What started as Jerry and Daves Guide to the World Wide Web in 1994 became the one-time leading email provider and search engine Yahoo – and in her conference call, CEO Marrisa Mayer clearly hoped to restore faith that Yahoo could return to some of its former glory.

Although they have had very patchy success with mobile, losing a succession of heads of mobile to gaming firms and agencies, Mayer listed it as one of the companys core components, along with search, mail, ads, news and the homepage, as well as the companys top priority moving forwards.

“Mobile is not only a daily habit, but a fundamental and massive platform shift,” she said. “A platform shift that we have to ride and participate in in order to be relevant. While weve made progress, Yahoo hasnt capitalised on the mobile opportunity. We havent effectively optimised our mobile websites, underinevsted in mobile front-end development and splintered our brands. We have more than 76 mobile applications across Android and iOS.

“Our top priority is a focused and coherent mobile strategy, accelerating efforts to build a strong technology talent-base for mobile, of engineers, project managers and developers. As the world becomes increasingly mobile, the way we all consume content has dramatically shifted.”

She noted that some of the top content consumed on mobile is weather, sports, stocks, videos and sharing photos – and added “does that sound like any particular company you know?”.

Mayers confident speech, her first as CEO, was followed by a 4.6 per cent rise in Yahoos stock price, to $16.49, during after-hours trading. Given that when Mobile Marketing first launched, seven years ago, Yahoo was making a lot of noise in the space, could Mayer help Yahoo finally come good on that promise?