This week’s roundup is short and sweet, so you can get a head start on standing in line for that iPhone.

• My world, My Yahoo!: Spice up your My Yahoo! (beta) with some foreign flavors. With our new international content category, you can browse by region and country to add favorite content from around the world (some in languages other than English). First log in, then click “Personalize this page,” “Add Modules,” and “International,” and — voilà! — 16 geographic categories to choose from. If you’re not using the beta, what are you waiting for? Upgrade now.
• When words are not enough: Whatever sentiments you want to express today, submit a photo of it to the Yahoo! Messenger Emoticontest for your chance to bring a new emoticon to life. We’re looking for brand spanking new, so make sure to check our list of existing and hidden smileys before you click. And don’t forget to vote for your fave mug here. If you’ve still got energy left, give a hoot and holler for 25 years of the emoticon. With feeling, people!

Subscribe to the RSS feed (or add it to My Yahoo!) to get this Product Pulse every week.

I haven’t admitted before that one of the reasons I came to work at Yahoo! Personals last year is because I’m an online dater. But it’s true. I am and, as the developers like to say, I eat my own dog food.

So I’m thrilled, both as the product lead for these efforts and as an online dater, by Yahoo! Personals’ release of a set of great new photos features. The photos upgrade that’s now live on our service offers daters — those searching for a date and those creating a profile — great ease of use. The features support users’ discovery and self-expression while being fun and kind of entertaining.

The product marketing story is that Yahoo! Personals users can now add up to 10 photos to their profiles (up from 5 previously), upload photos from multiple file formats (it’s been only JPEG since our initial launch in 2003), and add captions of unlimited length. In addition, all our captions are completely searchable, enabling photo captioning to feed right into search and keyword search as a discovery tool.

These features are incredibly important to dating — our research shows that a photo increases daters’ success by more than 8x. With these new features, Yahoo! Personals offers customers more photo capabilities than any other player in our space. And all captions and photos are reviewed by customer care agents before they go live — in keeping with the safety and security commitment on-line daters expect and demand.

What the online daters who use the service can’t see is that the new features sit on a platform upgrade that’s been in the works for more than a year. We couldn’t have scaled to the ability to accept up to 100,000 new profiles per week (and with 10 times the photos, plus the new elements of captions, that’s a lot of scale) without a new Oracle back end for search, new servers, and a blazing efficient datamap. With this new infrastructure powering search, photos, and the query requests, we can create a new front end experience that takes advantage of Ajax, JSON and PHP to create a Web 2.0-informed environment.

From an online dater’s perspective (that dog food thing again), the new photos features gives me a chance to annotate and label the pictures I put up (as in “that cute child in the photo isn’t mine—he’s my nephew”) and to use our newly enhanced keyword search to find people who label their photos with things that interest me — like comments about that trip to Burning Man or a wine tasting weekend in Paso Robles. I know my dating friends are going to like these features — and we’re going to have a much more vibrant, interesting service because of them.

Of course, one of the things that has me most jazzed is that this is just one in a series of feature releases we have planned for 2007. My team and I are looking forward to releasing all the expressive, fun-to-use features and services we’ve planned for the rest of the year — and making sure our profile and search features have the authenticity, resonance, and ease-of-use online daters crave.

We’ve pulled together a 90-second home-grown video (oh-so-very chic!) to give you a quick glimpse into the lives of real people using the site and a better understanding of how this all works.

Susan Mernit
Senior Director, Product, Yahoo! Personals

Photo from josh_goodman

It’s difficult to travel through the state of Nebraska without spotting the phrase “Go Big Red” somewhere along the way; but today, “Go Big Green” seems much more appropriate because Hastings, Nebraska, has gone green in a major way!

As noted on this very blog yesterday, Hastings beat out hundreds of other cities to earn the title of the “Greenest City in America” per Yahoo!’s “Be a Better Planet” promotion.

If you haven’t heard of Hastings, it is located right in the middle of the United States, is the birthplace of Kool-Aid, and also just happens to be home to every relative I have going back several generations. Initially, I was shocked to hear (overhear in the hallway actually) that Hastings was going to be victorious. But really there is nothing surprising about their big win at all. This is exactly the kind of community making exactly the kind of effort that Yahoo! hoped for when issuing our “Greenest City in America” challenge. Not to mention that people who live close to the earth may just care the most about it.

