Add to iTunesAdam Taggart - Director Product Marketing, Yahoo!
Introduction
A few weeks ago at CES, I sat down with Adam Taggart the Director of Product Marketing at Yahoo! He shared some of the recent news they had announced at CES around opening up their mobile platform for other developers and his perspectives on the mobile market.
Links
Transcript
| Sean Ammirati: Hi. Well this is Sean Ammirati from Read/Write Talk. I’m here with Adam Taggart who’s the Director of Product Marketing in the Yahoo! Mobile Group. And Yahoo!’s had some big announcements here at CES and one of the stars of the show Jerry Yang was or like one of the keynotes. And we covered that on Read/Write Web.But wanted to sit down a little bit today with Adam and talk about the things Yahoo! has announced in the Mobile Space and also his view on the Mobile market here at CES. So Adam, thank you for joining me today and maybe you could start by just giving me a little bit of your background and just the stuffs you’ve announced today.
Adam Taggart: Sure and it’s a pleasure to meet you. Thanks for sitting down with us. My background is, as you said, I’m Director of Product Marketing for Yahoo! Mobile. I’ve been at Yahoo! for about, almost seven years. And I’ve been in the Mobile Space specifically for the past year and a half or so. And I can say that out of my seven years at Yahoo!, the past year and a half has been by far in a way the most exciting and by far in a way the most exhausting in my tenure at Yahoo! so far. |
|
| 01:03 | So we do have a fair amount of big news here at Yahoo!. We announced a couple of new products the other day. But all those product launches, they relate to sort of an overall uber-message that we’re getting the word out here on CES this week. And that is that we are now in the process of developing a mobile ecosystem that is intended to serve eventually billions of mobile consumers. And I had to use the word “billions” there very specifically because it differentiates our strategy versus other people in the industry.Most of the people who are taking a very highly optimized approach around the specific device type or a specific operating system, which is great. You can do, provide a really excellent experience on those devices taking the strategy that those players are taking. The difference though is that in that approach, success is defined on the order of magnitude of millions of devices or hundreds and millions of device, I’m sorry, tens and millions of devices. |
| 02:07 | So if we’ll take the iPhone for example, you know, a phenomenal, fantastic device and very, very popular. They will probably sell in the middle of this year their two millionth iPhone. Windows Mobile, which has been doing this for a while, a couple of years, and investing a lot of money in this space. So again doing very well, good operating system. They’ll sell about 30 million Windows Mobile Phones this year. Out of close about a billion phones were sold this year. So you know, kind of around 3 percent of the market itself. So while you’re promoting a very good experience, you’re providing really just a very thin sliver of the total market of consumers out there with phones.As Yahoo!, our brand is all about ubiquity. All about getting services in a matter of all of you who access the Internet no matter what device type that you’re on. And we really want to stay true to that mission and make sure that we’re providing the absolute best mobile internet experience to the widest number of devices possible around the world. |
| 03:03 | And to that end, to play on the order of magnitude of the billions that we’re talking about here. We realized that we as Yahoo! can’t do it on our own. And that’s for a couple of reasons. First up, we realized that as popular as they are, Yahoo! Services are not the only Internet services that consumers use. I myself use a lot of non-Yahoo! Internet services on a daily basis and I’m sure that you do too.And I’m sure the services that you use everyday are probably pretty different from the ones that I use. Each of our sort of personal portfolio of internet services is unique to ourselves in our own unique tastes. And we know that to really truly deliver what people want on the mobile Internet, we’ve got to give them optimized access to the entire Internet through our solutions.
Secondly, we know that we’re just one company. So there’s a lot that we’re focusing on to push the envelope and raise the bar at the mobile space. But we know that we can really focus on so much and so we really want to be able to tap with innovation, the talents of a much larger pool. |
| 04:03 | So, all this is leading up to our announcement from the other day that we have opened up our mobile platform to the developers and publishers from around the world now. Specifically to bring their content and services live to create a whole new level of choice for the consumer. And again there, we tap into their innovation and their creative power to see where we could bring this mobile internet because there’s a lot that you’re going to go want to do with the phone that you might not be even necessarily be able to do on a PC. We really want to bring that to life.Sean Ammirati: Interesting. So, let’s go down to that a little bit because I think the point is a good one about across different web services being used. If I’m a listener listening to this and I’m at a start up with like a dozen people and want to have a presence on billions of mobile devices as you say. What will be the process I would go through to engage with you?
