Portals

Australian cellco Telstra has turned to SurfKitchen's SurfKit Mobile Internet Platform to power its new TelstraOne Experience. The new Telstra portal gives users one-click access to all their favorite mobile services and apps, including widgets, Internet and native applications and Web links.

SurfKit integrates with the phone's idle screen to provide the easy access. With it, Telstra can "deliver a branded and highly intuitive user experience enabling customers to quickly and easily discover, launch and customize mobile services on the home screen of mass-market devices," the companies say.

With the SurfKit Launcher, TelstraOne Experience provides a customizable launch pad for whatever services the subscriber chooses. It also uses the SurfKit Storefront app, which streamlines the purchasing and installation of the mobile services, and SurfKit Widget Runtime, which provides a range of on-device widgets such as news and weather.

Mobile application and services outfit ROK Entertainment Group and WeFi, which operates an open, community-based global Wi-Fi network, have partnered to launch a co-branded Wi-Fi-powered mobile portal.

Dubbed WeROK, the portal gives users access to ROK's e-mail and cheap SMS services as well as its free streamed mobile TV and social network services through WeROK's global Wi-Fi network.

The WeROK app is a free download. At launch it works on all Wi-Fi-enabled Symbian S60 mobile phones and on PCs. The companies haven't yet divulged their plans for expansions to additional handsets.

Intouch Group has released iBrowz, a smartphone application that lets users receive all their favorite online content and applications on their phone through a single interface. iBrowz users can access news, weather, stock info, sports updates and the like along with Facebook, Yelp and other Web sites with the simple tap of an icon.

The company also unveiled iStation, a Web-based companion for iBrowz where users can browse and subscribe to the content feeds and application widgets to populate their iBrowz interface. iStation is also where users can manage the layout of their iBrowz home page. iBrowz content is automatically updated in the background at user-selected intervals, so it's always fresh.

iBrowz is also a boon for advertisers, with its advanced targeting and cached delivery, the company said.

Initially available for Windows Mobile smartphones, Intouch plans to introduce versions of iBrowz for the BlackBerry, Android and Symbian platforms in the near future.

Yahoo has officially released its Yahoo Mobile portal, both for the Web and as an iPhone app. Unveiled at Mobile World Congress, Yahoo Mobile for the Web works on more than 300 mobile device models in the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, India, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Yahoo Mobile for the iPhone is available for download through the iTunes App Store in the same countries. Other local versions will be released over the next few months.

The application includes mobile search and access to Web-based e-mail, social networks and Yahoo's IM, address book and calendar. It also gives users a single location for accessing their favorite Web sites, sports and news sites, RSS feeds, weather, stocks, horoscopes and a bunch of other stuff, just like when they personalize their MyYahoo page online.

Live mobile video streaming service Qik is crowing that its application will be featured on Nokia's Ovi Store, the recently announced marketplace where Nokia device owners can go for all the apps, videos, widgets and other content they want for their Nokia handsets.

Qik enables the live streaming of video from a handset, so consumers can share their mobile videos with friends in real-time. In addition to making the app available through the Ovi Store, Qik has added the ability for users to cross-post their Qik videos automatically to Nokia's Ovi Share service.

Ovi Share is Nokia's online service that lets users to share photos and videos from their computer or camera phone. The integration with Qik marks the first the first Share on Ovi application to offer easy cross-posting of live mobile videos.

Yahoo has taken the wraps off the new and improved Yahoo Mobile service. Due to be ready for general availability in Q2, Yahoo Mobile will take the form of an application, with a special version for the iPhone as well as apps for Nokia, RIM, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and Windows Mobile smartphones. Yahoo also plans to make it available via Web access as well.

Designed to be a consumer's mobile Web starting point, Yahoo Mobile has a slew of features, with the Web, iPhone and smartphone versions all boasting Yahoo oneSearch; Today, which features Yahoo editors' picks for the day's top stories; oneConnect, which provides access to e-mail, social networks, instant messenger and the Yahoo address book and calendar; Yahoo News and onePlace, which lets users access and manage all their favorite content from one place.

Additionally, the smartphone version will offer oneSearch with Voice, Maps, Opera Mini 4.2 and widgets.

The mobile Web version and iPhone apps are currently scheduled for late March availability; the smartphone client is expected in late May. However, folks interested in participating in the managed beta program can visit http://mobile.yahoo.com from their mobile phone for details.

Blyk, the free, ad-supported mobile network for the under-25 crowd, has hooked up with mobile marketing and content services provider Velti to launch a new content portal. Dubbed On Blyk, the messaging-based portal lets companies offering contents and services determine their own pricing and promotions.

Where most content services are based on browsing for content, On Blyk is testing the theory that since messaging is the dominant mobile activity for Blyk's target audience, that its subscribers will turn to messaging for their content discovery as well.

Companies such as Player X, Saffron Digital, Jumbuck and others have signed on to offer video, chat, wallpapers, games and ringtones on On Blyk.

The portal is currently open to all Blyk users in the UK.

The mobile world was waiting and Microsoft delivered at Mobile World Congress. It officially unveiled Windows Mobile 6.5 along with some new Windows phones, a photo-sharing service, a voice-search technology and, also as expected, a mobile app marketplace.

One of the biggest improvements in the new OS is a better touch-screen interface with easier scrolling and navigation. There's also an upgrade of IE Mobile that's supposed to "execute up to 48 percent more tasks than the majority of mobile browsers," Mobile Marketer reports.

The My Phone back-up and photo-sharing service is a free online portal where users can safely store videos, photos, texts and contacts through a password-protected account.

Microsoft Recite is the voice search designed to compete with similar offerings from Google and Yahoo.

Then there's the Windows Marketplace for Mobile, where users can browse and buy apps from their Windows Mobile phone or a PC with their Windows Live ID.

You can get a lot more details on the products and services Microsoft announced here.

In today's Will-It-Ever-End department, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes said the company is still working hard on a possible deal involving AOL, and hopes to come to some kind of agreement "fairly soon," according to MediaPost.

AOL has struggled in fourth place after Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft in the portal wars; the company never really found its footing as an online portal, after demand dropped drastically for its core dial-up Internet service.

The report said that with the full spinoff of Time Warner's cable unit on track to close by early next year, Bewkes emphasized that the firm would "return to its roots as a branded content company."

As previously reported, Yahoo on Wednesday began laying off employees, following up on an announcement to cut its workforce by at least 10 percent in an effort to turn the struggling company around, AFP reports.

Meanwhile, Ivory Investment Management, which owns a 1.5 percent stake in Yahoo, is pushing Yahoo's board to sell its Internet search business to Microsoft, a refrain we've heard before.

"This is a tough time for all of us," Yang wrote in an e-mail to employees. "The reductions we're making are very hard, but they are also very necessary as we focus on the long-term health of our business."

The report said that the economic downtown hit Yahoo especially hard, as advertisers began to scale back and the public turned its attention toward Google, Facebook, and MySpace. A deal between Yahoo and Microsoft still has potential to shake up the mobile space in many ways, depending on how it goes down—if it ever happens.