Yahoo to Offer its Mobile Services to many Mobile Phones

Yahoo’s mobile Internet services will be crafted to run on various phone platforms, potentially including Google’s phone software and the Apple iPhone. Yahoo is committed to compete with rivals in a new and more open strategy, mobile chief Marco Boerries told reporters at the Consumer Electronics Show on Monday. By offering Internet services that work on existing phones, Yahoo hopes to reach hundreds of millions of mobile phone customers.

Yahoo’s mobile service will create mini-Web sites what will allow outside companies to be featured on Yahoo pages. Viacom’s MTV, News Corp’s MySpace and eBay are some of the companies creating mini Web features, which are known as widgets, to run inside Yahoo Web pages.

Yahoo is ready to create versions of Yahoo Mobile Widgets to allow users to keep tabs on their favorite Web sites on phones running Apple Inc, Google Inc, Microsoft Corp or Nokia-backed Symbian software, Yahoo’s Boerries said in response to questions from analysts and reporters.

“Our job is to make sure Yahoo Mobile Widgets run on any platform that creates a good user experience,” Boerries said.

“(Google) Android for us is another mobile operating system like (Microsoft’s) Windows Mobile and (Nokia-backed) Series 60 that we plan to support once it becomes a reality,” he said in response to a question from a Wall Street analyst.

“We are going to make sure Yahoo services run on every device” that makes the Internet easy to use on phones, Boerries said.