Developers came to hear about the launch of Yahoo! Connected TV’s new App Development Kit with Device Communication, which provides all the technologies they need to create mobile and tablet apps that can interact with TV.  Now innovative technology geeks can create cool “second screen” interactive apps for entertainment, games, social, sports, shopping and more.  During our hands-on training, we also showed developers our new open source Device Communication tools and libraries for Android published on Github, for writing mobile apps that connect in to our Emmy® Award* Winning Yahoo! ® Connected TV platform.

So what does this mean for consumers today?  To showcase the awesome potential of Device Communication, Yahoo released the Yahoo! Connected TV Mobile App on Android.  It is available in the Google Play store and delivers second screen interactivity to owners of 2012 Sony® Bravia EX 40, 46 and 55 inch TVs today including:

• Flipping Yahoo! ® videos from a smart phone to their big screen TV
• Sending web page URLs from their TV to their phone’s Web browser so they can peruse them close up
• Use their tablet and phone touch screens (rather than limited remote control buttons) to find, launch and navigate around their favorite TV apps, including finding news, playing games, interacting with social networks, viewing sports information or shopping.

We can’t wait to see what the development community drums up with these new technologies. And of course we have some more interactive mobile and tablet apps up our own sleeves as well. So if your TV has the Emmy® Engineering* award-winning Yahoo! Connected TV platform on it – stay glued to that screen!

* 2011 Primetime Emmy® Engineering Plaque Award

Today we’re excited to launch a whole new way to search and browse the Web across any device—Yahoo! Axis. It’s an innovative new mobile browser and desktop plug-in that gives people visual search results (as they type), ultimately providing a more direct path to whatever they’re looking for online. Think of it as a personal companion for your daily explorations of the Web.

You can download Axis as a standalone mobile browser for your Apple iOS devices here, and for major, HTML5 enabled desktop browsers, you can download the desktop plug-in here. Check out our video that walks you through how Axis saves you time whether on the desktop, mobile or tablet device.

Yahoo! Axis comes equipped with handy features that unify searching and browsing.  For example, our one-step search lets you preview and interact with visual search results without ever leaving the page you’re on. It’s the end of the back button! And our instant answers show the information you want as you type common searches like finding movie times, sports scores, stock prices and more.

Axis also includes a personalized home page that contains your most recently visited sites, bookmarks and articles you plan to read later. This personalized home page stays with you across your desktop, iPad and iPhone, keeping what’s important to you in one easy, centralized spot. No matter what device you started on, you can easily pick up where you left off when you switch devices.

Axis even has a few bonus features for iPhone and iPad users, like simple swiping to quickly get from one search result to the next, a bar that combines the search box and address bars into one, and sharing so you can easily post any page you’re viewing to Twitter or Pinterest.

We can’t wait for you to play around with this latest example of Yahoo!’s search innovation and tell us what you think.  To learn more, please visit axis.yahoo.com, our Search blog or Mobile blog.

Seven teams of developers from Singapore, Costa Rica, Brazil, UK, Canada, Seattle, San Diego, Cincinnati and New York City competed head to head for the grand price of a trip to Athens, Greece for the WPP Stream conference. With help from Yahoo!’s world-class team of technical experts and facilitated by Yahoo! Developer Network the competitors worked all night to build their prototypes – many of which were built on Yahoo! technologies like Cocktails, YUI, YQL, Calendar, and Flickr.

After review by our judging panel, the winners were:

• BEST OVERALL HACK: B.Lock, which lets individuals earn money by lending out bikes to others via three components: an electronic bike lock, a web portal, and a mobile app.
• BEST CREATIVE HACK:  A tool called ShutterSpot uses crowdsourced data from Flickr to provide insights into camera brands people are using around the globe.
• BEST CLIENT-FOCUSED HACK: Building off of the Nike+ app, a whole new social experience incorporates video glasses on tracked runs to record, share, and compete with friends.

After consuming vast quantities of pizza and Red Bull, attendees from Possible Worldwide, Blast Radius, dotJWT, VML , Catalyst Online,  Ogilvy and Wunderman  celebrated their hacks and the opportunity to collaborate across WPP agencies for brilliant new ideas and concepts.

Thanks to all of these latest hack participants, and stay tuned more from our hackday series.

The World IPv6 Launch takes effect at Midnight GMT on June 6, 2012. This means that in the U.S., you can expect changes take place on June 5 at 5pm Pacific, 8pm Eastern.

What is Changing?
Yahoo! will be adding IPv6 support to several of our popular web sites, including www.yahoo.com, Yahoo! News, My Yahoo!, Shine, and OMG. We are also adding IPv6 support to Yahoo’s Content Distribution Network, which delivers nearly all of our graphics and JavaScript for all Yahoo! sites. These upgrades should all be transparent to you.

In the months following the Launch, we will continue to bring additional IPv6 support to other Yahoo! sites, including Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Mail, and Yahoo! Finance.

How Does this Launch Impact You?
Most likely, the launch will be totally transparent to you.

Your browser will automatically use the best available protocol. If you have the new protocol available through your ISP, it will be used automatically. If not, you’ll use the old protocol automatically.

A very small number of you may have problems reaching your favorite Internet web sites as a result of the IPv6 upgrades. This is typically caused by a local misconfiguration, either of your computer, or your home router. You can check for this ahead of time by using the web browser test on our IPv6 help page. The page will provide further instruction in case you have any issues.

IPv6 Exceptions
We will continue to serve a few communities using the legacy Internet IPv4 protocol. We will do this in regions where deploying IPv6 will cause unacceptable delays. For example, many ISPs in Japan have technological hurdles to work through, when accessing the public Internet over IPv6. We will continue to work with those communities, and look forward to serving them with IPv6 in the future.

Why Is IPv6 Important for the Internet?
Thirty years ago, the Internet was born. It was opened to the general public in 1995, and has been steadily growing since. Though it started out as an experiment, it has grown into a critical part of our everyday lives.

The Internet is more than just a web address or an email address. Each time you visit www.yahoo.com, your computer looks up the proper number that will connect your web browser to our web server. Your computer does this for every single site it accesses.

The original Internet design is now running out of these unique numbers. Just like phone numbers, it is difficult to share the same number with several people (or several web sites). The main feature of IPv6 is to extend the Internet’s numbering system. This will allow more people, more devices, and more applications and web sites to join the Internet.

Wide-scale adoption of IPv6 will also help improve Internet security and ensure that the Internet experience you have today will be preserved (or improved upon!) in the future.

What Will Happen to IPv4?
The current IPv4 protocol will be with us for years to come. It will take time for all Internet Service Providers to be fully ready for IPv6. It will also take time for all home users to upgrade equipment. As such, ISPs will continue to provide IPv4 support.

How do I get IPv6?
Check with your Internet Service Provider (AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, etc.). Many are working behind the scenes to get ready for IPv6. Some have already started upgrading residential accounts; others are enabling IPv6 upon request, and offering it to folks who are signing up with new services. Your ISP can give advice on which home routers will be compatible with their particular IPv6 deployment.

If you are an IT professional or an Internet application developer, and your ISP does not yet offer IPv6, don’t despair. You can use an IPv6 tunnel to bring the technology into your home or office. Do a web search for “ipv6 tunnel providers.” Tunnels are a convenient way to get early access to IPv6, and do early testing of your products. Keep in mind that tunnels may bypass your firewalls; be sure to do a security review and protect yourself adequately.

Welcome to the future!

Jason Fesler
IPv6 Evangelist, Yahoo!

On May 7, Yahoo! employees in our Sunnyvale headquarters partnered with the Lincoln Intelligence Project in their search for “America’s Best and Smartest” company. The event provided an opportunity for Yahoos to earn “points” for the company and donations for our chosen charity by learning more about Lincoln’s newest line.

