SAN FRANCISCO -- Yahoo's purple reign continues.

Visitors to the level-2 show floor at the CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment 2008 conference couldn't miss the online giant's huge enclosure: a mix of purple signage, electric green carpeting and red-with-excitement employees, customers and prospects. It was all so dot-com heyday 1999.

"The booth as a medium has been a very deliberate investment for us," said Adam Taggart, director of product marketing at Sunnyvale, CA-based Yahoo Mobile.

The football-themed booth -- enclosure is a better, actually -- touted Yahoo Mobile oneSearch, Yahoo oneConnect and mobile advertising offerings.

Also prominently pitched was Blueprint, Yahoo's new XML-based platform that will let developers create smart mobile applications.

But that is pretty heady stuff, even for the battle-hardened wireless types who traipse conference after conference in search of client and cocktail.

After all, mobile marketing in terms of market spend is nowhere near what the technology side of wireless brings in.

"Talking about a platform is like using dental floss -- people know it's important, but it's just not a sexy product," Mr. Taggart said.

Hence the football theme. Hence the two NFL 49ers signing autographs on jerseys and footballs. Hence the banner signage saying, "Score big".

Hence the margaritas at the Goal Bar within the Yahoo Mobile enclosure. The lines were long and the smiles guilty.

"Being successful in mobile is not just about a great product," Mr. Taggart said.

Well, it at least helps to have a relevant product.

The football theme wasn't entirely out of place for Yahoo Mobile. The Yahoo division recently launched its Fantasy Football application, extending the offering from online.

A key charm of that application is that the mobile updates dovetail perfectly well with watching the game live on television.

"It becomes extremely interesting while you're watching a football game," Mr. Taggart said. "That's why [Fantasy Football] lends itself to mobile.

"It's a great way for us to engage people on a less sexy subject," he said.

Indeed, the subject is anything but.

Even while mobile marketing is on the upswing and attracting the same attention that the Internet did in the late 1990s, its ecosystem's disparate components is mindboggling.

As Mr. Taggart explained, creating mobile services is a lot tougher than it needs to be. As things stand, mobile marketing needs specialized talent -- not easy for a young industry.

And then there's fragmentation -- different platforms and operating systems such as Java and Symbian and Windows Mobile and the iPhone and Android and what have you.

Add to that the plentiful browsers, 400-odd mobile devices, six wireless carrier networks with their own standards and incompatible systems.

Blueprint is meant to make life easier for the mobile developer. Hence the major push yesterday through a shout-out from Yahoo keynote speaker Marco Boerries to a press conference and several interviews with major media outlets.

A whole armada of Yahoo executives and public relations executives from within and outside -- its Hill & Knowlton PR shop, hello Whitney Biltz -- were at hand, offering perhaps the best handholding in the entire three-day show.

Yahoo spokesman Zealous Wiley would have loved to share the number of Yahoo executives deputed to do booth duty. But you know corporate policy. Mr. Wiley is unfailingly polite, which is another customer-friendly culture differentiator for Yahoo from other competitors.

There was little wiggle room between the tables boasting display stations and the most number of mobile phones seen outside of a manufacturer's booth. People everywhere.

And if that wasn't enough, an hour or so before day's end, out came the plastic equivalent of the velvet rope alongside the booth. Yes, the two 49ers were going to autograph Yahoo Mobile footballs. "My kids would love to get your autograph!" Yeah, your kids â?¦

No doubt, this enclosure took its cues from the Yahoo booth for its online products at shows such as ad:tech.

Credit for this display goes to Lynn Arno, the specialist behind Yahoo's trade show efforts.

"We try to keep the concept fresh at every trade show," Mr. Taggart said.

While pitching is a key duty of every Yahoo executive manning the tables, listening to concerns is equally de rigueur.

For his part, Mr. Taggart identified a couple of areas that concerned booth visitors. Take the first, for example.

"'I see all these products. What is Yahoo's mobile strategy? What stakes are you putting in the ground?'" Mr. Taggart pointed out as a typical reaction to the enclosure.

"And I think that's a challenge," he said. "We have so much going on and people think it's a big engine that spits these things out. This [booth] gives us a chance to say, 'There's this umbrella strategy this is all nesting under.'"

Concern No. 2 is simple: What are the biggest forces you see driving the industry?

In other words, a different way of repeating that tired old chant: The mobile Internet has always been two years away, so when was it going to become a mass phenomenon?

"That's ended," Mr. Taggart said, repeating his line to others. "It's one of the seminal moments in time in something what was a specialized niche to become a global phenomenon."

Mr. Taggart credited Apple's iPhone and even mentioned rival Google's Android mobile platform as among the many drivers of "an exponential acceleration of innovation as well as an exponential adoption of the mobile Internet by the mass market.

"What can we do as Yahoo to serve as a catalyst in that phenomenon?" he said.

The vast booth, the army of energetic executives, the props, the press, the football heavies, the margaritas -- it all ties up neatly with Yahoo Mobile's stated vision of enabling the mobile ecosystem.

But.

"The ecosystem," Mr. Taggart said, "is still realizing it's the ecosystem."