Yahoo To Buy Online Anywhere

Welcome Guest. | Log In| Register | Membership Benefits

June 02, 1999 (1:42 PM EDT)

By Malcolm Maclachlan,

Yahoo announced two deals Wednesday designed to move it onto other platforms, including cellular phones and handheld devices.

The Web portal will pay about $80 million in stock for Online Anywhere, a company that specializes in the delivery of Web content to non-PC devices. Yahoo will use the company to format its content onto a variety of platforms, including digital phones, pagers, PDAs, and even television. The deal will be accounted for as a pooling of interests.

This follows an April partnership with Online Anywhere to use its Author Once, View Anywhere service to ready Yahoo content for devices including WebTV, the NCI set-top box, and the Palm III. Yahoo for WebTV became available last month, with the other services to be rolled out in the next several week, according to Ellen Siminoff, vice president of business development at Yahoo.

Yahoo followed with an agreement with Sprint PCS, which will offer Yahoo content to its 3.35 million subscribers. Sprint PCS users will be able to access personalized Yahoo content and services through their phones. This will include news, weather, e-mail, calendar, and address book services. Sprint PCS My Yahoo is set to launch by the end of the year.

"If you have eyeballs, they want them," said analyst Rob Enderle, at Giga Information Group.

Yahoo has been extremely aggressive into rolling out new services, he said. In the case of small devices, Enderle added, it could take awhile to pay off. Such devices often catch on first in the Asia-Pacific region, he said, especially in space-conscious and gadget-hungry Japan.

Popular devices ranging from ultra-thin laptops to Tamagotchi virtual pets caught on the in United States several months to two years later. Such goods often first find their way here through online stores or auction, Enderle said. However, devices such as cell phones and PDAs require a support network to roll out new services.

Yahoo expects the market for such services in this country to expand rapidly, Siminoff said, and plans to have first-mover advantage. Numerous studies point to this, she said, including one from Forrester Research that says within two years, more than half of Web use will be from non-PC devices. In the near future, she said, people will personalize their Web portal services through a PC, but then access those tools and information through a variety of devices.