That headline, of course, is a tribute to Yahoo’s CEO, Carol Bartz, who was entirely unimpressed with Michael Arrington’s line of questioning thus:

Arrington: Is your pitch kind of BS though?

Bartz: Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997 — the iPod came out 4 years later. 3 years after that is the first time his market cap grew. It took 7 years. I’ve been here a few months. Give me a break. You are involved in a very tiny company.

Arrington: Very tiny.

Bartz: It probably takes you a long time just to convince yourself what to do. “So f*** off!”

Arrington: Are you a search company or not?

Bartz: Half of our revenue is from search. The fact that you can crawl the web is a commodity. We’re about search, but we’re not a search company. We do a lot of things.

I have to say I’m reasonably impressed that Bartz has the balls to use naughty words. This is actually what Nokia needs, in some degree — Nokia needs a spokesperson who will stand up, bang the table and tell Michael Arrington to f*** off. Well, actually, what I’d like to see is Nokia defending their achievements. Their ridiculous Finnish subservient ‘rise-above-it’ management culture does a brilliant job of stymying the efforts of some of their most talented individuals. Still. The company’s in the middle of a turn-around whose strategy I broadly agree with. Faster, quicker, better. That’s what I’d like to see. With some balls. Some real balls.

Speaking of which, I think Bartz did a very good job of defending Yahoo in that exchange. My issue is that I don’t think the company has delivered anything meaningful for a long, long time. I just paid another $25 to Flickr for the MIR premium account. But is Flickr really Yahoo? The only thing I ‘feel’ is truly Yahoo is their email system, which, as I’ve written before, is utterly useless. I’ve stuck 280,000 emails into my premium Yahoo account and just breaks every time I try and search it. Almost like a metaphor for the company as a whole, perhaps.

In terms of both companies, I’m not impressed at their strategic alliance. Yeah I do like the user account federation. But Yahoo IM? Meh. Indeed, the whole alliance doesn’t turn me on at all. I could take it or leave it.

Now Facebook… that’s be an interesting move. Account federation with Facebook so that whenever you switch on your new Nokia phone, it asks for your Facebook ID, that I’d get out of bed for. Every new Nokia now powered by your Facebook Address Book? The merging of Ovi and Facebook into one giant synchronised service? Yeah. That would set the cat amongst the pigeons. That would get the planet’s mobile marketplace in a tizzy quickly.

But Yahoo? Tired. Tired and thrice tired.

I also really enjoyed this piece on the subject by TelecomTV’s Martyn Warwick (“Yahoo! CEO curses her way through announcement of strategic alliance with Nokia“).

[Editorial point: As much as I'd like to include the word 'f***' without the stars (and I have done a few times before) I understand that it causes a lot of shenanigans for those reading via corporate firewalls.]

Global strategic alliance enables industry leaders to leverage strengths in e-mail, instant messaging, maps and navigation across PC and mobile devices

New York, NY, USA – Today, Yahoo! and Nokia announced a worldwide strategic alliance to extend the reach of their industry leading online services and offer people rich experiences that keep them connected to their world and the world around them.
Building on more than five years of collaboration, Nokia and Yahoo! ® will leverage each others’ strengths in e-mail, instant messaging and maps and navigation services, to provide consumers with access to world-class experiences on both PC and mobile devices.
As part of the alliance:

- Nokia will be the exclusive, global provider of Yahoo!’s maps and navigation services, integrating Ovi Maps across Yahoo! properties, branded as “powered by Ovi.”

- Yahoo! will become the exclusive, global provider of Nokia’s Ovi Mail and Ovi Chat services branded as “Ovi Mail / Ovi Chat powered by Yahoo!”

- Nokia and Yahoo! plan to work on ID federation between their services, beginning by making it easy for people to use their Ovi user IDs across select Yahoo! properties to easily access the online content and services they need.

“Delivering great user experiences — both online and on your mobile – is what this alliance is all about,” said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, CEO, Nokia. “We’re enabling millions of Yahoo! customers in key markets including North America to discover the unique capabilities that Ovi Maps brings.

