Marissa Mayer Declares Yahoo! A "Mobile First" Company

Just like everyone else.

Marissa Mayer took the stage at the Nob Hill Masonic Center in San Francisco at Yahoo's inaugral Mobile Developer's Conference to assert the company's ongoing dedication to mobile development.

"Mobile went from a hobby, to becoming a core part of our business," she said, later noting that the gains Yahoo has made in mobile are what she is most proud of in her tenure as CEO.

She presented statistics being touted everywhere that support the foregone conclusion that mobile is the next online frontier: 88% of time spent on smartphones is spent in apps as of November 2014 (up 80% last April), and the average smartphone user spends 177 minutes per day on their smartphone. Therefore, Yahoo is going to continue to invest in mobile applications.

At the basis of that commitment is Yahoo's partnership with Flurry, something Mayer talked about at length. Flurry is a mobile development and analytics company Yahoo acquired last year, and the addition that Mayer credits with Yahoo's recent (and, implied, future) gains in the mobile marketplace. "We've learned so much from them," Mayer said. She went on to say that the Flurry platform currently includes 200,000 people, who have built 630,000 apps used on 1.6 billion devices. This combined for 2.2 billion hours spent in Flurry-built apps in January of this year alone.

Mayer also announced the release of a Mobile Developer Suite, which was created with Flurry. The suite is intended to give new tools to mobile app developers by giving them access to anaytics, marketing, integration with Yahoo search, and monetization opportunities. According to Mayer, the main tenets of Yahoo's strategy moving forward will incorporate outside development—the purpose of a Mobile Developers Conference—and native advertising to monetize it. "We want to take your great apps," Mayer said to the 1,000-plus attendees, "and turn them into great businesses."

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