By Wendy Lee
Chip Beck couldn’t find anyone his age at Yahoo’s first-ever mobile development conference in San Francisco.
The 16-year-old app creator from Pennsylvania was eager to make some connections Thursday inside Nob Hill Masonic Center, where Yahoo was pitching its products to more than 1,000 developers. But like a high school dance, it was a little awkward. In fact, the whole event was a little awkward. A fire alarm cleared the building halfway through the day and forced people to stand on the sidewalk. And while Yahoo has expanded its mobile team in the past few years, adding some 500 employees and buying dozens of businesses, it still noticeably lags behind Google and Facebook.
When a stranger asked Chip if he created apps as a hobby, he replied, "I still live with my parents."
At the event Thursday, Yahoo released a set of tools to help developers monetize, market and analyze activity on their apps.
"Many of you are creating incredible experiences, and we want to be a part of it and support it," said CEO Marissa Mayer.
The programs allow developers to track deeper analytics, share data with partners, incorporate native and video ads, market their apps on Yahoo properties and include Yahoo search in their apps.
By launching these tools, Yahoo hopes to get a larger share of mobile advertising revenues, analysts said. Tech companies are eager to court mobile app developers as more people use apps to shop, chat with friends and do business on their smartphones.
But can Yahoo’s efforts make a dent? The company has a mere 4 percent of the U.S. mobile advertising market, compared with Facebook’s 17 percent and Google’s 35 percent, according to research firm eMarketer. The conference was one way that Yahoo hoped to get in front of app developers.
Mayer stressed that Yahoo is putting mobile first, and that its investmentsare paying off. Revenue from mobile, video, native and social advertising was more than $1.1 billion last year, about 24 percent of the company’s total sales. People spend 177 minutes on their smartphones every day in the U.S., and Yahoo has worked hard to make its mobile apps better, Mayer said.
"We’ve really taken the strength we’ve had at Yahoo and really thought about what it means to be mobile first," she added.
Mayer spoke in front of an audience of about 1,000 people. That audience was much smaller than the 2,500 people that attended Facebook’s developer conference last year and the huge crowds that waited in long lines for Google’s big developer event.
But Chip was impressed.
"The event here is grander than I expected," he said, marveling at the purple hued lighted walls.
Chip said he looked forward to using some of the new developer tools, especially one that allows him to see how people are using his apps. That data will help him come up with ideas on how he can improve them.
Chip traveled from Hermitage, Pa., with his parents after being accepted into Yahoo’s free conference. He says he’s always been interested in technology and programmed his first app, a calculator, in 2011. He didn’t know any app developers in Pennsylvania, so he learned what he could online.
Since then, Chip has created 17 apps, including some for small businesses. His first client was a funeral home that paid him $1,500 to create an app that lets people look up obituaries and order flowers.
To Chip, the chance to go to a free developer conference was too good to pass up. He had once applied for a scholarship to Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference and was rejected. He’s still a fan of its products, though, and sported an Apple logo jacket at the Yahoo event. He bought the jacket at Apple’s headquarters on a previous trip, but it’s so cold in Pennsylvania now that he can’t wear it there.
During lunch, Chip mingled with other conference-goers and looked forward to visiting Google’s Mountain View campus during his stay in the Bay Area. While he was excited to be so close to tech professionals, his friends at home have other interests.
"They are jealous more that I am in California than at a tech conference," Chip said.
———
©2015 the San Francisco Chronicle
