Yahoo on Tuesday tightened its focus on the mobile market with an announcement that it is offering an array of mobile news and search-related services designed for fans of the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball tournament.
The Sunnyvale, California-based Internet portal firm will offer mobile phone users a web site dedicated to the tournament, along with a search tool specially configured to relay basketball information, and a tournament widget.
This year's March Madness as the hoops tournament is called will be the first time Yahoo, which has been very aggressive in the mobile sphere, will offer specialized mobile resources for a popular sporting event.
The tournament has become easily the most successful live, annual broadcast event on the web, and Yahoo is hoping that the online success extends to the mobile sphere, particularly with the Beijing Olympics on the horizon.
"This is our first marquee event and the idea is to drive an audience that compels advertisers, and we've picked up Jaguar based on their interest in getting to this discrete audience," said Bruce Stewart, Yahoo's vice president and general manager of Connected Life Americas.
Car maker Jaguar North America will be the featured advertiser for Yahoo's mobile coverage of the 65-team tournament, which is expected to draw an attractive demographic of college-educated males.
Despite huge improvements in the quality of mobile phones and the growing reliability of mobile networks, Americans have not embraced the mobile web with the kind of enthusiasm demonstrated in both Asia and Europe.
But carriers and content providers continue to offer high-value and time-sensitive content such as news, sports, weather, and traffic information in the hope that they will find the right key to open up the mobile web market.
Still, sports with its long-proven popularity in the U.S., remains tantalizingly out of reach as a mobile market traffic phenomenon. But one observer thinks the missing element in the way mobile sports is done is interactivity.
"Yahoo's services are a first-generation way of getting users engaged in sports via mobile, but we think mobile sports blossoms when you get sports fans connected to each other via mobile," said Chris Bull, vice president of marketing for AirPlay, a San Francisco-based firm which hosts competitions such as fantasy sports tussles among mobile phone users.
Mobile users can visit Yahoo's March Madness website for the latest scores etc., or they can get continuous updates of news, scores, images, and scheduled games via alerts. Or they can use Yahoo's oneSearch for specialized basketball content.