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Virgin Mobile USA to offer Yahoo! mobile services
Virgin Mobile USA, considered to be the first MVNO in America, has landed Yahoo! as of last week to get the web portal's mobile services available to its 4.6 million wireless customers. Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger will be first up to bat, with those mobile services coming as downloadable applications for several Virgin Mobile handsets this month. In addition, Virgin Mobile will be pre-loading Yahoo! Mobile applications on many of its phones starting now, according to both companies.
Yahoo! "jumps ahead" of Google in mobile search
We're not quite sure how Yahoo! claims to have "jumped ahead" of Google in terms of mobile search, but upon investigation here, the Sunnyvale company has unveiled its new "local" search for the first time in the States, delivering locally relevant answers to mobile search queries instead of just relevant but global search results (like Google defaults to with its mobile search). It's true that offering customers search results that are specifically tailored to locality (Yahoo!) instead of a list of relevant but global URLs (Google) are more likely helpful for mobile web searchers, but we're not sure on if this really has Yahoo!'s oneSearch "jumping over" Google's mobile presence. In terms of usefulness, probably. In terms of sheer search volume, well... who knows.
Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0 Gamma now available
Yahoo! is carving its own little piece of limelight from this week's 3GSM event in Barcelona, as the web's most highly-visited portal launched a new gamma version of Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0 as of Monday -- just a short month after the beta rollout. What's new from the beta to the gamma? Outside of Greek designations, customers can now search directly from maps and share Yahoo!'s oneSearch results, news articles and more with friends. Ah, social communities and Yahoo! Mobile -- what a match made in, well, somewhere. But, you'll need to have one of 100 phones that the new Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0 works on -- and with Google also stepping it up, this is a mobile battle that's turning the screws every time we see it.
European mobile carriers plot against Google and Yahoo!
Apparently the Brits and other European wireless telco carriers want to drop the bomb on Yank mobile search engines like Yahoo! and Google -- so much that Vodafone, France Telecom, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, Hutchison Whampoa, Telecom Italia and, gasp, America's Cingular are plotting to try and supplant the mobile search services of Google and Yahoo! from their customer's handsets. You know you're performing more Google searches from your wireless 10-key than from your ultra-fast PC, right? Those Europeans are a tad more mobile-focused compared to us here across the pond, so it comes as no surprise really that the big European wireless carriers want to capture all those mobile searches using...their own search service. We're not quite sure how they'll index the mobile (and real) web for all those customers to compete with the years-ahead services from Google and Yahoo!, but we wish them well at 3GSM next week when they pitch this to, well, whoever will listen.