Similarly, Yahoo!’s online expertise will bring exciting mail and messaging enhancements to millions of Ovi Mail customers across almost every country around the world, many of whom will have their first Internet experience on their mobile.”
“What a combination,” said Carol Bartz, CEO, Yahoo!. “We’re excited to expand the reach of our best-in-class Mail and Messenger services, bringing personalized experiences to more people across the mobile web, particularly in emerging markets where we are seeding the next generation of Yahoo! users. At the same time, we believe Nokia’s strength and continued investment in maps and navigation will greatly enhance our existing products, enabling us to focus on areas that are core to our business.”

Together, Yahoo! and Nokia will continue to deliver compelling Internet experiences that address the core needs of consumers, developers, operators and advertisers. The companies will utilize their respective global distribution advantages and brand recognition across consumer audiences.

Select, co-branded service offerings are expected to become available from the second half of 2010, with global availability expected in 2011.

Nokia is the world’s largest mobile device manufacturer, with hundreds of millions of devices sold each year and a leader in digital mapping, with continuing investment and innovation focused on developing comprehensive digital mapping and navigation services, now covering 77 countries in 46 languages. With more than 600 million users of Yahoo!-branded sites per month, Yahoo! is a global Internet powerhouse, a one-stop web destination enabling consumers to enjoy their online life anywhere and everywhere – all customized for their interests. As one of the leading Internet brands, Yahoo! is focused on growing its audience by providing seamless web experiences across PC and mobile devices.

Note to editors: Media materials, including a webcast replay, can be found at pressroom.yahoo.com and www.nokia.com/press.

The TechCrunch post gives a little more detail:

According to Kara Swisher’s sources, Yahoo will be announcing a deal with Nokia that will build Yahoo email, search, and other applications into their devices. At first glance, this is a very big deal. Nokia, after all, is still by far the largest mobile phone maker in the world.

Yahoo is tired, very very tired. Their email is a piece of shit — indeed I’ve had to stop using it because, well, I’ve had too much email. It’s completely unusable. This is despite paying the $25 or whatever it was for a premium account. Utter rubbish. (I made the mistake of using it as a backup for my main mail account. The system generates an error when I try and search 250,000 emails. Ridiculous.)

Yahoo almost got it with Yahoo Go, years ago — when they created a native application for Nokia devices that integrated all their services into a nicely designed app. Everything from photos to contacts to email. It really was a super building block. Then, of course, they canned the service, turning the next versions into a series of mobile web links.

Total bollocks.

A quick glance across the Yahoo Mobile page reveals a few interesting offers — Yahoo Mail on your Nokia, Yahoo’s iPhone app, Yahoo’s BlackBerry App and Flickr for iPhone. Not bad, not bad. Nothing that’s causing me to lean forward with interest or excitement though.

Yahoo and Nokia together is a highly unfortunate match. Indeed I’m even more skeptical of Nokia’s future than I was 2 weeks ago at the moment, especially after Android’s ridiculous gains recently.

I look forward to seeing what the two firms can jointly vomit out the door — but I most definitely am sitting here with arms crossed not looking impressed. I hope it’s not just a ‘all Nokias will now default to Yahoo Search’ announcement too.

Although Google makes the Android mobile operating system, the search giant’s chief competitor, Yahoo, will be the default provider on AT&T’s first Android-powered handset, due to be released March 7.

Great.

Talk about fragmentation on the Android platform.

Yes, you bought a ‘Google Phone’. But, no, the reason your search isn’t that good is because Yahoo is powering it. Sorry, I mean Bing. Yahoo doesn’t actually do search any more. While Bing does have some very good qualities — it’s search results aren’t quite there yet.

But what the hell are AT&T’s executives thinking?

Apparently there is a ‘long-standing relationship’ between AT&T and Yahoo for search partnerships. And this means that they’ve decided to screw about with the inner-workings of the device and really piss off consumers at the same time.

This is precisely why mobile operators need to be shot. In a nice way, you understand.

Some executive from AT&T and some executive from Yahoo have got together. They’ve both gone for very expensive martinis (on expenses) and discussed each others’ aims and objectives. They’ve nodded along with each other, they’ve got to know each other, they’ve — dare I say it — bonded with each other. After a few more martinis, the Yahoo guy confesses that they’re completely irrelevant ‘in mobil’ (it’s important to do the accent).