The Event

For one day only, Lincoln brought their all-new Lincoln MKZ Hybrid and MKS to Yahoo!’s Sunnyvale campus for employees to test drive. About 450 employees came out to take a spin around Sunnyvale and see for themselves what Lincoln’s latest line has to offer. After the test drive, employees were invited to play interactive games, testing their smarts about Lincoln’s line and earning points for Yahoo!’s final score. The entire event was capped off by music throughout the day, perfect sunny weather and a table of refreshments to keep the energy high.

YEF Donations

Beyond being drawn by the chance to experience Lincoln’s latest models, Yahoos attended the event in droves in order to show their support for the Yahoo! Employee Foundation (YEF). YEF is a grassroots philanthropic organization run by Yahoo! employee volunteers with a mission to impact Yahoo! employees’ communities through grants and volunteering opportunities. Lincoln made a donation to YEF for every employee who participated in the Lincoln Intelligence Project, and so many Yahoos came out and participated that we reached our maximum donation of $10,000 with plenty of time to spare! The grand prize of $100,000 will be awarded later this year to the nonprofit associated with the company that scores the most points through test drives and interactive games. With such a great show of support from Yahoos, YEF stands a good chance of receiving that prize.

This event couldn’t have been a success without the support and energy of all of the Yahoos came out and the great partnership between Yahoo! and Lincoln. We’re looking forward to hearing the announcement of “America’s Best and Smartest” company later this year – and we’re hoping it’s us!

Sony Pictures plunders the Kids homepage with a full page overlay for its new animated summer movie treasure.

Arrrrrgggg you ready for summer movie season? We hope so because Sony has set sail to a silver screen near you with a galleon for all ages entitled “The Pirates! Band of Misfits.”

With such voice talent as Hugh Grant, Salma Hayek, Imelda Staunton, Jeremy Piven, David Tennant, and Brendan Gleeson, “Pirates!” is the latest piece of clay-mation from Aardman, the British studio famous for its quirky and very entertaining stop-motion clay-mation films such as the Wallace and Gromit series, “Chicken Run,” “Flushed Away” and “Arthur Christmas.”

To herald its arrival, the Yahoo! Kids homepage recently featured a full page overlay, more appropriately known, at least in this case, as a takeover.

When you land on the page, you’re also landing in a seaside village courtesy of a very rich background framing and underlying the live page content. This background was served as a Wallpaper unit, a static image to replace the default background with Sony’s content.

Just when you think all is peaceful, the Pirate Captain (voiced in the film by Hugh Grant) swings past your monitor in the nick of time to dodge a cannonball. Through the charred hole we see a smiling Polly and a concerned Mr. Bobo.

From there, the rest of the live page content fills in, as does the 300 x 250 graphical unit on the right. Pirate Captain, Charles Darwin, and Cutlass Liz brandish the title and a link to tickets and showtimes.

The swinging Pirate Captain effect was achieved with a Flash Overlay and transparent video with alpha channel to let the page content as well as the coastal village background shine through. To make the user experience fun without going overboard (pun intended), the automated swinging Captain is frequency-capped at one per day per user.

The cannonball explosion effect was rendered via a separate Flash file timed to fire after the Captain has swung by. Mr. Bobo and Polly represent two more Flash units. Even after the action settles into the 300 x 250 unit, you’ll notice a Flash-animated fish swimming around and poking its head above the water.

The 300 x 250 unit features an ActionScripted replay button that offers the user another opportunity to make the Captain swing again.

The Pirates take full advantage of the entire digital Kids canvas to render an experience as quirky and fun as the movie itself without—yes I’m using that pun again—going overboard.

Click here to embarrrrrrgggk on a pirate voyage.

–Thomas T. Lady

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a new series entitled “Ad Tech of the Week.” For more information visit the Yahoo! Advertising Blog or follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Some of Yahoo!’s coolest and most useful applications have stemmed from these Red Bull-fueled coding marathons. Since 2005, when Yahoo! invented the Hackday, Yahoo!s have used the overnight opportunity to develop everything from consumer-facing mobile apps to a more efficient calendar scheduler for employees. “One of my favorite products from Hackday was called “Bad Ass Ads,” said Erik Suhonen, Head of the Yahoo! Developer Network, describing a Hackday conception that built living ads through the Cocktails platform. “In only 24 hours, it’s absolutely amazing to see the innovation that these employees create on top of Yahoo! technologies to expand and improve this company in such a meaningful and significant way.”

Q2 2012 Hackday kicked off at 11 am on Thursday, May 10th and the designated classrooms within Yahoo!’s headquarters were soon buzzing with the energy and momentum of 60-plus teams of Yahoo! Engineers, Product Managers and Designers from all over the globe, putting their heads together to move Yahoo! into the future.

Eric Rowell, a front- end engineer for Yahoo!’s video platforms team is a two-time Hackday veteran, hard at work on an idea called “Yahoo! Snap – News at Your Fingertips,” designed to make consuming news on Yahoo faster and more efficient. “It’s great to work at a company that genuinely cares about the ideas we have,” Rowell said. “There are always new ways to improve or develop new products and it’s nice to have a dedicated 24 hours to build something and demo it to people.”

Hackers like Eric will have until 11am the next day to work on their ideas, after whichHackday demos of the final 30 will take place live at Yahoo! headquarters on Friday, May 11th, 3:00-4:30pm.   We hope to see some of Hackday winners coming to a Yahoo! product soon!

So how do you enter for a chance to win?  Follow these simple steps:

• Fire-up the IntoNow app on your tablet or smartphone while watching Revenge during the last two episodes airing on ABC on May 16, 2012 and May 23, 2012 (10:00-11:00 p.m., ET.) If you don’t have the app already, you can download IntoNow from Yahoo! for free here for iPhone and iPad devices and here if you have an Android phone.
• Simply “tag” the show and voilà, you may enter the contest and be one step closer to becoming a socialite!  With just one tap, IntoNow identifies the show you’re watching using its patented audio recognition technology, SoundPrint.
• While in the app, you can participate in Revenge-themed trivia, engage in real-time conversations with friends and other Revenge fans, and share what you are watching directly to your Facebook or Twitter feeds.

“Devices in the living room are allowing people to engage in TV like never before,” said Adam Cahan, founder of IntoNow and vice president of products at Yahoo!. “Entertainment is social and fans don’t just watch a show passively – they want to talk about it, share their favorite moments, and know what others watching in the show are thinking.  That context opens up powerful opportunities for networks and advertisers by amplifying the brand message from the TV right into the device in their hands.”

This truly interactive companion experience on a prime-time drama is another example of the key role IntoNow and second-screen apps are now playing in TV programming. Earlier this year, ABC partnered with IntoNow for the Republican presidential candidate debate, where viewers engaged with polls, read related news content and discussed the responses.

We already know you keep your mobile device handy in the living room – 80% of you use your tablet while watching TV – so make sure to have yours at hand for the final episodes of Revenge and your chance to experience the Hamptons lifestyle (minus the vengeful subplot.)

Four years ago, Kyle was fighting for his country as a Marine in Iraq. But when a roadside bomb left him seriously injured, Kyle was faced with the challenge of returning home to his family without the use of his hand, which was severely damaged by a bomb and later amputated. Suddenly, Kyle found himself struggling to perform basic tasks from hammering in a nail, to doing up the snaps on his baby girl’s jumper. Finding his basic hook-like prosthesis to be more of a hassle than help, the right-handed vet had been making do with life as a leftie. But with a new house to remodel, a child with special needs, and a new baby on the way, Kyle was in desperate need of a helping hand – literally.

Yahoo! News’ Remake America stepped in to help this worthy former Marine regain the life he deserves. After a consultation with ABC News Chief Health and Medical Editor Dr. Richard Besser, Kyle was taken to Hanger Prosthetics in New York City – one of the most cutting edge prosthesis manufacturers in the world. Until meeting with the technicians at Hanger, Kyle had resigned himself to a life without some of the activities he enjoyed. His dream career as a police officer also seemed out of the question after his injury. But with the help of Remake America and a state-of-the-art prosthesis from Hanger, Kyle soon learned that with a little training and a commitment to the new hand, nothing would be out of reach. So will Kyle choose to get the prosthesis? Find out on this episode of Remake America.

