Marissa Mayer: Yahoo!’s future lies in personalised content and mobile

Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer is spilling some information about how she hopes to turn embattled internet giant around, reports Bloomberg. It seems that, just like company COO Henrique de Castro, said earlier this week, it is all about personalisation and content.

Mayer wants Yahoo! to compete in the mobile space through strategic partnerships. “I think that it’s really important,” Mayer said of mobile. “If you look at what’s happening in terms of the shift to mobile, the number of mobile phones and smartphones in the world has tripled in five years. Tablet sales will outsell laptops this coming year, if predictions hold true.”

Speaking at the World Economic Forum, the CEO said that the future of the company will see it use individual’s data to create interest graphs that show commonalities which leads to the creation a personalised web. She reckons that this data should be owned by the users and that they should be able to move their information across platforms.

“With the web becoming so vast, there’s so much content and there’s so much social context, and now with mobile, there’s so much location context and activity context,” Mayer said. “How do you pull all that together?” In Yahoo’s eyes through “a feed of information that is ordered, the web is ordered for you and is also on your mobile phone.”

Since joining the company late last year, Mayer has revamped Flickr, acquired mobile app startup Stamped and set a course to hire engineers with expertise in smartphones and tablets.

“Yahoo has always been a very friendly company. Our focus, in addition to technology, but also on media, means there is an opportunity for strong partnerships. That is what we will be focused on. We work with Apple and Google in terms of the operating system,” she’s quoted in TechCrunch as saying. “In terms of social network, we have a strong partnership with Facebook. We’re able to work with some of these players that have a lot of strength in order to bolster our user experience that we offer on the Yahoo site.”

Mayer has her work cut out for her has the fifth CEO in four years in a company that has seen three straight annual sales declines.