Nodding along, the AT&T guy, chest swelling, explains, “Well, you know Pierce, I can help…Yes, another round of martinis please…”

Pierce — the Yahoo Guy — sits back, with a slight frown, “How, Giles?”

“Well Pierce, we have eighty-five million subscribers…”

Giles takes a moment. He just loves flopping his subscriber number out on the table for the lads to look at.

Giles continues, “We have eighty-FIVE million subscribers, I’m sure we could put a bit of traffic your way…”

You just know it. Something like that happened, at some point, between Yahoo and AT&T.

They hatched a plan.

They thought it would be ‘super-fantastic’ to change the default search.

It’ll get folk chattering. It’ll show we’re with-it. It’ll let AT&T pretend to have a bit of relevance for 20 seconds during the initial announcement. It’ll breathe useless life into the decomposing carcass that is Yahoo’s ‘mobil’ strategy.

Not once has anyone thought about delivering the best possible user experience. No — that was traded away as soon as possible. That’s the thing with mobile operators. If there’s an opportunity to screw things up, to do the wrong thing (or the slightly wrong, annoying thing), they will. Especially if there’s a shite small amount of potential revenue in it.

Witness, for example, the carrier-deck b0llocks strategies that permeated the globe for much of the last half-decade.

Ridiculous.

Absolutely 100% ridiculous.

Would AT&T please get back into’s it box and fix their shitter-than-shit data network?

Would Yahoo please just get bought by somebody and put out of it’s misery?

I thank you.

I wonder if it’s the fact that she, “dodged questions about what happens next and asked for those outside the company to give it some “friggin’” breathing room.”

Further, she commented that, “For a great company and a great franchise” had been a mistake, and the company need to “get outward-looking and kick some butt”.

This sounds good. I’m hoping that Carol is someone who won’t take no for an answer and will kick the company into shape.

I hope Carol is a Google user.

Because that’s the only way Yahoo will get better. Whenever a bright spark tries to defend the bollocks that Yahoo has dribbled out to the planet recently, I point them to a post I made a while ago about Yahoo Mobile Search. Or Yahoo Local. Or something like that. So BAD was my experience that I really can’t be bothered to invest the time into finding the sodding post.

It went something like this. I fire up Yahoo Go on my phone. I type in ‘Cinema Times’ and hit search.

I do this with an open mind. A really open mind. You know, I want them to be successful. More than anything I want a decent result so I can find out what’s playing at my local cinema. I wasn’t arsing around. I was testing — but I wanted results.

Flucking piece of rubbish.

What did it come back with?

Times Cinema. Milwaukee.

I kid ye not.

Mil-flipping-waukee. In the United States.

It was, in a sense, accurate. The domain name of the Times Cinema is http://www.timescinema.com/.

At LEAST look up my sodding IP address. Come on. Spot that I’m using a Vdoafone UK data connection. I mean that’s HALF a clue right?

What are your mobile search developers smoking? It must be good stuff to allow that tripe out the door.

Where do I go?

Well I shut down the Yahoo Go rubbish and head straight to Google and get the cinema times on the first search.

Geez.

Yahoo Go used to be very, very smart. Terry Semel had it right when he stood up on stage and introduced the Yahoo Go app. Then some bright spark dumped the application and converted it to a link to Yahoo’s web properties. Removing the photo sync, the contacts integration, the push email — this was amazing stuff and very much ahead of its time.

I haven’t taken a look at Yahoo Go recently.

I simply can’t bear it.

Not until someone else can tell me that it’s decent. That they’ve thought about it. That I’m not going to be immediately disappointed.

Moving to online, I am a paying user of Yahoo Mail Premium. I set it up because I thought I should kick a bit of cash over to the failing giant. I also reckoned it would be a good idea to send a copy of all my email to my Yahoo Premium account. Just in case. I use Google Apps for my personal and MIR email — so it’s rock steady and 100% available — but, well… I thought it would be cool.

As a result I’ve got 203,380 emails in my inbox. No kidding — here’s a screenshot from this evening:

And that’s where it’s time to get super annoyed. I thought I’d try and organise it. You know, strip out all the newsletters that I don’t need. Strip out all the alerts and various emails that I need on a day-to-day basis but not as an archive. To try and reduce down that 200k email.

