Yahoo! hits the road

Yahoo! wants to get off your PC and into your palm and your living room. As part of the effort, last week the company signed an agreement with a Web formatting company that will take it down the same multidevice path as America Online and Microsoft's MSN.

Yahoo! Everywhere, a program to migrate its services and content onto hand-held devices and Internet TV appliances, will be developed by Online Anywhere, a start-up company with a patented technology for converting HTML content into forms suitable for display on these devices.

"This is important to us because it's an extension of Yahoo!'s Online Everywhere strategy," said Ellen Siminoff, vice president of business development and strategic planning for Yahoo!. "It's a stake in the ground announcing how significant that strategy is for us."

Online Anywhere's main weapon is an extensible markup language technology called "Author Once, View Anywhere" that will format Yahoo!'s Web content and personalized services for non-PC devices. Users will be able to access all Yahoo! services.

The first target is Internet TV appliances such as Microsoft's WebTV and Network Computer Inc.'s set-top software. Last month, Yahoo! signed a deal to put its branded e-mail, calendar and personalized content such as stock quotes and sports scores onto PageNet pagers. A previous deal also gave 3Com Palm Pilot users access to the company's People Search function and other features. "You'll continue to see us evolve our strategy on all personal data assistants running Windows CE, as well as other PDAs and other wireless devices," Siminoff said.

"All studies say these devices are going to be a significant computing force going forward," said Mohan Vishwanath, CEO and co-founder of Online Anywhere. "That's fine, but this market will grow to its potential only if there's content for it. If I'm using e*Trade on my PC and my carrier only offers me Charles Schwab on my wireless phone, I won't be interested because I'll have to transfer my account, my credit card information-change my whole trading philosophy. We have to let people get the data they want on any of these devices, and that means getting the content providers up and running with minimum pain."

Online Anywhere does that with FlashMap, a content reformatting engine that takes data written in HTML or other protocols and changes it into formats for non-PC devices. Formatting rules can be defined by Online Anywhere or by the content providers, giving them control over the look and feel of their product.

"This is very exciting," said Laurie Falconer, an analyst at TeleChoice. "It's especially important because of the access it gives Yahoo! to the wireless broadband market."

Yahoo! rivals America Online and Microsoft have already announced plans to migrate their branded content beyond the PC.