Hastings’ charge was led by the unflappable Mayor Matt Rossen and his staff. They saw an opportunity to highlight and extend an effort Hastings was already making and they aggressively set out to engage the entire community. They got the word out in a major way and via all available means: emailing the local businesses (who in turn encouraged their entire workforces to participate), leveraging local media, making numerous phone calls, even going door-to-door. With so much effort going into the “Greenest City” challenge, you might think Mayor Rossen has a lot of time on his hands. He doesn’t. For his service as mayor he receives $9,600 a year, so mayor is just one of two jobs he holds in this town.

Another Hastings resident who made time for the challenge was Jane Staley, who despite coming off a series of difficult surgeries, managed to find the strength to answer twenty-nine environmental questions on Yahoo! Answers. Jane was (and is) motivated by her desire to ensure we leave a world where “our grandkids and their grandkids can see rainforests and polar bears in their natural environments.”

Jane was one of over 2,000 Hastings residents who joined us Monday night for the “Greenest City” celebration (those 2,000 celebrators comprise nearly 10% of the entire Hastings population). It was a night of music, food (served on corn-based biodegradable plates), dignitaries, and the afore mentioned Kool-Aid (green for the occasion). It was also a night where a small team of Yahoos learned first-hand just how much this distinction meant to the town. From the marquees celebrating the victory all over town to the keys to the city we were honored to receive, it was clear this town couldn’t be prouder or more appreciative of the “Greenest City” title.

Chuck Conrad, Hastings resident and loyal Yahoo! user for 10 years, told me he had a good feeling that Hastings might win and noted that it was the topic of conversation the past few weeks. As for what this means to Hastings, he said, “We were ‘fly-over’ country before. We knew what we had here, but now hopefully other people know now, too.”

Here’s what we know Chuck: Hastings is officially the “Greenest City in America” and as such, will be receiving a quarter of a million dollars to continue greening their city. (Yeah, we initially offered up hybrid taxis but there’s not much need for taxis in this town).

To everybody in Hastings and all of the Yahoo! users who participated in the challenge, we thank you and we share your passion for protecting our planet.

Stay green!

Heidi Burgett
Yahoo! Evangelist

Apologies to anyone who was hoping to listen to free LAUNCHcast today. We’re shutting down the Internet’s #1 radio service for the day to draw attention to the outrageous rates recently set by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, D.C.

We’re doing so in alongside thousands of webcasters, including Pandora, MTV, Real/Rhapsody, WXPN.com, KCRW.com, and many many others. (For a more complete list, check Kurt Hanson’s site, RAIN). AOL and Clear Channel stand out as the only two online broadcasters too corporate to show their solidarity (sorry, Lisa :) ). Hopefully you’ll be seeing lots about today’s protest in the press and, most importantly, I hope you’ll let your representatives in Washington know how you feel. Please visit the SaveNetRadio.org site where they make this easy for you. We need your help between now and July 15th when the first payments are due under the new royalty rates.

The situation webcasters are in is simple: the new royalty rates are higher than the revenues anyone can hope to make from related advertising. In other words, we all lose money on Internet radio starting July 15th. Yahoo! has no intention of operating LAUNCHcast radio as a loss-leader. This senseless rate hike needs to be changed, or our business will have to. And unfortunately the way we’d have to change our business would end up curtailing the great diversity that makes Internet radio uniquely compelling.

I think we’d all be terribly sad to see Internet radio start to sound more like terrestrial radio with its limited number of stations playing very limited playlists. The irony that the new rates force webcasters to either go out of business or sound more like terrestrial radio, which pays no similar royalties, is rich.

Here are a few myths which the industry needs to get its head around:

Myth: Yahoo! (and other big Webcasters) can “afford” these rates. Fact: LAUNCHcast loses money under these rates. Yahoo! has no appetite to run radio as a loss-leader.

Myth: All Internet radio should be for-pay subscription.
Fact: Less than 3% of our radio listeners are subscribers. Subscription is a feature for users who would prefer no interruptions, not an interesting business for anyone.

Myth: Radio drives tons of users into Yahoo! and therefore Yahoo! will operate radio at a deficit.
Fact: Not only is this a terrible way to structure an Internet business ecosystem so that it grows, it’s just not true. We’re fortunate to be a part of Yahoo!, the most visited network on the Internet, and the traffic the network drives to us is what makes us so popular. Not vice versa.

