Panama News Warms Yahoo!

"What we offer is the most advertising products and a breadth that is unmatched because of the massive audience we have on Yahoo!," said Decker in an interview. Decker, who will ultimately head up the Yahoo! advertiser and publisher group in the wake of a high-profile management shakeup in December, says the rich data Yahoo! gathers on user behavior across its network can combine with the new Panama system to target ads in a uniquely sophisticated way.

Along these lines, the company also recently extended its push in the mobile space by unveiling a new service that allows users to launch quick searches from their mobile devices. While Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel said in the conference call that it's not clear about when it sees this service starting to impacting its bottom line, the company is betting that driving adoption will put it in a better position to use online data to serve up local and mobile ads.

Yahoo! is gunning for pole position in the rapidly emerging segment in the hope that it will find a way to make big profits later on. The big payoffs will come if the company is able to harness the insights into online user behavior and translate these for fast-growing mobile devices better than anyone else.