Visit the Remake America page on Yahoo! News for weekly video stories and advice and resources on problems faced by families on Remake America, including tips to reduce stress and advice on caring for a loved one with special needs.

Each month nearly 50 million fans come to Yahoo! Sports, the No. 1 leader for online sports coverage, to find up-to-the-minute news, scores, and stats – and college fans are no different. College sports fans depend on Yahoo! Sports’ college destination Rivals.com, the dominant provider for team sites and recruiting coverage. Rivals already offers the most in-depth recruiting database available and more established prospect recruiting rankings, exclusive video and content, and historical, accurate, and in-depth team rankings than the competition.

And starting today, Yahoo! Sports and Rivals.com are bringing you the next generation in sports media coverage: Alex Kline, the 17-year-old owner and operator of The Recruit Scoop, has joined Rivals.  The Recruit Scoop, a leading site for dissecting, discussing and reporting on basketball recruiting, is now live on Rivals.com at http://recruitscoop.rivals.com/.

In his new role, Alex will be an Expert Publisher, focusing on the world of basketball recruiting. Alex will showcase student-athletes who are making visits to, verbally committing to, and ultimately signing letters of intent to play for colleges and universities across the country.

Eric Winter, Head of Rivals.com for Yahoo! Sports, had this to say about Alex joining Rivals: “As the No. 1 football and basketball recruiting site, Rivals.com is thrilled to have Alex and The Recruit Scoop as a major focus of our hoops recruiting efforts. Alex leads the charge for what we call the next-gen in media coverage. His ability to break news, procure relationships with recruits and the tight coaching fraternity, coupled with his strong social acumen, will allow Rivals.com to reach today’s youth in ways traditional media and our competition cannot.”

Here are some more details on what Alex will be doing on The Recruit Scoop:

• Providing daily updates and breaking news on the hottest recruits around the country
• Writing weekly features on the Rivals150, the top 150 recruits across the country
• Hosting Q&A with top talent
• Hosting live chats with basketball prospects from coast-to-coast

Alex will be doing all of this while attending to his primary job: finishing high school. Alex will graduate from the Pennington School in New Jersey this spring, and will be attending Syracuse University in the fall. He’s built a Twitter following of over 21,000 as he’s become the next big thing in college hoops recruiting.

And as if that isn’t enough, Alex is also the creator of the Mary Kline Classic, a basketball showcase at the Pennington School. The Classic features elite high school players participating in skills competitions and a game, and raises funds for cancer research. The Classic is named in honor of Alex’s mother, who passed away from cancer when he was 10 years old.

Check Alex out for yourself at his new site on Rivals.com, where you’ll find all of the biggest college hoops recruit scoops.

As a crossover vehicle, Acura’s second generation RDX (“intelligently built for the size of your life”) is big enough for Brobdingnag while compact enough for Lilliput. So it’s appropriate that the miniature inhabitants of the latter land unveil the new RDX in a syncronized rich media display ad on Movies to appeal to the giant car lover in all of us.

Acura, the exclusive sponsor of Yahoo!’s official Tribeca site, ran a campaign in late April and early May that consisted of two ads executing in sync as a roadblock, so called because both units ran for a full day as opposed to your more typical partial-day execution.

The Acura’s syncronized unveiling happens as soon as the user lands on Movies. The Lilliputians in the 970 x 90 banner use all the elbow grease they’ve got to lift the drape off the RDX in the right-hand 300 x 250 graphical unit. The drape ends up in the north banner and falls on a few of the Lilliputians. Not to worry, those little big car lovers emerge just in time for the banner to switch to the static image of the RDX paired with its logo while a pair of Lilliputians carry a hyperlinked “Discover RDX” button to take you to the crossover’s official site.

The engine driving the sync is Flash LocalConnection. Since both units were designed in Adobe Flash, the designers used Flash LocalConnection to allow the separate Flash files to “talk” to each other and delay the start of the animation until both were loaded and ready to play.

The 300 x 250 unit boasts an “Expand” button to let the user explore the RDX without leaving Yahoo! Movies. This stretches the 300 x 250 unit into a 560 x 300 unit complete with exterior and interior views of the RDX, a 360° toggle, videos, and another “Discover RDX” button. The expansion happens courtesy of a Flash command that was “animated” into the ad by RPA, Acura’s creative shop.

Both the exterior and interior views feature Lilliputians working diligently to keep the vehicle buffed and polished while you click those little red dots to get more details on the RDX’s design and functionality. The dots were made with ActionScript 3 (AS3), an open-source scripting language designed mainly for Flash-based programs.

The 360° view is a marriage of approximately 30 separate jpegs of the RDX. RPA coded Flash commands to make the Lilliputions rotate the showroom platform as you toggle.

Lastly, the Videos button presents the TV spots incorporated into the 560 x 300 unit as Flash NetStream objects.

Even though RPA shouldered the brunt of the rich media assembly, Yahoo!’s Ad Tech team still had to coordinate with them about ad placement, specs, troubleshooting, and tracking. RPA of course wouldn’t be familiar with the pixel count of Yahoo!’s ad formats and placements, so Ad Tech had to ensure, for example, that the right number of pixels separated the bottom of the 970 x 90 from the top of the 300 x 250 and the expanded 600 x 300, while maintaining the correct pixel count between the edge of the units and the edge of the page.

Most NT1 banners are only 66 pixels tall, but Acura requested an extra 24 pixels to afford the Lilliputians more room to work. This wasn’t a big deal in terms of extra programming, but since it does mean pushing more page content below the fold, Ad Tech had to consult with the Y! Movies team to be sure they were okay with it. Fortunately, they were happy to oblige Acura, since it’s not every day you see a non-movie ad on Movies, what they call a non-endemic ad.

With its nod to “Gulliver’s Travels”, Acura’s syncronized roadblock makes playful, and literary, use of Yahoo!’s digital canvas, allowing the user to do some exploring of their own without infringing too much on live page content.

–Thomas T. Lady

With Earth Day past us, our commitment to environmental responsibility is top of mind here at Yahoo!, so we thought we’d share some little-known facts about our energy consumption:

• 56% of Yahoo!’s  electricity demand at our data centers is met with renewable energy
• Yahoo! has built some of the world’s most efficient facilities with a unique “chicken coop” design that runs almost entirely on free cooling
• Our most efficient data centers consume 40% less energy than conventional data centers due to their unique shape and use of free outside air cooling 98 percent of the year
• The Lockport data center is saving enough energy to power more than 9,000 New York State households energy annually.
• The Yahoo! Lockport data center is saving enough energy to power approximately 300,000 CFL light bulbs for one year, running 24/7.
• Yahoo! will save more water per year than flows over the Niagara Falls for a minute straight
• The water saved at the Lockport site in one year is enough to provide drinking water for 200,000 people to sustain a healthy life (Approximately 180 gallons per year per person is the average amount of drinking water in a lifetime).
• A lot of people assume that a green facility has to cost more up front. Our Lockport data center was cheaper to build than a conventional data center.  And was built from ground to commissioning in 6 months.

These points and more were recognized earlier in a new report from Greenpeace International, titled “How Clean is Your Cloud?”  The study found that Yahoo! is leading the way among large technology companies through its use of clean energy in its data centers.  Yahoo! earned the highest “Clean Energy Index” score (a company average for clean energy usage) and we are proud of it!

This is because we strongly believe that location matters, and choose sites for our data center facilities very carefully.  We base decisions on things like the presence of clean power and great workforces, as well as weather conditions that we know will help us build energy-efficient free-cooled data centers.

As a result, we were also named a finalist this week in the Facility Design Implementation category of the 2012 Green Enterprise IT Awards, which recognize pioneering advancements for significantly improved energy productivity in IT and data center operations.

So rest assured.  We love delivering great consumer experiences and we do it responsibly with an eye towards the future of our planet.

