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@ CTIA: Keynote: Yahoo’s Marco Boerries Launches oneConnect For iPhone; Expands BluePrint

imageUp next in this morning’s keynotes is Marco Boerries, Yahoo’s EVP of Connected Life Division. He’s here to discuss three things: provide an update on where the company is in mobile, to launch oneConnect, and to give an update on BluePrint. Yahoo is providing a number of things in mobile today, from search to advertising and a platform that allows developers to build widgets for a community. The round-up was a little rah-rah, but he announced oneConnect for the iPhone, and expanded Blueprint developer tools.

Progress report: We have launched oneSearch with AT&T’s (NYSE: T) mediaNet. This is the first big launch in the U.S. It will change the way people use their phones. That’s a huge success for Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO). We also launched an idle screen product that allows the search bar to be on the homescreen. First launched on 20 Nokia (NYSE: NOK) devices in 18 markets and nine languages.

oneConnect: It is now available today for the iPhone. The platform integrates all of your messaging for IM, SMS and email. Allows you to integrate social networks, like Facebook and Twitter in a feature called Pulse, which allows you to see in one view all of your networks. Available now in Apple’s (NSDQ: AAPL) App store. It is free.

More after the jump...

oneConnect demonstrated: In one view, you get access to all of your networks, like Status, where with one click you get all of the statuses in one view from Twitter, Facebook, etc. You can also look at all the photos, and see all the photos that people have uploaded in your networks. For messages, it’s emails and IMs. There’s a list of all the conversations. And if you aren’t signed in, you can fall back to SMS, and send a message to the person’s phone number. It’s taken the contacts, and then shows what networks I know them from. For instant, when you open up a person’s address card, it maps how you know the person, from Facebook or Last.fm, for example.

BluePrint Developer environment: This is not a mobile OS. There’s enough variety. It’s not for games, and it’s not proprietary. There’s five key reasons why it is important: it decreases development time; it’s only for mobile; it’s XML based; it’s beautiful; it’s powerful and includes a huge set of pre-built services like, location and image and video controls; it runs on thousands of devices. It’s open and cross-platform. Originally it only ran on Yahoo Go, meaning that users had to download Yahoo Go in order to use the applications

Expanded access: You can create a standalone app that runs on hundreds of Windows Mobile, Java and Symbian devices. This means that users won’t have to have Yahoo Go on their phones in order to use one of the widgets developed in Blueprint. You will also be able to create mobile websites, so that you can use your site, your domain that will support thousands of devices. It’s now available for everyone. This will also include a Blueprint environment for the iPhone.

Blueprint demonstrated: On the iPhone, developers will be able to use Blueprint. For instance, the TV show Heroes can create a site that pulls information from a variety of sources, listing more episodes, etc., or look at the cast. “You really can write once and be best everywhere. This is a key differentiator of Blueprint. This is about developing fast, efficient and very feature rich and beautiful services.”

Sep 10, 2008 12:18 PM ET

Posted In: Companies, Apple, Yahoo, marco boerries

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