The first thing I did was try and organise messages by sender. Error 4:

Nothing flippin’ works.

Ok, I’ll try and do a search for The Times. I get their newsletter every morning. I should have at least 300 copies of them that I can happily delete, right?

I type ‘The Times’ into the search box:

I wait.

I wait.

There’s a little ‘loading’ icon whirring away in the corner whilst the system works out that it can’t be arsed and wasn’t made for any sort of professional use.

I recognise that 200,000 emails is certainly an unusual amount. But, you build your stuff scalable, right?

Fail again.

Rubbish.

So.

What do I do now?

Do I keep sending mail to this account and hope that Carol will sort this out?

Or recognise that it’s probably a lost cause…

What d’ya think? And have you used many of Yahoo’s mobile products recently?

I trust that she also brings a few hundred million dollars with her.

Geraldine previously headed up biz and marketing strategy for Yahoo’s mobile section (“Connected Life”). Every success Geraldine!

AT&T will offer access to Yahoo’s Onesearch web-based services to approximately 70 million of its total userbase through the provider’s mobile internet portal. The services will include website keyword search along with links to news stories, weather forecasts and flickr photos. 

According to Yahoo, its Onesearch services currently cater to almost 800 million mobile phone users, spread across 60 carriers in Britain, Europe, Latin America, Asia and the Pacific.

Google, on the other hand, is currently in talks with Verizon to power the Search for the second largest carrier in the US. 

Could this be the push Yahoo was looking for? Even if it is, Yahoo’s happy days won’t last too long. If Google starts powering Verizon searches and Verizon gets the regulatory nod to buy Alltel, it is all set to become the largest carrier in the USA.

Activists promote safe sex in India with cellphone ‘Condom, condom!’ ring tones

NEW DELHI – A cellphone ring tone that sings “Condom, condom!” has been launched to promote safe sex in India.

The a cappella ring tone features a professional singer chanting the word condom more than 50 times.

It’s a playful approach that public health activists hope will spark discussion and make condoms more socially acceptable in India, where condoms carry a strong social stigma but where AIDS is a growing problem.

Nearly 2.5 million people in India are infected with HIV and the disease is still largely taboo.

The activist BBC group, which is funded by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, hopes the condom ring tone can make people in India more comfortable with safe sex issues.

More than 270 million people use mobile phones in India and ring tones, especially those featuring hit Bollywood songs, are extremely popular.

“We’ve made a conscious effort to move the concept of the condom away from negative association, like HIV and sex work,” said Yvonne MacPherson, country director of BBC World Service Trust India.

“Condoms are actually health products and if you have a condom and you use it, you are seen to be smart and responsible.”

“A ring tone is a very public thing,” she said. “It’s a way to show you are a condom user and you don’t have any issues with it.”

The ring tone was launched Aug. 8 and has been downloaded 60,000 times, MacPherson said.

Interesting! But is it wrong that this instantly popped into my head? (substitute condom for mushroom, and I apologize to anyone who know instantly hates me

it’s a web platform, so users can access it over their PC as well as their mobile and developers can build applications on top of it – apparently over 55 have already been built during Fire Eagle’s beta phase (the developer site is here.)

Privacy issues have always dogged location based services, so Yahoo gets extra bonus points for building features into Fire Eagle that let users govern who gets to know where they are at any point in time. Extra bonus points for allowing people to be able to delete their info – too many web companies are holding on to data they shouldn’t be.

Google and Yahoo have just described the mobile internet market and stated their desire to go after it. According to the channel mag ARN the two companies want to go after 3 billion (that’s nine zeros) mobile phone users.

“The phone is three times the size of the market as the Web, so why not people turn on the phone first?” remarked Andy Rubin, Google’s director of mobile platforms.

Rubin said that since Google’s business comes mostly from advertisements, enabling Internet-like experience in mobile phones is very important to them. He said Google’s new mobile phone platform, Android, could be “the ultimate Internet-style-luminated mobile phone” slated to be launched later this year or early 2009.