Adam Taggart: Great question and this is why we’re so excited about our announcement. So up until, you know, just a few days ago, the landscape was a very challenging one for developing mobile applications. |
| 05:12 | Actually, when you look at the reasons why the mobile internet has yet to be a completely mainstream phenomenon yet, you look at the reasons for that. They used to be technology-based reasons. Used to be that devices weren’t powerful or enough or the network or isn’t fast enough. Now, the main limiting factor is that its still just very hard to bring content and services mobile. You have to go out and find mobile programmers, which are still somewhat rare to find.And there’s a lot of competition for those resources as well so they can be hard to find. They could be expensive. And by conventional means, it could take a while to build these mobile applications. And once they’re built, that’s actually only the first step. You then actually, you then have to start porting the applications you built to different devices and you’ve got thousands of different device types. You’ve got different operating systems. |
| 06:01 | You’ve got hundreds of different carriers with their own network idiosyncrasies. You’ve got hundreds of different browser types. It’s very, very hard, very labor intensive, very expensive and frankly it’s a very buggy process. And it tends to be prohibitively expensive for most players out there. So what people tend to do is they tend to specialize this. They, say ” well I’m just going to develop for Blackberries then.” or “I’m going to develop just for the Windows operating system.” And we get to that point earlier that we talked about. We are really kind of limiting the exposure.Sean Ammirati: Sure.
Adam Taggart: So, what we’ve done is we have actually at Yahoo! had to solve this problem ourselves over the past several years as we’ve, you know, been bringing our mobile services to market. And we’ve had years and years of investment in trying to solve these problems inside of Yahoo!. We’ve actually made this a big criteria in the companies that we’ve acquired in this space to help us get better at this and really found being able to scale across the entire system of phones out there. |
| 07:03 | So, and we’ve actually been leveraging our own for the right ones, run anywhere solution inside of Yahoo! for sometime now. And now what we’re doing is simply making that available to the rest of the world. So that this small start up you talked about now, they actually don’t need to go out and find these really high-end developers. Our solutions are XML based. Anybody who knows how to program in XML, which most developers do, can use the tools that we’ve now made available to create their own mobile applications.And this whole device support problem we’ve talked about, they don’t need to worry about that. Once they plug into our platform they instantly run across all the same devices that Yahoo! services run across. So what I would encourage these folks to do is go to mobile.yahoo.com and look at “for our developer” site. It will explain this whole platform there and they can download the specifications for how to design one of these applications. We call them Yahoo! Mobile Widgets. And they can write it, submit it to us and be up and running in no time. |
| 08:03 | Sean Ammirati: So, for the entrepreneurs listening, their ears went up when you said it’s been a criteria for the companies we’ve acquired. So would you want to drill in into that just a little bit? Maybe give a couple of examples of companies you’ve acquired and how the mobile aspect has been important in these acquisitions?Adam Taggart: Sure. So the best example of this is a company called VertiSoft which was a German based company that we bought a little over two years ago now. For those of you old timers who are listening. Their technology provided the under pinning for the kind of the grandfather of the Yahoo! Go client. So that Yahoo! Go 1.0 that we announced over two years ago was completely built upon the solution that we’ve acquired. And we’ve taken the platform that we acquired through VertiSoft and what we’re announcing today is actually kind of the great, great grandchild of that which is now scaled across hundreds of different devices. And, you know, as time will tell if at least you guys started writing to this over the next couple of weeks. It’s very, very easy to write to. |
| 9:09 | Sean Ammirati: Cool, just to make sure I understand though, there’s acquisitions that you’ve done to build up a portfolio of things to help Yahoo! Mobile but the acquisitions at Read/Write Web, readers know about the most popular. So that would be like Flickr and Delicious and Upcoming. Did they have to have a mobile presence? Was that one of the criteria’s too?Adam Taggart: For those particular brands that you mentioned, I think at the point of acquisition for Yahoo!, I don’t think that had been a primary criteria of these companies. We certainly have been working extremely closely with those guys since we’ve really begun investing, I would say, almost over investing in the mobile space over the past couple of years. Starting about two years ago, some shared, some of your astute readers have probably noticed, Yahoo! really got religion around the mobile opportunity and began as a next step. |
| 10:06 | I’ve been there for almost seven years now. There’s been very few instances where I’ve seen a company line up so quickly and so intently behind a major strategic initiative. And what’s been absolutely great is as we’ve been figuring out how to mobilize Yahoo!’s contents over the past couple of years. As we’ve began work towards this week when we’re launching this new platform one of the chief challenges inside Yahoo! have been, again, just one of capacity where there’s only so much the internal mobile group at Yahoo! to do with its resources.And there’s still plenty more services that we want to bring mobile and that Delicious is a great example of that. We’ve got an excellent Flickr application but we just haven’t had the chance to get to Delicious yet on the mobile side. Now that we’ve launched this new, easy to create, easy to write solution, its now going to be very, very easy for those Yahoo! properties on their own to build their own mobile services. |
