Yahoo! has announced a number of new mobile initiatives for the Asia Pacific region, including five new Yahoo! oneSearch partnerships with mobile operators in the region, including Mahanagar Telephon Nigam (MTNL) in India, Hong Kong CSL, Smart Communications and Digital Mobile Phlis, (SUN Cellular) in the Philippines, and Vibo Telecom in Taiwan. Yahoo! oneSearch will be adopted by each of the operators as the preferred search service on their mobile Internet sites. The deals bring the number of Yahoo! oneSearch partnerships in the Asia Pacific market to 23.
Yahoo! has also announced strategic mobile advertising partnerships with Idea Cellular in India and Maxis Communications in Malaysia. The two mobile operators plan to carry a variety of graphical advertisements, sold and served by Yahoo! The company has similar mobile display advertising syndication partnerships in place with operators including AT&T, T-Mobile International and Vodafone UK.
In addition, the company has announced localized versions of Yahoo! Go 3.0 for India, Australia and Southeast Asia, including a local language version for Indonesia, and an English version of Yahoo! oneSearch with voice that recognizes regional accents. Yahoo! oneSearch with voice first launched in the US in April to make it easier to initiate mobile searches. Yahoo! says the product has demonstrated the ability to increase the number of average searches per user by over 35% across the same mobile device models after discounting for speech accuracy rates.
The service is available now for select BlackBerry devices including the 8800 series, Curve, and Pearl, and is capable of understanding, disambiguating and learning accents localized for India and Singapore, allowing consumers to search for anything by speaking into their devices.
The new voice-enabled Yahoo! oneSearch can be downloaded from http://m.yahoo.com/voice from compatible mobile devices, or to learn more about the products, consumers in the region can visit http://in.mobile.yahoo.com or http://sg.mobile.yahoo.com on their PC. Over the coming months, says Yahoo! the product is expected to support additional devices and languages and become available in additional countries.
Finally, Yahoo! has announced the launch of new mobile widgets for the Asia Pacific region, including Yahoo! Cricket, Yahoo! Answers and Showtimes (Yahoo! India Movies), as well as an MTV Asia mobile widget featuring news updates and music charts. Yahoo! Mobile Widgets will be accessible through the new Yahoo! Go 3.0 and the Yahoo! mobile home page. (http://m.yahoo.com)
Consumers in Australia, India and Southeast Asia can download Yahoo! Go 3.0 on more than 270 mobile devices from major manufacturers worldwide and use it on most wireless networks by visiting http://m.yahoo.com on compatible devices.
Mobile widget developers can build their widgets in Blueprint, Yahoo!s recently launched XML-based language that allows developers to write their widget once and have their widgets run across millions of devices.
Yahoo! says the announcements further demonstrate its global momentum and unveil the next phase of the companys mobile strategy for the Asia Pacific region. It notes that todays Yahoo! oneSearch partnerships announcement brings the total number of mobile search deals signed by Yahoo! worldwide in the last 18 months to over 60.
60 signed Yahoo! oneSearch partner deals is a great milestone, putting us on our way to our goal of ultimately connecting the billions of mobile consumers around the globe with the best possible Internet experience, says Marco Boerries, Executive Vice President, Connected Life at Yahoo! Todays partnerships and product launches further Yahoo!s global momentum and serve to reinforce our strong position in the mobile industry. 