I’m sure you’re wondering how we ended up in this situation. How is it that a board set up by Congress would ask a growing business to pay more than 100% of its revenues in royalties? We’re all asking ourselves that question and, to be honest, still scratching our heads a bit. For a rundown of the chain of events that put us where we are, check out my slightly longer post at the Yahoo! Music Blog.

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting with the folks that run Sound Exchange, the organization that represents the copyright holders and administers the payments from webcasters. They’re good people, by all accounts, and I can only imagine that they believe in the position they’ve staked out in the press, that the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) saw the details of our business and chose a rate that we could afford.

If only. Unfortunately the CRB made a mistake, handed Sound Exchange a loaded gun and gave them the option to shoot Internet radio dead. How the CRB came from the testimony presented to this outcome is a complete mystery to everyone involved. I’m guessing Sound Exchange is nearly as puzzled as we are at this point.

I’ve also had the pleasure of meeting with our representatives in Congress and understanding their position. Congress doesn’t like to set rates, and I think we’d all agree that we’d prefer they didn’t micro-muck with the economy at this level. Instead, they set up a process and a standard, we all went through the process, and they’d like to think the outcome served the needs of the people. Our continued protest just sounds like “wah! the rates are too high! wah!”, which they’re sick of hearing and I don’t blame them. So we’ve been working hard to show them that the conversation here isn’t just “hey, we aren’t making as much money as we used to” but really “um, we are losing a lot of money on Internet radio, and we’re going to have to change our offering in such a way that it’s going to lose a lot of its great diversity of programming at the very least or that it’ll go away entirely at the very worst.” But it’s a tough slog and has taken a lot of convincing.

Finally, the elephant in the room is that while they’re asking Internet radio to pay more than 100% of revenue in royalty fees, satellite radio pays about 7% of revenue and terrestrial radio pays 0%. Killing the newest, most diverse, with the most growth potential, is asinine for all involved.

I’d like to think we’re making progress, though. Please do your part and write or call your representatives in Washington and let them know what you think of the above process and outcome. With your help, we can put Humpty back together.

Tune in to KCRW.org anytime today, they will be looping an hour long radio program where Webcasters discuss the specifics of their situation.

Thanks for reading and your support.

ian c rogers
General Manager, Yahoo! Music

Hastings, Nebraska, has long had bragging rights for being the birthplace of Kool-Aid. Now they have something new to be pleased as punch about.

As Sam Champion announced on Good Morning America this morning, Hastings is the winner of Yahoo!’s Be a Better Planet “Greenest City in America” challenge. A goodly sum of its 25,000 residents participated in the campaign by taking pledges to reduce their carbon diets on Yahoo! Green, answering green questions on Yahoo! Answers, and conducting eco-friendly mobile searches on Yahoo! oneSearch.

We’ll present Mayor Matt Rossen with a $250,000 check tonight at a “good ole Nebraska BBQ” for 750 celebrating Hastingsians. The city opted for a cash donation over the original prize of a fleet of hybrid taxis (I guess they’re not so practical in the Heartland) and plans to apply the funds toward city greening projects, with support from Global Green USA.

We’ve asked our very own Heidi Burgett, head of employee communications, to represent Yahoo! at the festivities because, quite coincidentally, five generations of her family hail from Hastings. She’ll drop by tomorrow with some highlights from the shindig.

In thanks for their rallying efforts, we’ll present the four runner up cities with thousands of compact fluorescent light bulbs at ceremonies today. For a list of the top ten cities, head here. Congrats to Hastings, Nebraska!

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Whether you call it a Kobe, Bubbla, Volky, or Herbie, take your love bug for a spin to celebrate Volkswagen Beetle Day. Or just indulge in Käfer envy here.

• Face-Up?: No, we’re not offering free makeovers, but we are making it possible to combine all your Upcoming and Facebook events in one place! Just go to Facebook and download the application for one view of all your weekend activities. The best part is once you download it, you can go to either Upcoming or Facebook to see your combined list of events. Read more here.
• IM on your CrackBerry: Or any mobile device that supports WAP. With the new Yahoo! Messenger for Mobile Beta, you can view your full IM conversation, rather than going back and forth SMS-style. It’s a faster and prettier version that tells your buds you’re busy or idle (or you can go stealth) and displays all your pals’ new Avatar outfits. There’s even a search box that helps you find a friend on your list and add contacts right from your phone — no scrolling necessary! Read more here or download the new beta by going to http://m.yahoo.com on your mobile.

