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When Jerry Yang co-founded Yahoo Inc. 14 years ago, the company quickly became the biggest and coolest kid on the search engine block.

But over the past decade, other bigger kids have moved in and set up shop down the street - namely Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. - and since then the former Internet search leader has become greatly overshadowed as its larger and more visible competitors have elbowed their way into the spotlight.

Now as Mr. Yang steers Yahoo deeper into the waters of the mobile Internet, he believes his company has the software and services needed to differentiate itself from its rivals, even though the other big kids from Mountain View and Redmond are already fighting over the new and fertile turf as well.

In his first major speech since taking control of Yahoo last June, Mr. Yang announced the launch of a new upgraded mobile home page for cellphones, an updated version of its mobile portal Yahoo Go as well as new software tools to help outside developers design applications and widgets to work in conjunction with Yahoo's mobile offerings.

Yahoo also announced new partnerships with News Corp.'s MySpace, eBay Inc. and Viacom's MTV network, which will see those companies use Yahoo's development tools to create mobile applications users can access through Yahoo.

"I think it's time to get Yahoo yodelling again," Mr. Yang said during his address yesterday at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the world's largest technology and electronics trade show.

"We're ready and excited about what the next phase of the Internet has to offer," he said.

However, Yahoo has opted not to enter the mobile operating system market. Microsoft has already shipped millions of Windows Mobile-equipped devices while Google plans to unveil its own open source operating system later this year that will run on dozens of phone models. While users will be able to access Yahoo's home page from either of those operating systems, the trick will be convincing them to do so.

In an interview with The Globe and Mail, Steve Boom, head of Yahoo's mobile division, said the company expects the market for mobile operating systems to become increasingly commoditized as more and more players enter the market and that it isn't a priority for Yahoo.

Instead, Yahoo's strategy will be to create a user interface similar to traditional Internet portals that works well on any mobile device, but which isn't limited to a single OS or carrier, he said.

"Yahoo has made a big bet in mobile over the last few years," he said. "In the next several years we will have more Yahoo users on mobile devices around the world total than we do on the PC, and we have half a billion users on the PC, so that's a lofty goal."

Companies that generate revenues from online advertising like Yahoo, Google and Microsoft are eyeing the mobile Web with hungry eyes. Mobile phones outsell personal computers by a margin of 4-to-1, according to market research firm Gartner Inc., while the market for mobile advertising is expected to be worth in the neighbourhood of $16.2-billion (U.S.) by 2011, according to EMarketer Inc., a research firm in New York.

"At the end of the day, these things are designed to grow the size of the audience," Mr. Boom said. "When the audience grows, the advertising follows. There's a tremendous amount of advertisers in mobile right now, but it's still in its very early days."

Yahoo has faced criticism in the past for the way it has handled its core Web search and advertising businesses, which ultimately led to the shakeup at the executive level that landed Mr. Yang in the top post.

What concerns investors is that Yahoo moved a number of its top engineers away from developing mobile products to focus on rebuilding its flagging PC search business, said Jeffrey Lindsay, senior analyst for the Internet at Sandford C. Bernstein in New York.

"I think they may have lost a bit of momentum there by switching gears," he said.