Take Credit For Your Flickr Photo’s on Pinterest

It’s no secret that Flickr users’ photos are a huge hit on the social media site Pinterest, which features a “virtual pinboard.” And now, Flickr users can to get credit for their inspirational work. Flickr has just announced a partnership with Pinterest to make it easier for people to share Flickr images to Pinterest with proper attribution. A “Pinterest” button will be added to the site’s share menu, enabling people to “pin” all content that can be shared via Flickr including photo pages, favorites, and groups. When a Flickr photo is pinned on Pinterest it will be accompanied by clear attribution that includes the name of the photographer, the title of the image, and a link to the photo page. In addition, Flickr photos that are pinned from a third-party site or blog will automatically ll be attributed on Pinterest and link back to the Flickr photo page. Attributions cannot be edited, guaranteeing that each photographer will receive proper credit for their work. People who are uncomfortable with having their images pinned to Pinterest can opt-out of the sharing functionality. Now go get pinned!

Yahoo! Screen’s Hit Shows Get a Picked Up For a Second Season

Coming off of an incredibly successful first season of web shows, specifically created for a female audience, Yahoo! Screen is gearing up for its second season of specialty programming that covers a variety of lifestyle topics — from health and fitness, to cooking to relationship advice. Whether seeking relationship advice from our resident expert Niecy Nash in her hit show “Let’s Talk About Love,” or figuring out the best ways to navigate a busy schedule with Judy Greer and her health and fitness dream-team on “Reluctantly Healthy,” Yahoo! Screen delivers premium web programming that women are looking for. Along with returning shows, Yahoo! Screen will premier “The Yo Show,” coming this spring and featuring Micheal Yo, the pop-culture and E! News entertainment reporter, who will showcase a variety of unique features that will include exclusive celebrity interviews, comedy and the latest in pop culture. To check out all these shows and more, visit Yahoo! Screen.

Batch Upload For Flickr Now Available on Android

Attention all Flickr users who have been waiting patiently for the chance to batch upload photos from their Androids – the time has come! Users can now select as many photos as desired from the photo gallery on any Android phone. Easily add titles/descriptions, set privacy levels and add to sets, then Upload! Weak signal? No problem. We’ve added the upload queue to help ensure your photos get up to Flickr as soon as possible. Track the photos while they are uploading. If your signal cuts out and interrupts your upload, we’ll try again once we get connection or you can manually start it later. So, what are you waiting for? Get the app and start uploading more now!

Yahoo! Small Business Launches Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard

Yahoo! Small Business has just announced the launch of Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard, a free tool that helps entrepreneurs discover new marketing opportunities to grow their businesses, while getting a clear picture of their marketing results, online reputations, and website performance, all in one place.

Designed specifically with the small business owner in mind, the Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard enables small businesses to easily analyze website metrics and maintain accurate and comprehensive business listings across the Web.  With all these key business metrics accessible in one location, small business owners with limited resources can spend more time focusing on their core businesses and less time buried in multiple interfaces and spreadsheets.

Some of the key features included in the free Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard include:

•  Search engine and directory listings: Enables monitoring and provides recommendations on new listing opportunities, covering over 100sites (including Yelp, Yahoo! Local, and more)
•  Online reputation management: Pulls information from up to 8,000 sources (including Facebook and Twitter)
• Site traffic analysis: Enables users to understand key website performance metrics (including Google Analytics)
• Small business-focused news and advice: Provided from Yahoo! Small Business Advisor
• Campaign tracking: Provides email marketing, SEO, and SEM campaign tracking (must subscribe to these services)
• Support: 24/7 in-house free customer support

 Premium paid services are also available for those businesses looking to increase their online visibility, track their competitors and attract new customers by taking advantage of marketing services from featured, best-in-class third party marketing vendors.

The Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard and Yahoo! Small Business Advisor are the most recent additions to the suite of tools from Yahoo! Small Business which also offers web hosting, ecommerce, domains, and business mail aimed at helping small businesses grow. Get it for free here.

Flickr Photos Get a Larger-than-Life Makeover!

When it comes to photos, most Flickr users would agree that bigger is always better! You asked and we listened! Flickr is excited to announce two new photo sizes, 1600 and 2048 pixels. They are already available in the lightbox and will be rolled out to the API and a few other places over the next few weeks. Along with our outstanding, low-compression photo quality, this will give you an exceptional viewing experience; no matter if you are in front of your HD display, your new iPad or any other pixel-perfect high-resolution screen.

The new sizes are available for all photos that you have uploaded since March 1. For each photo we are generating the two new 1600 pixels and 2048 pixels sizes (unless the uploaded image is smaller on the longer side). These new larger image sizes will make your photos look even more stunning on Flickr. Take your pictures to the next level today!

Photo: Available from Xerxes2K./ FLICKR: http://www.flickr.com/photos/quicksilver/3022285020/

For one night every year, journalists, celebrities and politicians collide for the annual White House Correspondents dinner. This star-studded event is one of Washington’s most eagerly anticipated events – and this year, Yahoo! had front row seats.

Yahoo! News enjoyed its first-ever appearance at the 98th annual White House Correspondents Dinner on April 28th – co-hosting a hugely successful pre-dinner cocktail party with ABC News, and had its first table at the dinner itself. Reporters, editors and executives from the political news powerhouses had the incredible opportunity to mingle with celebrities, politicians and other notables that attended the Yahoo!/ABC party — from former Republican Presidential hopeful Rick Santorum to California Governor Jerry Brown, the cast of ‘Modern Family’, Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, Kevin Spacey, Diane Sawyer, and Barbara Walters.

The event, which featured comedian Jimmy Kimmel and President Obama taking turns roasting Washington’s political and media elite, was a perfect chance for politicos and politicians alike to let loose and poke fun at each other. Eager for Yahoo! users to share in the fun, Yahoo! News live-tweeted the event and put together an Instragram album, providing a behind-the-scenes look at the festivities. Check out the special White House Correspondents Dinner page on Yahoo! News to check out event pictures and videos and share your own feedback on the night’s featured topics via Facebook. Click here for an exclusive look at Yahoo!’s WHCD Flickr album featuring additional photos from the event.

Today, Yahoo! Small Business launched the Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard, a free tool that helps entrepreneurs discover new marketing opportunities to grow their businesses, while getting a comprehensive picture of their marketing results, online reputations, and website performance, all in one place.

Designed specifically with the small business owner in mind, the Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard provides a clear, consolidated picture of a business’s marketing results and reputation, making it easier to discover new insights and develop new ideas for growth.  With key business metrics from across the Web accessible in one location, small business owners with limited resources can spend more time focusing on their core businesses and less time buried in multiple interfaces and spreadsheets.

Some of the key features included in the free Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard include:

• Search engine and directory listings: Enables monitoring and provides recommendations on new listing opportunities, covering over 100 sites (including Yelp, Yahoo! Local, and more)
• Online reputation management: Pulls information from up to 8,000 sources (including Facebook and Twitter)
• Site traffic analysis: Enables users to understand key website performance metrics (including Google Analytics)
• Small business-focused news and advice: Provided from Yahoo! Small Business Advisor
• Campaign tracking: Provides email marketing, SEO, and SEM campaign tracking (must subscribe to these services)
• Support: 24/7 in-house free customer support

Additionally, business owners can opt for paid premium services within the Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard that enable them to enhance their marketing and analysis.  For example:

• Local Visibility Pro: Small businesses can increase their online visibility by submitting their business information to over 100 search engines and directories
• Reputation Management Pro: Users get more comprehensive data, plus the ability to track their competitors, receive email  alerts, and share positive customer comments via social channels or email
• Integrated campaign tracking: Small businesses can also attract new customers by taking advantage of marketing services from featured, best-in-class third party marketing vendors, including Constant Contact and OrangeSoda, and display and monitor results from campaigns with those vendors from within the Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard

“We created the Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard to help small business owners who feel overwhelmed by online marketing options and monitoring a wide range of sites and social networks to keep up with customer feedback,” said Shannon Parker Hane, Director of Product Marketing, Yahoo! Small Business. “Now, within a single tool customers can conveniently evaluate their marketing options, campaign results and online reputation without having to search across the Web for information.”

The Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard and Yahoo! Small Business Advisor are the most recent additions to the suite of tools from Yahoo! Small Business that provide resources to help small businesses grow. To learn more about the Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard, please visit http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/marketing-dashboard.

For starters, Flickr has added a Pinterest button in the share menu to easily “pin” photo pages, favorites, and groups. If you don’t want your content to be shared, you can disable sharing in your account settings and make the Pinterest option unavailable.

With Flickr images amongst the most popular content pinned to Pinterest, we believe your Flickr photos should be properly attributed to you, regardless of where they are pinned from.  Starting today, every image shared from Flickr will be clearly credited with the name of the photographer, the title, and a link from Pinterest to the photo page – this will also include all Flickr photos previously shared on Pinterest. The attribution cannot be edited, so even repins of images will be credited and linked back, so that people can leave comments, fave your photo, or contact you directly on Flickr.  This also works automatically for any Flickr photos embedded in websites or blogs, giving you much more certainty that you’ll be credited when your Flickr photos are shared on Pinterest.

You can read more about the new features on the Flickr Blog and on the Pinterest Blog.  Try them out and share your feedback as we continue to evolve Flickr and work to further protect the rights of photographers and content owners.

Photo: Available from Xerxes2k./ FLICKR: http://www.flickr.com/photos/quicksilver/6770210647/

A recent Yahoo! survey reveals some interesting tablet preferences by American households, proving just how important these devices have become. For example, results uncovered that Americans are more inclined to fight over a tablet than the TV remote and a shocking 15% of us would go so far as giving up our car in order to keep our tablet (a surprising, but healthy indication for our planet!).

The 2,000 U.S. respondents participating in the study were aged between 18-64 years, and were asked questions on their tablet usage and habits, in order to uncover who’s really using them, where they take them, and just how far they’ll go to keep them. Some additional findings are outlined below:

• 15% would give up their car for an entire year to be able to keep their tablet; that would equate to 45 million fewer cars on the road, meaning less traffic and a whopping 270 million tons fewer greenhouse gases (CO2) emitted per year.
• Tablets are now the second most fought over device in the living room, just behind desktops/laptops, and ahead of TV remotes.
• A third of men frequently take their tablet to the bathroom. 40% of women never take the tablet to the bathroom.
• A quarter of women are happy to give up sex (25%) to keep their tablet. As for men? Only half as many men would give up sex (13%).
• The tablet is the go-to wind-down device: 91% use their tablet in bed.

Any of these strike a chord in your house? Take a peek into the average home with the below infographic, for a visual representation of just how pervasive tablets have become.

Yahoo! offers a number of industry leading tablet experiences, including IntoNow from Yahoo!, Livestand from Yahoo!, Yahoo! Messenger and Sportacular. Check out mobile.yahoo.com or search for “Yahoo!” in the Android Market or iTunes App Store to discover more of the tablet-optimized applications available from Yahoo!.

You may know me best as an Olympic gymnast. At the 1996 Atlanta Games, I competed on the first U.S. women’s gymnastics team to win the team gold medal, and I won gold on the balance beam as well. I won five medals at Barcelona in 1992, the most of any American athlete at those Games. Gymnastics allowed me to become an Olympic gold medalist, but since then I’ve enjoyed a variety of titles including author, TV and radio host, speaker, cancer survivor, health advocate, and, most importantly, mom.

And at the upcoming Games in London, I’ll be adding another title to my list – analyst for Yahoo! Sports.

I am so excited to be covering the Summer Olympics with Yahoo! Sports. As an athlete, we don’t see as much while we’re competing as you do at home watching. Most of our time is spent sleeping, eating, and training. That’s why it is so much fun to cover the Games!

As an analyst, I’ll be able to give up-to-date information and insight into the athletes, their training, and what they are feeling during the biggest competition of their lives. Athletes and their stories are everywhere and this is my opportunity to share these stories and dreams with those around the world.

On the gymnastics side, I am expecting a strong team. If TEAM USA is healthy and consistent, they will be difficult to beat. Russia and China will certainly be strong competition, though. Individually, Jordyn Weiber is the one to watch right now. However, with qualifications beginning at the end of May a few other names to watch for are McKayla Maroney, Gabrielle Douglas and Nastia Liukin.

I can’t wait to get over to London and report back to you on all of the exciting things happening at the Games!

For now, here’s a little bit more about me:

My most memorable Olympic moment:
As an athlete, one of my favorite moments was walking into the Georgia Dome to 40,000 screaming people…for training!

My favorite Olympic location:
I can’t choose – Barcelona was amazing and it was my first Games. Atlanta was home soil; it’s hard to compete with that!

My secret talent, which I would win a gold medal for if it were an Olympic sport:
Organizing! Garage, closets, you name it – I can organize it.

The best meal I had at an Olympics:
I tend to eat the exact same meal before every competition: grilled chicken with a baked potato – a mix of protein and carbs for the long competition ahead.

My best travel tip for the Olympics:
Leave plenty of time to get places. Road closures, crowds, security all add to a bit of wait time. Bring snacks, water and your smart phone or tablet with you so you can get the latest updates on all things Olympics!

My favorite Olympic sport other than gymnastics:
I love them all! I’m amazed by diving. It is so beautiful to watch but I just can’t understand why people want to flip toward their head.

Shannon Miller,
Yahoo! Sports Analyst, Gymnastics

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series entitled, “In My Own Words,” that gives employees the opportunity to share their own stories about Yahoo!. Feel like yodeling your own? Post your Yahoo! story on your social networks using the hashtag #myYahoostory.

For many women, life is divided into two parts: before kids and after kids. From the moment you cross that line into motherhood, nothing is ever the same.

It’s a revelation you can see in the face of Brenda Law, Shine’s beloved Community Manager, in a photo taken just after delivering her twin boys.

Here’s how Brenda remembers feeling in that instant: “This photo is the first time I held my boys together as one was whisked away after birth because of his low body temperature. That moment you realize you’re a mom is truly overwhelming. It’s pure joy, intense love, relief, and a bit of fear because they are such tiny perfect beings and you just want to do your very, very best for them.”

Yahoo! Shine wants to know what your first moment of motherhood looked like — whether it’s your first pregnancy photo or your first face-to-face in the hospital, we want to see it.

It may be hard to explain what it feels like to hold your baby for the first time, but that’s what photos are for. Upload your own first mommy photo to Shine’s First Mom Photo Flickr Pool and share the love!

Moms have already started to submit their photos – check them out here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/1946650@N20/

We will be featuring entries in a gallery on Yahoo! Shine next month – just in time for Mother’s Day.

With close to two hundred outlets across the Philippines, the Goldilocks chain of bakeries is renowned throughout the archipelago and beyond (they’ve established beachheads in California and Vancouver) for their cakes, pastries, candies, breads, and Filipino cuisine.

Among the standouts on their menu—and there are many—is the Thirst Quencher, a yummy frozen yogurt-esque concoction that comes in a variety of tastebud-zapping flavors, such as fruit salad, gulaman, halo-halo, pandan jelly ice mix, and mango with sago.

Delightful Formats

In running a rich media display ad on the Yahoo! PH homepage, it’s only appropriate the ad be as delightful to watch and interact with as the Thirst Quencher is to quench with.

Yahoo!’s Ad Tech Southeast Asia team rose to the challenge with an ad format fittingly called Dual Delights, a custom combination of no less than five smaller standalone formats, all brought together and collectively harnessed to deliver an experience worthy of both the Yahoo! and the Goldilocks premium brands.

The formats at work here are the 350 x 200 FPAD (frontpage ad) on the right, the 1280 x 1024 rich wallpaper framing the page content, a 770 x 560 transparent banner, a 960 x 560 takeover banner, and video.

Delightful Execution

The ad kicks off with a Flash-built 770 x 560 transparent banner giving the illusion of the Thirst Quenchers suspended across the digital canvas. From there, the Flash enables the Quenchers to slide over to the page margin, or gutter. Both gutters assume the Goldilocks branded graphics to compliment the FPAD.