Subscribe to the RSS feed (or add it to My Yahoo!) to get this Product Pulse.

Whether you’re a Cameron Crazy, a die-hard Husky fan, or a lifelong Longhorn fan, Yahoo! has made a roster move that will have you cheering from the sidelines. Today, we announced an agreement to acquire Rivals.com, the leading online destination for college and high school athletic information.

Hands down, Rivals.com provides the best coverage of college and high school sports on the Web, maintaining more than 100 college-specific sites and posting hundreds of updates each day. It also satisfies high school fans by following games and news in more than 35 states.

Its editorial team tracks recruitment news, rankings, team and athlete updates — in short, everything you need to know about what’s happening on the most popular campuses. Rivals.com will perfectly complement Yahoo! Sports’ editorial coverage — the work of its 200 on-the-ground local writers, reporters, and publishers meshes well with what we’re doing at the national level.

Rivals.com is also known for being the place for college sports fans to chat and share information, stats, and photos. In fact, its message boards are among the most popular in sports, and an important part of the business.

To those loyal Rivals.com subscribers out there, rest assured that we don’t intend to alter the formula you love and trust. I understand what makes Rivals.com special, and that’s why I’m so pumped about today’s announcement. Rivals.com’s CEO Shannon Terry and I will team up to ensure the continued success and growth of the best college and high school sports site on the Web.

So stay tuned, sports fans — we’re working on a winning game plan for Rivals.com and Yahoo! Sports.

Oh, and by the way, for those of you wondering how our recent management changes will impact our media operations here in Santa Monica, this deal should give you an indication that we’re going full steam ahead.

Jimmy Pitaro
General Manager, Yahoo! Sports

Greetings from Asia, where mobile phones are as ubiquitous as shoes. And where Yahoo! just got a tremendous leg up in the mobile Internet market.

I’m writing from CommunicAsia 2007 in Singapore, where I just finished a full-day of meetings with press, analysts, and partners from across Asia. We all spent the day fixated on the future of mobile search and agreed that that the next phase is dependent on a consumer-friendly, intuitive service designed specifically for the mobile device.

We’ve created such a service with Yahoo! oneSearch. And as of today, 100 million more mobile phone subscribers in Asia have access to this service through partnerships we’ve struck with six major operators. Searching and finding via mobile phone got infinitely easier for people in the Philippines, India, Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Taiwan.

These carrier agreements make oneSearch the default mobile search service on our partner WAP sites and reinforce our leadership in markets where mobile phones are incredibly pervasive and where there’s an increasing demand for mobile Internet services.

Since launching oneSearch at CES in January, we’ve worked hard to localize it for this important region. We know that PC search is not mobile search and PC browsing is not mobile browsing. People want faster results, easier navigation, and local relevance. OneSearch addresses that gap and now it does so in 14 countries around the world.

We’ll also launch localized beta versions of Yahoo! Go 2.0 this Friday, bringing the cool mobile Internet app to 13 countries in Europe, Asia and the Americas.

This all gets us closer to our big audacious goal to eventually connect 1 billion mobile users worldwide. And think we’ll reach it down the road with more news like this.

Dave Ko
VP & GM, Connected Life, Asia

Cannes. The Côte d’Azur. And it is. Very azure. But, Yahoo! (aka Big Purple) is in Cannes this week to turn it from azur to vert. Right. Because, of course, Yahoo! has embraced a major global re-thinking of all matters ecological (purple is the new green, after all). We created a very intriguing little contest aimed at the advertising community in eight countries, with the grand prize being a trip this week’s Cannes Advertising Festival for three winners.

What kind of contest, you might ask? Well, it’s called Big Shot in Cannes and you can learn more about it (and see the work) here. Since the advertising industry has been abuzz about user generated content, we thought we’d challenge the best minds in our business to create a great piece of communications, on the ecological/green subject of their choice, and do it like a consumer would. No big budgets, no fancy production teams, no boondoggles in exotic locations, and no high-priced celebrity talent.

