Yahoo on Flickr Mobile plans
Present at this morning’s X-Series launch from 3 was Yahoo, which is one of the initial partners for 3’s mobile broadband service. I had a quick chat with Geraldine Wilson, who’s vice president of Connected Life for Yahoo Europe.
At the start, X-Series won’t mean a big change to what Yahoo is actually offering to 3 users – it’s already offering its Yahoo Go application through the operator, giving users access to email, web search, instant messaging and their Yahoo Photos accounts. However, she says that the important thing about X-Series is that its flat-fee pricing will help popularise this kind of application, because users won’t be worrying about how much they’re spending on data charges while using it.
More excitingly, she said that proper mobile integration with Flickr is coming in January, presumably also via the Go application. Flickr has signed deals with handset manufacturers like Nokia already to help people upload pics from their phones, but with no data charges on something like X-Series, people will upload many more pics. Roll on January.
Oh, also Wilson said that the other advantage of something like X-Series is the possibilities it opens for mobile advertising – particularly richer ads involving pictures (and presumably video). Once people aren’t paying for data by the kilobyte, they’re less likely to get angry at effectively having to pay to download ads. That’s the theory, anyway.
