Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer said the company is working on technology that will personalise content from the web and feed it to people on their mobile devices.
Users' data will make it possible to create a so-called interest graph to show commonalities among people and create a personalised internet, Ms Mayer said in an on-stage interview with Bloomberg's Erik Schatzker at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
The data ought to be owned by the users, who should be able to move their information between platforms, she said.
Ms Mayer has invested in wireless technology as she attempts to win users and advertising revenue from Facebook and her former employer, Google. Since becoming CEO last July, she has updated Yahoo's Flickr application for photos, acquired mobile app startup Stamped and announced plans to hire engineers with expertise in smartphones and tablets.
"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," Ms Mayer said. "How do you pull all that together?"
Yahoo's answer will be "a feed of information that is ordered, the web is ordered for you and is also on your mobile phone."
Ms Mayer, Yahoo's fifth CEO in four years, aims to reverse three straight annual sales declines as web users flocked to Facebook and Google. Since she was hired in July, shares of the Sunnyvale, California-based company have climbed about 30 per cent.
Ms Mayer has made the recruitment and retention of talent a priority. She has filled out her management bench with chief operating officer Henrique de Castro and hief Financial Officer Ken Goldman, and sought to acquire small technology startups for their experienced engineers.
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