We got an amazing 165 entries from 10 countries (right, two more than could legally enter) and, with much difficulty, narrowed this list down to 33. Because we generated more than 100,000 viewings of the submitted videos (thanks to JumpCut for putting this together for us), we used viewer feedback plus our own very idiosyncratic perspective to narrow the list for our final judging.

We then sent the final 33 to our 11 top creative judges and, lo and behold, three winners emerged: one from the US, one from Spain, and one from India. We had strong runners up from Australia, France, and Italy too. Check them all out here. Amazing stuff.

Our finalists, Kristin Cahill (USA), Diego Duprat (Spain), and Pranav Harihar Sharma (India) all arrived in Cannes over the last few days. Given that two of them had long and tiring flights, we got them to their hotel room and let them nap. Then plenty of free time to wander around the Palais des Festivals, meet up with friends in the biz, and get ready for their introduction to polite society on Thursday afternoon at the Advertising Community Together (ACT) Pavilion when they’ll receive their very own Yahoo! Big Idea Chair. BTW: ACT has an annual traveling exhibition of “socially responsible” advertising from around the world, and Yahoo! has been a proud sponsor since 2006.

That’s all the news from La Croisette for today. Somehow I feel virtuous and ready to hug some trees even though we are consuming energy like there’s no tomorrow (somebody turn off that TV!). But it’s nice to see all the big shots going green in Cannes.

Jerry Shereshewsky
Ambassador Plenipotentiary to Madison Ave.

The title of Chief Yahoo takes on new meaning today. I have the great honor of stepping into the role of Yahoo!’s Chief Executive Officer. Yahoo! has an incredibly bright future and I make this move with deep conviction and enthusiasm. I’ve partnered closely with our executive teams for 12 years to steer our strategy and direction and today I’m ready for this challenge.

Today also marks the close of a great chapter in my life with Terry Semel as my partner. Since coming on board in 2001, Terry has given Yahoo! six of its best years. He delivered great value to our users, advertisers and shareholders. Terry refocused the company on key strategic priorities, and in so doing, helped Yahoo! increase our revenues nearly nine-fold from $717 million in 2001 to $6.4 billion in 2006; boost our operating income from a loss in 2001 to nearly $1 billion last year; and create more than $30 billion in shareholder value during his tenure. He helped grow our audience from 170 million to more than 500 million users globally, and he oversaw the expansion of our base of talented employees from 3,500 to nearly 12,000.

I will always be grateful for the incredible achievements under his leadership — and for his mentorship and friendship. We’ll continue to benefit from his support and guidance as he transitions to his role as our Chairman.

I also couldn’t ask for a better partner in Sue Decker as our new president. In addition to knowing this company inside and out, Sue has incredible talents, leadership abilities, a fierce focus on winning, and intense dedication to this company and its people. I look forward to teaming more closely with her as we pursue our joint vision.

What is that vision? A Yahoo! that executes with speed, clarity and discipline. A Yahoo! that increases its focus on differentiating its products and investing in creativity and innovation. A Yahoo! that better monetizes its audience. A Yahoo! whose great talent is galvanized to address its challenges. And a Yahoo! that is better focused on what’s important to its users, customers, and employees.

The past year has obviously not been an easy one for us. But we’ve taken important steps to address the challenges we face, and we’re starting to realize some of the benefits – especially with the successful launch of Panama, which continues to receive positive feedback from advertisers and is exceeding our expectations. By the way, that’s directly attributable to the operational excellence mentality Terry has instilled and is a clear sign one of his most critical initiatives is succeeding.

We have incredible assets. This company has massive potential, drive, determination and skills, and we won’t be satisfied until the external perception of Yahoo! accurately reflects that reality.

I have absolute conviction about Yahoo!’s potential for long-term success as an Internet leader. Yahoo! is a company that started with a vision and a dream and, make no mistake, that dream is very much alive. I’m committed to doing whatever it takes to transform Yahoo! into an even greater success in the future.

The time for me is right. The time is now. The Internet is still young, the opportunities ahead are tremendous, and I’m ready to rally our nearly 12,000 Yahoos around the world to help seize them.

Go Yahoo!

Jerry Yang
CEO and Chief Yahoo