Marco Boerries, executive vice president of Yahoo's Connected Life, said onePlace is an essential component of Yahoo's mobile products. "Yahoo onePlace is where users will be able to find what matters to them the most, no matter where their interests, passions and information come from," he said. "Yahoo onePlace will provide mobile users with a rich and dynamic content experience."

Hypercustomized Content

Yahoo aims to personalize the mobile Web. Its onePlace tool organizes content, keeps it current, and serves it according to consumer preferences. Yahoo is calling it "hypercustomized" to consumer tastes.

Yahoo thinks onePlace will be easy to adopt because it uses bookmarks to link to Internet content, including news feeds, Web sites, videos, images, e-mails and search queries. The tool's task is to keep that content updated -- be it the latest game scores or stock prices -- and assign categories and tags. Users can place the content into customized collections.

Yahoo offers the example of a user planning a holiday to Paris in June. The user could create a "Paris" collection and begin linking it to any useful information -- weather conditions, city guides, restaurant reviews, hotel reservations, walking maps, songs of Edith Piaf, English-French dictionaries, winery recommendations, etc. If the flight times change, onePlace automatically updates that information.

Yahoo expects to release onePlace in the second quarter.

Eliminating Mobile Pain Points

Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence, likened onePlace to MyYahoo adapted for a mobile setting. The concept is also similar to RSS feeds. While "favorites" have largely disappeared from users' desktops because people just search for what they need, the idea of favorites on a mobile device is important and powerful because, Sterling noted, it's painful to search for all these sites.

"If you can set up favorites and they are easy to access, then it becomes a very useful and 'sticky' application for the mobile user," Sterling explained. "Consumers would be loyal to this because it helps you organize all your mobile content. This will be very strategic for Yahoo if they can get into lots of different hands."

Of course, the ultimate goal is to drive advertising dollars. But the way in is to establish a relationship with the user. In an ultra-competitive environment, software makers need to create useful tools that motivate mobile users to download them and use them repeatedly. User loyalty will bring page views and searches that Yahoo could serve ads against.

"onePlace looks like a quite valuable tool," Sterling concluded. "The idea that you can page through important sources of information is valuable. It's trying to sort of be a front door to the mobile Internet."

Mike Kent also contributed to this article.