Go 2.0 will be available for more than 200 different mobile phones by the end of July and that will expand to more than 400 by end of the year. It will also be pre-loaded on new devices from Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, LG and HTC that begin rolling out later this year.

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