Mobile is the key to Yahoo’s future

Once on of the kings of the Internet, Yahoo has fallen far over the years. CEO Marissa Mayer has promised to turn things around for the company and many analysts are confident that she’ll be able to do so. One of the ways Mayer hopes to do this is by putting an intense amount of focus on the mobile market which is arguably the single most important market in the tech world. If these past few months are any indication, it seems as though Yahoo may actually have a chance. 

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is banking on mobile to turn the company around. Since she joined, the company has ramped up its mobile team from 50 to 500 people and refreshed a number of its apps—Weather, Sports, and Games—to rave reviews. But now the focus is on courting app developers to build on its platform. At its first mobile developer conference yesterday, Yahoo debuted a new suite of tools for building, distributing, and making money from apps. Essentially, the company has set up an app development pipeline, and what it needs now are more apps. “If we think we can help developers make apps better, everyone wins,” Mayer said at the conference. Key to luring developers over is Flurry, an analytics startup that Yahoo picked up last July for a reported $300 million. Undoubtedly the star of yesterday’s show, Flurry is ubiquitous in the mobile world, with a view into roughly seven to 10 apps on the average smartphone. (Flurry’s software tells developers things like how many people are using their apps and what they’re doing.) Overall, it’s collecting data on 630,000 apps, reaching 1.6 billion devices globally.