| 11:06 | So what we’re taking is just an awful lot of friction having a system here. You know, both for the ecosystem that we’ve been talking about. But even inside of Yahoo!, we’re benefiting from this ourselves.Sean Ammirati: That’s cool. So you’re eating your own dog food –
Adam Taggart: Exactly. Sean Ammirati: Okay. Cool. So I’m sure most at CES has been here at the booth for you. The lay up question you have to ask at CES is what’s the coolest thing you’ve seen that’s not done by Yahoo!? So is there anything big in the mobile space that you’re excited about? Maybe at a macro level from being at CES this week? Adam Taggart: Yeah. I’ve got to be real honest which is walking into a booth today was probably the most time I’ve spent outside the booth the past couple of days. Everyone keeps talking about the gigantic 150″ TV that’s out there. In terms of other mobile services, here specifically at CES, maybe you would actually sometimes based later in the day when I get an actual minute to walk for. |
| 12:05 | But I think what interests me most in general is from the traffic coming into the booth and talking to us, it really does seem that mobility and ubiquitous connectivity really is the dominant trends of what’s going on here at CES. And it’s exciting because having been here year over year over the past several years because the story really every year has been a “It’s coming” story. It’s just around the corner story and I think this is really the first year, which was really an “It’s here” story and it’s arrived story.And we’re seeing a lot of people particularly responding to our message that we’ve announced here kind of the other platform and making it a lot easier to bring these internet content and services to the mobile internet. That, you know, I think a year or two ago for a lot of people, they didn’t really, they were still kind of figuring out yet how to think about this space and how their services and the companies might play. |
| 13:03 | Now I think there’s a much clearer sense of how people want to connect with the users and what they can do with the mobile platform. And now that all of the friction is being removed for them there’s just this really infectious excitement on the players here of what more they can do. So there’s a real sense of what everyone is showing here. There’s a very much kind of a 1.0 feel the things here where people are excited and proud of how or what they’re showcasing. But they’re so excited about what they’re going to be able to show next year and the year thereafter. As I said it’s really infectious.Sean Ammirati: Very cool. So just a sort of related question and I realize it’s really in the platform so it’s okay if you don’t have any. But I’m curious, as you’ve opened this up. Any early partners that you would point to who have taken in and added to your list?
Adam Taggart: Yeah. So along with the announcement of the platform, we announced the first three non-Yahoo! applications to launch on it. So we announce mobile widgets from eBay, from MySpace and from MTV. And we’re excited about those for a couple of reasons. |
| 14:06 | One, it’s a real validation of what we’re talking about. So we’re not out there selling vaporware. This is actually something that, you know, a credible, legitimate, large Internet brands that are already events of. Two of the services themselves are great. So I don’t know if you’ve used the, you and your readers have used the current mobile solutions for those players. And while they were noble, you know, first attempts to bring their other internet services to mobile, just the richness and the feature quality of what they’ve just released on the new platform is really impressive and to the extent any of your readers are auction fanatics or big social networker’s with MySpace completely encourage you guys to go out there and get your hands on these applications.And frankly bang on them and then tell us what you think. But we think you’ll be really impressed. There’s a long list of folks that have knocked on our door in just the past couple of days now that they know this is open. And the best thing is this, you know, a lot of folks ask how they can get in our cue to have us develop these widgets for them and you’re going to have to remind them because that is something you can do yourselves in a matter of days now which is just a phenomenally positive message to be able to tell them. |
| 15:10 | So our intent and time will tell but we should know whether in just a matter of weeks, to a months or so how well mobile developers are adopting this. But we’ve got really high confidence and a lot of excitement that when you come look at the Yahoo! widget mobile gallery, in just a couple of weeks, you’re going to see that populated with a large selection of brands.And again what we’re really excited about is it’s going to be just as easy for the small player. You know, the Blog writers, the small and medium-sized publishers to be able create these as it is for the large companies. So you as the audience of one that we’re trying to optimize our services for, your phone then would completely match the unique idiosyncrasies of your life. This is going to have some of the head-in content you know that eBays and MySpaces. But it’s probably going to helpfully have a lot of the tail end content as well that makes your phone exactly what you want it to be. |
| 16:05 | Sean Ammirati: Very cool. What is the approval process like? So I understand you and they started to build it themselves but then typically in a lot of these open platforms there’s still some type of approval process. What’s that like for you guys?Adam Taggart: Sure. It’s just a pretty straightforward editorial process. It’s the same process that we used for our mobile, I’m sorry, our PC Desktop widget business. So some of your readers may remember we bought a company called Konfabulator getting close to that two years ago. So we already have a lot of experience in the widget space in terms of working with developers to help them build them to have a culture in place.