To minimize intrusiveness, the automated intro is frequency capped at one per day per user. Users who return the same day will see only the 350 x 200 FPAD with invitations to “mouse over here to learn more” and “open wallpaper.”

The various layers of the wallpaper had to be adjusted in order to meet the frequency cap requirement and yet still have the wallpaper appear if the user opts for it.

Mousing over the FPAD brings up a 3-2-1 countdown made with JavaScript. This launches the 960 x 560 takeover banner where the users can learn more about the Quenchers and watch a Goldilocks commercial, built into the banner as a Flash NetStream object. The user can also click through to the Goldilocks site.

The Ad Tech SEA team had to do some fancy Flash manual coding to add those “open wallpaper” and “close wallpaper” buttons for the user’s convenience.

The Goldilocks Dual Delights ad is just that. It achieves a tasteful balance between taking full advantage of the interactive canvas without intruding too much on the user experience.

Click here to quench your thirst.

 —Thomas T. Lady

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a new series entitled “Ad Tech of the Week.” For more information visit the Yahoo! Advertising Blog or follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Nearly 500 advertisers, media buyers and agency executives attended Yahoo!’s first-ever Digital Content NewFront event in New York City yesterday. Key executives were on hand to reinforce our commitment to premium, quality content and announce the launch of new programs, such as ‘Katie’s Take’ starring Katie Couric, and our latest additions to the men’s programming slate.

At this event, Yahoo! highlighted what makes it unique among web distributors: Premium content, programming and curation, exclusive experiences, leading content verticals and the scale that only its global audience can bring.

Top Hollywood talent and industry leaders such as Anthony Zuicker, Ben Sherwood (ABC News), Bob Bowman (MLB), Ken Marino, Fabio Vivani (Top Chef) and Katie Couric, took part in Yahoo!’s event alongside Ross Levinsohn, EVP and Head of Global Media, Wayne Powers, SVP, North American ad sales and Mickie Rosen, SVP, Yahoo! Media Network.

The latest projects announced and promoted on stage included:

• From the creators of “Rock of Ages,” Matthew Weaver and Chris D’Arienzo introduced “Dancing With Myself,” (working title) a musical “jukebox” comedy, produced by Matthew Weaver and RelativityREAL, featuring classic 80’s pop songs;
• Our third slate of original video programming targeted at men, with six shows, including a talk show in development with Jeff Goldblum, “Stunt Nation,” with host Sal Masekela, demolition program “Kaboom,” and daily show “The MANual”;
• Katie Couric’s new web show, debuting on May 1, “Katie’s Take.” Each week, Couric will explore topics and issues that matter most to her viewers – including health, nutrition, parenting, and wellness. Every episode will feature interviews with top experts in a variety of fields as well as Couric’s own personal, fun and unique perspective. Poland Spring Natural Spring Water is the exclusive launch sponsor of this series which will be featured on a dedicated page on Yahoo!.

The Digital Content Newfront is an annual series of events committed to the creation of valuable partnerships between brands and content providers.With events held in New York City over the course of two weeks, DCNF has created a marketplace for connecting digital content and content creators with brand owners and their marketing agencies.

Yahoo! is committed to being an environmentally responsible company, and we make constant improvements to our operations to work smarter and more efficiently.

In the past year, we made great progress in increasing our number of Green office buildings around the globe, continuing to push the industry standards for energy-efficiency in data centers, providing meaningful content to our users, and spreading grass-roots impacts through the Yahoo! Employee Foundation (YEF) and the Yahoo! Green Team.

Here is a summary of some great green things that have been happening at Yahoo!:

GREEN ON THE NETWORK
We don’t keep sustainability to ourselves!  We serve the Yahoo! community with smart lifestyle tips every day at Yahoo! Shine Green .  And, we’ve just announced an exciting partnership to promote the launch of America’s most fuel-efficient five-seat car, the Focus Electric, with “Plugged In,” Yahoo!’s first reality competition series on Yahoo! Screen.  Read more about this electrifying programming on Yodel Anecdotal.

Search Trends:

• Searches on Yahoo! for “electric vehicles” are up 2168% this month.
• Hybrid car searches are up 259% this month on Yahoo!, 59% of searches come from males
• Earth Day searches are spiking 226% this month on Yahoo! – searches for Earth Day activities are also spiking.  72% of searches come from females.

GREEN AT WORK
On the data center front, we’re proud to have the best Clean Energy Index score in Greenpeace’s report on the IT industry for the second year in a row. Our Lockport data center also won a Finalist spot in Uptime Institute’s highly competitive Green Enterprise IT annual awards.

And, last year, Yahoo! offices received LEED® Green Building Certification for our Sunnyvale, New York, and Bangalore, offices and our Omaha Data Center.  Additional third party Green Building designations have been awarded to our offices in Dublin, Milan, and Singapore.   As of today, 35% of Yahoos work in designated “green” buildings, up from 0% in 2010, and climbing quickly towards our 2014 sustainability goal of having 60% of Yahoos working in green certified offices. 

GREEN IN THE COMMUNITY
Yahoos contribute their time, talents, and treasure to environmental causes all over the globe.  Through fundraising and grant championships with the Yahoo Employee Foundation (YEF), Yahoos have contributed their own money and efforts to deliver nearly $400,000 in grants for environmental organizations. 

YAHOO! GREEN TEAM
The Yahoo! Green Team is taking action with events around the globe, including Tree-Plantings (Bangalore), E-waste Recycling (Atlanta), Free is Good Re-Use Fairs (Barcelona, Ho Chi Minh City & others) Trashcan Retirement Parties (Sunnyvale,  Beijing & others), Stair Climbing Celebrations(Taipei), Mugstock events (Omaha),  Green Speakers Breakfast (Dublin), Lights-Off Hours (Manila, Singapore, Seoul, etc.) and many more.

Happy Earth Day, from the Yahoo! Green Team!

One of Yahoo!’s big European partners, AOL Germany, has seen its homeland usurped by General Aladeen, ruler of the Republic of Wadiya, the main character played by British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen (Ali G, Borat, Brüno) in “The Dictator”, Paramount Pictures’ upcoming summer side splitter.

Paramount is waving the banners for this “heroic story of a dictator who risks his life to ensure democracy would never come to the country he so lovingly oppressed” with a fully immersive and very playful custom arch on AOL DE.

The Ad

It starts harmlessly enough with a 300 x 250 MPU (Mid Page Unit) on the right showing a brief video teaser, paired with a 400 x 60 graphic displaying the film’s release date.

Accepting the MPU’s invitation to click to expand (“Zum Vergrössern Klicken”) activates the arch with a digital swish of a Wadiya-gold curtain.

The Tech

The two primary technologies used to create this ad are ActionScript 2.0 (AS2) and JavaScript.

First and foremost, JavaScript enables the building of the arch upon user initiation. Indeed, throughout the execution it’s the JS that facilitates the local connection to sync the ad units and trigger the animations upon user interactivity.

The ALADEEN search box trick as well as the rich wallpaper were pulled off with Flash and AS2 while the trailers are Flash NetStream objects.

Arch on the March

Relatively new in Yahoo!’s EMEA markets, the custom arch format is catching fire. Just one trip to Wadiya and it’s no wonder why. The custom arch allows for a myriad of graphical units and levels of interactivity and engagement. As such, it’s a textbook example of what differentiates display ads in the digital realm from traditional media advertising.

Currently available in the UK/IE and Germany, the custom arch will soon land on the shores of Yahoo! and partners in Italy, France, and Spain. Brazil, Mexico, and Australia will be welcoming it as well.

And it’s in the Republic of Wadiya.

Click here to say hi to the general.

—Thomas Lady

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a new series entitled “Ad Tech of the Week.” For more information visit the Yahoo! Advertising Blog or follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

For the first profile in the series, Flickr is spotlighting Santa Cruz, CA-based photographer Carolyn Lagattuta, whose experience with Flickr is a true reflection of what the site hopes to instill in every user –- inspiration.

