Yahoo! has launched Blueprint a mobile content devleopment platform in India to enable mobile web development. Blueprint is a free software package to brands and content owners, which, once installed on the computer, will help them develop the mobile sites or applications and also help them to host these on the mobile network.
Yahoo has been has pinned a lot of hope in the growth of the Indian mobile niche and have invested heavily in partnerships and mobile related services in the past in India. This move seems to take the game directly to content builders and developers to make it easy for them to publish in the mobile medium. Consider it blogger sort of service on the web, just that the platform is more capable to publish more than just blogs.
For Yahoo this opens up an avenue to build revenues as publishers using this platform are likely to use their ad network to monetize their sites.
Vishal Maheshwari, senior director, connected life, Yahoo! India, says, “The content owner can decide to do the ad sales of the mobile content on his own or rope in our mobile ad network to get advertisers for it. For instance, we are responsible for the ad sales of the mobile site of Idea Cellular.” If a publisher uses the Yahoo mobile ad network, then he has to share the revenue earned through the ads served by the mobile ad network with Yahoo.
Yahoo has been developing and fine tuning the Blueprint platform first used on Yahoo’s mobile application Yahoo! Go since long. What started as platform to develop widgets for Yahoo! Go can now be used by developers to build standalone applications for Java, Windows Mobile and Symbian devices, besides create mobile web sites accessible via virtually any HTML or xHTML mobile browser. Though the platform currently targets site builders for GPRS and WAP access it is also capable of helping build iPhone apps as well.
If using Blueprint is a cakewalk and can deliver good results (I am not aware of how exactly it functions) Yahoo can have winner in its hands. And this is not just because of the obvious reason of having a platform that works but it will actually help Yahoo reach out to the mobile mass in more direct manner. I don’t know of any other mobile development platform that’s available and if Yahoo enjoys a monopoly in that regards it can quickly get adopted by a lot of publishers. For one it will surely be considered more reliable and easier than using any other publishing tool given its proven track abroad.
Till then we wait for what Yahoo will say about Blueprint’s adoption and success in the coming months. If you are a mobile publisher or are keen to be one, maybe you can read the Opera Report on content consumption trends on mobile to begin with.
