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The Barcelona Mobile World
Conference unveiled a new service brought by Yahoo, oneConnect, a “socially
connected address book” combining e-mail, SMS, instant messaging and social
networking and at the same time, an open service that allows other companies to
join, Yahoo said on Tuesday.
Marco Boerries, executive vice
president for Connected Life at Yahoo said at the congress held in Barcelona
that the service will become available this spring as part of the Yahoo Go 3.0
mobile platform. OneConnect is actually an all-in-one service, designed to keep
users in touch with the latest changes of their social networking contacts, by
mixing social messaging and social applications for the users’ best convenience.
The service will support sites
such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Hi5 and others and will be compatible with
instant messaging services like Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, AOL Instant
Messenger and MSN Messenger. OneConnect is expected to make its debut in the
United States around March this year.
“The key driving force in
opening up the platform is putting content into the device. No company can
create these ecosystems alone. We have to be open,” said Boerries at the Mobile
World Conference in Barcelona, the Associated Press reports.
Boerries also announced the
collaboration with the cell phone carrier T-Mobile, that will provide its
European customers access to Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Weather and
other related services. T-Mobile dumped Google for Yahoo because Yahoo’s mobile
search technology was far superior to what Google had to offer, as Hamid
Akhavan, T-Mobile chief executive, said.
Yahoo is also thinking about
negotiating all-inclusive tariffs for the one Connect service, especially for
its European users. The large amount of data sent to and from the mobile phone
could turn the service into an unattractive one, due to high costs for its
customers, but Yahoo is thinking about introducing prices for unlimited amount
of data, similar to the U.S. system.
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