Before joining Flickr in 2006, Carolyn had a nagging feeling that something was missing in her life. “I always felt like I never really had one particular thing I was good at — something that lit my fire and made others feel something” Carolyn said. “Little did I know, I did have a talent in me. Flickr and the people I’ve met through the site brought it all to the surface.” After a friend suggested that the university administrator and casual photographer, join Flickr, Carolyn immediately found her niche within the site, connecting with other photographers, joining Flickr groups and gaining recognition among her peers for her quirky, colorful style and creativity. Carolyn’s newfound passion for photography, cultivated through Flickr, breathed new life into her career, friendships and even the way she looked at the world. “Flickr has made me see everything in a whole new light,” she said.

Carolyn spoke with Flickr about her photography, Flickr-founded friendships and how the photo-sharing site has influenced her life today.

You are quite the Flickr fan! What has made your experience with the site so positive?

I know it sounds cheesy, but Flickr has truly changed my life. It ignited something inside me and made me feel like I was really good at something. I wasn’t really a photographer before I joined Flickr, I was just at home, taking photos of my baby to send to my husband at work with a point-and-shoot he had bought for me. The best part of joining the site initially was that I didn’t need to be a professional photographer to capture people’s attention with my work. As my eye and technical ability began to improve, my husband upgraded my cameras and my work was getting noticed more and more. The feedback I got from my Flickr contacts, both good and bad, inspired me to keep shooting to see where it would take me.

I joined a Flickr group called Mission 24 which gave us weekly photo challenges where we were assigned a particular word and had 24 hours to take a picture of the way we interpreted it — literal or not. While my photos weren’t the greatest at first, I always tried to be as creative as possible and I even made the front page of Flickr with my tampon- inspired interpretation of the word “flow.”

I think this experience kicked-off my passion for wanting to think outside the box and have fun with my photos. The reaction to my work has made me feel like I really have a place within the Flickr community, and that I’ve made connections that will last a lifetime. All in all, I cant even begin to express the impact that Flickr has had on my life.

Tell us about the friendships and connections you’ve made with other users

Hands down, one of the best things about the site has been the friendships I’ve made with Flickr users all over the world. We communicate on a regular basis, sharing insights on photography, video clips and information on photo workshops. There’s this constant communication between us that has even crossed over into our personal lives. I know about people’s children and families and we help each other whenever needed. It’s crazy to think that these kinds of personal connections could be available on a photo-sharing website.

How has Flickr helped you with your career?

I work at UC Santa Cruz. I was first hired as an administrator in public affairs and communications, but as I got more involved in Flickr, my photography techniques improved due to the guidance I was receiving from other users, and my work soon captured the attention of my co-workers and manager. Three years ago, photography was written into my job description and now I’m also a campus photographer, shooting for the school’s various publications and websites. With all the restructuring and layoffs taking place throughout the workforce, I’m confident that this has made me more valuable to my employer. I even took a picture from the UC Santa Cruz campus that ended up being featured in Newsweek! It just gets better and better.

What has been your main takeaway from your Flickr experience?

The benefits I’ve enjoyed from the site are too many to count but I think the main thing is that Flickr, and photography in general, has made me see everything in a whole new light. I notice everything and everything is magnified. Even if I don’t have my camera with me, I notice it all, be it beautiful or ugly, ordinary or unusual; a couple holding hands, or a rusty sign, or a sunset, or a piece of trash in a gutter. I’m seeing everything and appreciating it in a way that I never imagined I could. Knowing that my new way of looking at the world has inspired me and my Flickr community of friends has been invaluable.

Check out Carolyn’s photo stream here. Interested in having your Flickr story featured? Click here to submit your story for a chance to be our next featured photographer!

The Yahoo! Safely team is deeply committed to ensuring the online safety of Yahoo!’s 700 million users—and now they are getting a little help from their new mascot! This friendly robot is full of great advice about privacy settings, coping with online bullying and the best ways to use Yahoo! products safely. But before he starts sharing his valuable advice, he needs your help finding a name and a message!

Want to help make this friendly robot a success? From now until April 27th, enter the Name the Safely Bot Twitter contest by following @YahooSafely on Twitter and tweet:

- A name suggestion, and/or
- Our new mascot’s first safety message

Don’t forget to use the hashtag #SafelyBotContest so we can track your entries. You can enter one name and one message per day.

Our judges will pick one winning name and one winning message. The winning contributors will get a Yahoo! Safely shirt, a shout-out on Twitter, and recognition on the Yahoo! Safely site.

The contest is open to U.S. residents 13 and older. If you’re under 13 but still want to put your naming skills to good use, ask a parent or guardian to help you enter. Get started now. Visit Twitter and submit your entry today!

Yahoo! Finance and PARADE teamed up to discover how Americans view their jobs and work culture, their career priorities and prospects. We invite you to take the Job Happiness survey, which will be featured in a future issue of Parade and on Yahoo! Finance later this year on PARADE.

How would you answer the following questions?

• Would you fire your boss if you could?
• Would you rather have a 5 percent raise or two more weeks of vacation?
• If you could start over, would you pick the same field?
• Would you be friends with your colleagues if you didn’t work with them?
• What one piece of advice would you give a young person starting a career today?

You can also check out some of the stories from Parade’s 30th Annual Report of What People Earn on Yahoo! Finance.

Chevy is promoting its 2012 Volt hybrid (“Electric When You Want It, Gas When You Need It”) with a hybrid custom ad for Yahoo’s tablet homepage.

Built entirely in HTML5 by Yahoo!’s Homepage/Login Ad Tech team, the ad starts out as a humble 768 x 40 sliver dividing the top story from the rest of the page content. The moving car is a combination of imagery and code. The two wheels are a pair of animated gifs that were added to the car image, all of which traverse the sliver in seamless tandem thanks to HTML5. The sliver’s background image of the road is actually three images married together and animated in sync to simulate driving.

When you tap the sliver, JavaScript makes it expand to the full ad. If you’re using an iPad 1 or 2, the ad takes up the full screen. The iPad 3, which has double the pixel resolution of its predecessors, will display the ad across half the screen.

Road Trip

From here it becomes a fully immersive interactive experience with you in the driver’s seat. Upon pressing the power button to start the silent engine, you zoom off on a road trip that takes you across myriad landscapes, from desert to the wintry mountain variety before finally arriving at the beach just in time for sunset.

Taking advantage of the iPad’s built-in gyroscope, tilting the tablet from side to side lets you pan to take in the full panorama through the windshield. The Homepage/Login Ad Tech team used JavaScript to access the Apple hooks in the iPad so that the ad could detect and respond to gyroscope events.

The ad also accommodates both the portrait and landscape views. This required double the amount of style attributes in the CSS3 that compliments the HTML5 so that the relative positioning of the ad’s components remain consistent.

The little map along the bottom, also HTML5, is much more intricate than it appears at first blush. What looks to the lay driver as a simple two-dimensional map tracing a linear one-way route is in fact several layers of imagery married together. The background, the animated battery and fuel gauge gifs, the line on the map, the little disclaimer text, the dark gray filling the map in time with the video: Each represents a separate standalone part on the assembly line.

The map has ten pixels of transparency on either side. The dark gray filler is JavaScript that shines through the transparency. Whilte it appears the dark gray is tracking the video’s duration, in reality it was the video’s timing that determined how fast to let the dark gray fill ‘er up as the ad was built.

The whole point of the simple yet complicated map is to convey how far the Volt can take you on its combined energy sources of battery and gas.

Carousel and Wallpaper

The end of the road trip sees the ad turn into a carousel to show off the Volt from no less than eight different angles, each with a handful of buttons on certain parts of the vehicle. The user can tap each button to get information about that part of the vehicle before using the arrows on either side to rotate to another view.