Just to make sure that a widget indeed delivers the value that it’s intended to and doesn’t have anything crazily objectionable in it. But it’s a fairly quick turn around time process. So you would simply create your widget. You would submit it through our online submission system. It’ll get reviewed by one of our editors. Again a fairly quick process and then you’ll be immediately up and running in our mobile gallery. |
| 17:04 | The other thing too that’s important for developers is that we already have a lot of expertise in how to make these widgets discoverable to users who are looking for them. So can imagine once you begin to get successful. When you have hundreds and then thousands of these widgets, how do you let a user come in and find the widgets that they want to find?So there’s a whole host of discovery techniques that we’ve really honed on the PC which aside of things that we’re immediately being able to leverage in the mobile widget side. You know, one of the things we actually didn’t talk about but I’ll just mention it for a moment because I’m sure some of your entrepreneurs are thinking about this, which is “It is great. But how do I actually make money off of these things?” All right, “How do I actually use these to kind of build my business?”
So we are, they’re not in today’s initial version of what we’ve launched. And just by the way for full disclosure, what we’re referring to, what we’ve launched today as a developer preview in terms of the mobile widgets. Well we have launched specifications on how to build these and directions on how to submit them. But over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be launching a number of more robust tools for developers to use in a full fledged SDK for developers to use. |
| 18:14 | So there’s more to come. It’s what I’m saying. But as that rolls out, we’ll be rolling out modernization tools as well so that you as a developer can choose how you want to monetize your widget. You can use the same display advertising solutions or sponsored search-advertising solutions that we’ve already integrated into our mobile offerings. So this would be completely at your discretion. And in certain cases, we may have partners who are developers who have already partnered with a third party ad serving solution.And we definitely recommend you go with the Yahoo! monetization tools and services because we truly believe we can provide the best experience. But if for whatever reasons you feel the need to use your existing third parties, we’re allowing those to plug into your widgets. So we realize that when we say we’re creating an open solution, open means open. |
| 19:03 | Sean Ammirati: Well we had Bradley Horowitz on Read/Write Talk a couple of months ago and you’ve talked in about the Yahoo! Hack event, sort of the in points of that. I’m curious. Did you see any of like mobile hack today that’s coming out or anything like that?Adam Taggart: Yeah, definitely. We intended to have one in mid-December. It just didn’t have the chance to get to a moment base in this around CES. I can pretty much guarantee you will be having one in Q1 and there’s a lot of excitement around Yahoo! for this. And there’s a lot of excitement around the Yahoo! mobile team to see what the rest of the company is going to be able to do. So, definitely.
Sean Ammirati: Very cool. Well, Adam, I really appreciate you joining me today and just any kind of closing thoughts that you’d want to share with the audience before we wrap up here? Adam Taggart: Sure. Well first off, if you’ve made it this far through the interview thanks for listening to the whole thing. But more importantly, as we mentioned earlier, our strategy is to provide the best mobile experience across as many devices as possible. And we have a premium offering, which we launched here at CES, Yahoo! Go 3.0. |
| 20:05 | We also, the other product launch was a brand new homepage for mobile Yahoo! If you can go out and try out all those, we think you’ll have a great experience and thank you. We’d just loved the feedback as well. For both of these products that are what we call early beta and when we’re into early beta process. Getting feedback from the market place is the absolute best way for us to get the GA fastest.And, you know, if you think you can use Yahoo! Go and get that on with your phone, if you’re phones are capable of running it which will increase the number of phones are we definitely recommend you get that one. But for those of you who don’t have those types of phones, we want to let you know that we are bringing a lot of the best to that experience to the browser and the mobile browser as well. So that your experience are going to continue to get better over the course of the year. So please go out and try it out and let us know what you think.
Sean Ammirati: Great. Thanks a lot Adam. Adam Taggart: Thank you, Sean. |