Sunnyvale, California — Internet pioneer, Yahoo Inc., on Tuesday unveiled three new products as the company continues to concentrate more on developing specific applications for the iPhone and other select smartphones like the BlackBerry for Yahoo Finance and Fantasy Football, in addition to a new iPhone Flickr application.
The most widely advertised application to be announced Tuesday is Flickr for Mobile. This application is only available for Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch. It is free from the iTunes App Store. Moreover, it enables users to upload, share, and tag photos and videos. Flickr already has a browser-based mobile app at M.flickr.com.
The official Flickr app for iPhone and iPod Touch boasts search, browse, and upload features. The Yahoo Finance for Mobile apps will be available for iPhone and iPod Touch users, as well as those with BlackBerry Bold, Tour, or 8900 series smartphones.
The free Yahoo Finance application enables users to track market trends or the activity of a certain company, read news stories, follow a personalized portfolio, get currency conversions, and watch streaming video from Tech Ticker. Yahoo already has a browser-based version of the application.
And, when you become bored and need a break from work, Yahoo released Yahoo Fantasy Football for Mobile to relax you from boredom. This application is available for the iPhone/iPod Touch and the BlackBerry Bold, Tour and 8900 series.
With this application, football fans can manage their teams from their phones, add and drop players, view match-ups and player stats, get live scoring and get news and expert advice already available on the PC.
These new applications, which are more importantly developed for the iPhone and a small number of BlackBerry devices, are part of the company’s latest strategy to address the mobile market. Earlier this year, Yahoo diverted its mobile strategy to focus more on developing separate and distinct applications instead of creating services that fell into an all-encompassing Yahoo application.
“Before we had a one-size-fits-all approach to the application market,” said Sandeep Gupta, senior director of mobile applications for Yahoo. “But the iPhone changed how consumers accessed applications. Now, they want to search for and download point applications. And we thought it was better for us to fit into this world.”
Both apps are available in the U.S. and Canada.
Yahoo’s major goal with the strategy shift is to induce Yahoo’s PC-based services to mobile phones. And in order to do this, Yahoo executives said they needed to develop and distribute applications like other developers, which meant adopting the iPhone model.
The new Flickr app is available in English, French and traditional Chinese for the U.S., Canada, UK, France, Hong Kong, and Singapore.