Event
Summary
ATHENS, Greece (Reuters) - Greece's OTE Telecoms(OTEr.AT) (OTEyq.L) said
it signed a formal agreement with Yahoo! to provide its mobile phone and
Internet customers access to Yahoo! services.
Market
Impact
The agreement between the two companies became effective on August 1st
2000 and will provide Yahoo! Mobile services via WAP enabled phones to
OTE's clients. The offering is available only in English, which may prove
to be a major deterrent to a large percentage of OTE's clients. Initial
wireless services will include the typical industry set of features, e-mail,
stock quotes and news.
In
addition to the wireless agreement, Yahoo! Will also provide OTE's ISP,
OTEnet with a Yahoo! Branded component, which will be hosted on OTEnet's
home page.
User
Recommendations
While this announcement is not unique in and of itself, it does demonstrate
the global proliferation of WAP use. We do not expect the offering will
find much success with OTE's existing client base due to an international
language barrier of sorts. If OTE takes the time and resources, in cooperation
with Yahoo!, to provide either integrated translation software or an offering
in Greek we believe the offering will find success.