I personally think he’s missed one point and that is the mobile internet users are usually the PC owners. If you’re not that fussed to have the internet at home, is it such an emergency to pay for it on the mobile?

That said, a recent report by eMarket predicted that the mobile advertising market, with a record spending of US$1.2 billion in 2006, would reach $16.2 billion in 2011. Is it any wonder the companies are after this.

More from ARN:

“Android is open-source platform for mobile phones. It allows developers to develop Internet-style applications on the phone,” he explained, adding that Google has partnered with eight telecommunication companies worldwide who are now building phones based on the Android platform.

Rubin said Google has funded US$10 million to challenge developers to develop applications for Android and there are now about 1700 developers in 75 countries that joined the contest — 20% submissions coming from Asia –which he described as a “pretty global effort and exciting to watch.”

In an exclusive press briefing in Singapore, Rubin presented an unnamed mobile phone that uses the Android platform, where it has Internet-style application features such as BreadCrumbz, PedNav, Fon11, Enkin, multiple weather applications, and various pocket PC games,among others.

Meanwhile, David Ko, managing director and vice president of Connected Life Yahoo! Asia Pacific, announced at the CommunicAsia event here in June that Yahoo!now treats mobile devices as the “starting point” in reaching more product consumers in the Internet compared with PC users.

“We’re reinventing the mobile Internet. It is our goal to target billions of consumers in the Internet,” Ko said, announcing Yahoo!’s new partnerships with Smart Communications Inc. and Sun Cellular, both in the Philippines; the Mahanager Telephon Nigam Limited (MTNL) in India, one2Free in Hong Kong, and Vibo Telecom Inc. in Taiwan.

Ko said the development has increased Yahoo!’s mobile search deals to over 60 in the past 18 months. He claimed that with Yahoo! oneSearch’s launch in the Philippines, it now has the potential to reach 95% of the country’s mobile phone users, more than online desktop users.

It’s no surprise that Google should dominate mobile search so completely: its algorithm is streets ahead of its competitors and consumers are just as likely to go to the brand name they recognise from the fixed internet world when they need a mobile search.

But Yahoo’s not resting on its laurels: it’s signed up five new operators to its search platform, where the carriers will provide Yahoo’s oneSearch as the default search to their customers. If Yahoo can get more of these sort of deals under its belt with bigger name operators or even handset manufacturers – the iPhone would be the Holy Grail here – it might be able to stage a bit of a comeback.

What a coup for the 4INFO team! I’ve been following them for years and met the two founders in San Francisco a while back. The Alley Insider has announced that they’ve struck a partnership with Yahoo. 4INFO have already swept up most of the mainstream media in the States and count them as partners so it already has a sizable mobile ad network of its own. Makes sense for Yahoo to outsource that part. I wonder, if Yahoo can get it’s act together (with this Microsoft business) whether they might try making a play for 4INFO at a later date.

Yahoo is about to try the only type of mobile advertising that has even close to caught on–text messages. The WSJ reports the company is set to announce a partnership with Silicon Valley startup 4INFO, which will provide technology for Yahoo (YHOO) to send content to mobile phones via text, advertising included.

Yahoo will be able to sell advertising on its text messages–such as news, horoscopes, sports scores and weather forecasts–or 4INFO will sell them via its own mobile ad network. The revenue is split 60-40 with the majority going to whoever made the sale.

Under the trial, the WSJ says, 4INFO will give Yahoo the tech it needs to publish content like news and horoscopes over SMS with a small ad included, with either Yahoo or 4INFO selling the ad space.

With operators now looking at embedding ads into games and trading them in return for mobile TV clips, it’s interesting to see search companies turning to the old school likes of SMS. While it’s not as flash as newer advertising types, it does have one major advantage – being opt-in – not to mention better click rates.

Yahoo is obviously rather fond of this technology – it’s also announced that it’s invested in Vlingo as part of a $20 million series B funding round for the company. Vlingo said it will put the money towards expansion and R&D.

Voice is, let’s face it, still the killer app for mobiles so it’s actually surprising there aren’t more people talking up voice-enabled search, especially given the push for mobility in emerging markets where literacy rates may be low. Does anyone know what Google’s up in this area?