Yahoo launches 'hyper-customised' onePlace

Smart bookmarks promise dynamic content

Ian Williams at CeBIT in Hanover, vnunet.com 05 Mar 2008

Yahoo has unveiled its onePlace platform at the CeBIT show in Hanover.

The company said that onePlace puts consumers' data into a single location and serves it up in a "personally relevant manner".

According to Yahoo, the offering uses an intelligence-driven system to organise content according to unique interests. The material, and the way it is consumed, is "hyper-customised" to specific preferences and tastes.

OnePlace uses bookmarks to link to pieces of content, such as news feeds, websites, videos or images. Information is then automatically updated and assigned categories and tags.

The system also places material into customised 'collections', making it more intuitive for consumers to find and combine content in the ways most useful to them, according to Yahoo.

For example, users planning a holiday to Paris could create a 'Paris' collection, and begin linking it to any information they think might be useful on the trip.

Such content could include flight updates, weather conditions, city guides, restaurant reviews, hotel reservations, maps and dictionaries, all of which is kept automatically updated.

Users can create categories to organise content according to commonly used subjects, such as celebrities, local businesses or sports.

A Pulse feature streams updates to relevant content, such as flight status changes or a restaurant review.

Marco Boerries, executive vice president of Connected Life at Yahoo, said: " Keeping track of all the things that interest me is really tough because my content is in so many different places.

"So what's the answer to that? How do I keep up? Simple, by putting all of this into one place."

Yahoo expects to launch onePlace and oneConnect in the second quarter of 2008.

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