This part of the ad was built with eight separate PNG images of the Volt provided by the agency. In the beforetimes, when a rich media execution like this would’ve been built in Flash, adding those buttons would’ve been cake. Flash has button states, and a button is a very common Flash object. With HTML5, however, the Homepage/Login team had to build the buttons manually in the code, complete with the correct size, sheen, opacity, and positioning.

Clicking “Download Wallpapers” brings you to the wallpaper gallery, the final interactive portion of the ad. Here the user can browse and shuffle the images while deciding which to download. Tapping any of the three images along the bottom pushes it to the larger top pane. Tapping that enlarges the image even further with download instructions that the team added manually. The HTML5 allows for the shuffling animation and keeping track of which image is where as you tap along.

Photoshop Assembly Done in a “Flash”

Before HTML5 even entered the equation, quite a bit of digital factory work had to be done. To convey what they were envisioning as the final product, the agency provided a 1600-pixel video of a user interacting with a Flash version of the ad. The video was shot with a fisheye lens to simulate the panning.

The agency also provided the creative assets with which to build the ad in the form of two Photoshop (PSD) files. When comparing the assets to the video, the Homepage/Login team discovered that the assets were only about 75% complete. When using PSDs to build Flash events, it’s a common habit to make changes on the fly in the Flash without reflecting those changes in the original PSDs.

Among the changes were the buttons for replay and download. Quite a bit of the copy, such as the legal disclaimers, had been changed. The wallpapers had to be recut to three different sizes: Icon, medium, and the large downloadable image.

Among the biggest hurdles was creating a portrait version of the ad, as the original Flash file only showed landscape. Two faux tablet screens, landscape and portrait, were created in Photoshop. The Homepage/Login team kept the original video handy to ensure accurate image placement and layering.

The map alone required two separate files: The road on the light gray background with the filler portion cut out, which allowed the dark gray filler to be coded in HTML5 as a mask timed to move off the image at a pace equal to the video’s progression.

The map’s pop-ups are comprised of another four images: The battery and gas meters, both animated gifs, each parked in their own respective containers, all timed with the video with very specific instruction on timing. Due to legal reasons, the battery icon was only to remain for 1/10 of the route before flipping to the gas icon. Hence, the Homepage/Login team had to keep the brakes gently pressed at the start of the map animation to give user time to read the battery’s associated copy.

Each of the buttons used in the eight-sided carousel was a separate PNG file. Photoshop was used to resize and set the correct opacity and transparency. For the most part, 80% opacity was used (20% transparency).

During this Photoshop construction, the x and y coordinates had to be documented, as that’s vital for the HTML5 code that came afterward.

HTML5-Wheel Drive

With the assets in place and perfectly layered, the manual HTML5 work could begin. It was a long and arduous road trip to be sure, but the result was worth it. The Chevy Volt tablet ad takes its place on the showroom floor as a superlative example of mobile display advertising. It opens the driver’s side door so the user can get in and take a spin in a fun, visually rich, interactive vehicle of digital craftsmanship.

Special thank-you to Jonathan Zing and Patty Spyrakos from Homepage/Login Ad Tech for providing the details about the ad. They built the ad in cooperation with Lloyd Rivera, Campaign Manager for Homepage/Login Ad Tech.

Click here to jump in and drive.

—Thomas T. Lady

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a new series entitled “Ad Tech of the Week.” For more information visit the Yahoo! Advertising Blog or follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Here are a few of our favorites:

• Personalize your in-box: Yahoo! Mail has many colorful themes to choose from and two of them are even animated! People with newer Macbooks who use the Google Chrome browser can have an alien zipping around their screen. To check it out go to Yahoo! Mail, “Options”, “Themes” and select the thumbnail with the alien in the UFO. Move your laptop around to see the alien fly faster. There’s another theme that moves too. We’ll give you a hint – it’s blue. Hey, we don’t want to give everything away so easy!

• Keep your in-box tidy: Automatic Organizer sorts your emails according to pre-set preferences so your inbox doesn’t spiral out of control. Regret signing up for some of those newsletters? Use the Unsubscribe feature to safely get off mailing lists. And to manage your emails, set up folders so it’s easy to find the important ones. If you right click on an email and select “filter emails like this”, you can set up an automatic filter to make email filing a snap.

• Photo Slide Shows: Yahoo! Mail detects photos in your incoming emails, so you can view slideshows right from your Inbox. An incoming email that contains photos, or a link to a photo service like Flickr, displays thumbnail images at the bottom of the message.

• Take it with you: Yahoo! Mail is mobile. Apple iOS5 users can easily add their Yahoo! Mail account to their iPhones & iPads. Android users can download our popular Yahoo! Mail Android app from Google Play.

• Organize your purchases: Drowning in email receipts? Online shoppers, rejoice – we’ve got you covered. Sign up for the All My Purchases app within Yahoo! Mail to get all of your receipts and purchase information centralized in one spot.

• Hidden Cat: For all cat-lovers out there, be sure to Alt-Click on the Yahoo! Mail logo within Mail to meet our resident team mascot. “Fluffy” can only be seen for people using Firefox or Internet Explorer.
• Become a productivity master: Shift + ? pulls up all of the keyboard shortcuts within Yahoo! Mail. Learn new shortcuts like N = new message, T = start a new text and P = print message.

And to those of you without a Yahoo! Mail account, open a new account to see what you’ve been missing!

We’ve been nominated for 5 Webby Awards this year, and we’re also in the running for 5 Webby People’s Voice Awards. The winners of the prestigious Webby Awards, handed out for excellence on the Web, are selected by the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences (IADAS), but the Webby People’s Voice Awards are voted on by members of the online public – that’s where you come in.

The People’s Voice Awards let consumers choose the best in each category, and we need Yahoo! fans to help us bring the awards home for:

• Flickr for best Community website
• omg! from Yahoo! for best in the Celebrity/Fan category
• IntoNow in the Social category
• Financially Fit in the How-To and DIY category
• Failure Club in the Reality category

Voting is open through April 26, so click the links above and cast your ballots for our nominees!

Adding to the exciting news, the Academy has acknowledged other outstanding entries among the nearly 10,000 received as Official Honorees, including 7 Yahoo! entries:

• Yahoo! Movies — Movie and Film category
• Yahoo! TV — Television category
• Yahoo! Mobile Flickr Android App — Best Use of Device Camera category
• Chow Ciao — Best Web Personality/Host category
• Nikki Boyer of Yahoo!’s “Daytime in No Time” – Best Web Personality/Host category
• A Decade of Difference — Events & Live Webcasts category
• Around the World with Christiane Amanpour — News & Politics: Series category

Yahoo! is committed to creating deeply personal digital experiences for our users. We’re very proud to be recognized by the IADAS with our Webby Award nominations, and would be even prouder to win the Webby People’s Voice Awards we’re up for – so vote for our nominees and share in our collective yodel: Yahoo!

Four years ago, Leslie was a successful Phoenix- based real estate agent with more than 30 years of experience under her belt. But when the housing market tanked, so did her career and Leslie found herself out of work and struggling to keep the roof over her head. This episode of Yahoo! News’ Remake America highlights the struggles that Leslie has faced braving the job market as an older worker in a work environment where, according to Leslie, decades of experience do not hold the weight they should among employers.

After sending out hundreds of unanswered applications and attending a number of fruitless job fairs, Leslie was on the brink of selling her home when Yahoo! News’ Remake America stepped in. After a consultation with career expert Tory Johnson, Leslie was sent to New York City and given the opportunity to interview for her dream job as a sales trainer with Dale Carnegie, one of the premier sales training agencies in the world.

But when her interviewer presented her with a quirky challenge to test her sales skills, it was up to Leslie to prove that she still has the energy, spunk and creativity to rival any of her younger counterparts. Did her quick thinking and sales tactics land her the job? Find out on this episode of Remake America and tune in next Monday to learn about a wounded Iraq war veteran’s struggle to transition from warfare to workforce.

Visit the Remake America page on Yahoo! News for weekly video stories and advice and resources on problems faced by families on Remake America, including home foreclosure advice and resume tips.

Photo of Leslie courtesy of Pamela Dancil