March 4, 2008 12:22 PM PST

Yahoo to launch mobile-bookmarking tool

Posted by Stefanie Olsen

Yahoo is on a mobile roll.

The Internet company on Tuesday unveiled a new bookmarking tool for cell phones that lets people keep track of favorite Web content--news feeds, search results, Web sites--from one place on their handheld. The technology, called Yahoo OnePlace, will be available in the second quarter of 2008, according to Yahoo.

The tool builds on other new mobile applications from Yahoo. Those include OneConnect, a tool to update social-networking messaging on the phone (announced in February), and OneSearch, which aggregates news, weather, financial data, photos, and Web links based on search queries.

Users will be able to create and access social bookmarks on their phones with OnePlace.

(Credit: Yahoo Inc.)

Yahoo has heavy competition in mobile. Earlier Tuesday at Germany's annual CeBit conference, Google demonstrated Google Gears, an open-source browser extension for mobile phones that lets developers create Web applications that can run offline. For now, Google Gears supports Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile 5 and 6 phones, but not Apple's iPhone or other smart phones running Opera browsers.

Last month, Opera also switched out Yahoo and made Google the default search engine for its Opera Mobile and Opera Mini Web browsers designed for handheld devices.

Still, Yahoo's aim is to become the default access point for mobile-phone users accessing the Web. The idea behind OnePlace is to let people bookmark any piece of Web content--news feeds, sites, videos, images, e-mails, search queries--and put that material into a topic category such as travel or "trip to Paris." That material will be automatically updated and accessible from the phone. People can sort their bookmarks by local relevance or popularity with friends; and they can organize the material in any way they like.

"Yahoo OnePlace is where users will be able to find what matters to them the most, no matter where their interests, passions and information come from," Marco Boerries, Yahoo's executive vice president of "connected life," said in a statement.