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A walk down the Yellow Brick Road of Malaysia's Corridor of the future

by Jeff Ooi, Malaysia

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Yahoo! mobile phone search comes to Malaysia and six other Asian countries

May 15, 2007 11:13

News broke yesterday that Yahoo! will introduce OneSearch, a new version of its search engine, for mobile phones in seven Asian countries, including Malaysia.

Other countries covered by the service include high mobile data traffic markets in India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore and Vietnam.

OneSearch was first released in the US in March this year. Subsequently, a new version of the service was introduced earlier this month in Canada and five European countries.

However, the service for the Asian markets will only come in the English version, though Spanish and French options were made available for the European markets. Potential users of the Chinese, Japanese and Korean versions may have to wait a while longer.

One of the highlights of the service for the Asian markets is said to be customized local information such as weather forecasts and news, according to a statement attributed to Lee Ott, Yahoo director of product management.

Business-wise, OneSearch is positioned to allow the company to aggregate advertisers who want to reach out to mobile users, and those who surf the Web through mobile terminals.

According to early information, the service works on any mobile phone equipped with a browser and Web access. The service is free, but mobile service providers may charge a fee for Internet and data access.

Yahoo's latest offering comes hot on the heels of rivals Google and Microsoft, who have earlier announced plans to create mobile versions for products such as e-mail, online maps and search engines.

Both Yahoo and Google have publicly recognized that mobile-only users are the next battleground for business expansion in the near future.

A 2006 trend showed that mobile devices are outselling personal computers by a ratio of more than 4:1.

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About Jeff Ooi

Jeff Ooi is an Internet and e-Business consultant based in Kuala Lumpur who's spent the last four years blogging internationally on the tech scene, on anything and nothing. Which doesn't really explain why most of his own technology is about three years out of date. He doesn't even own a PDA after his Palm V crashed. He's on 3G, though... Lemak Lemang refers to coconut-flavored sticky rice stuffed in a bamboo container.