Today we are excited to announce a new deal that will make Snapfish the preferred worldwide printing partner for Flickr!  With 22 worldwide printing locations, our partnership with Snapfish will enhance the experience of Flickr’s 40 + million members by increasing the number of printing options and providing cost-effective, quality photo printing functionalities for both the US and international markets.

Our goal is to making printing simple and easy for our members.  For instance, the print functionality within Organizr will be easily accessible for Flickr members, allowing members to conveniently select photos in a batch process for printing.In the US, Flickr members will be able to go to a wide variety of Snapfish retail partners including Walmart, Walgreens, Staples, Duane Reade, Publix, Meijer, and Longs, among others.  Additionally, Flickr members will have the ability to ship their prints to any location in the world.  And since we know that money is tight for people, our new partnership ensures that our US members will have some of the lowest printing prices around, with competitive international pricing as well.

We believe that this new partnership provides a tightly integrated, comprehensive printing environment to help bring members’ photostreams to life.  We have worked closely with Snapfish to develop a full integration with our online photo organization features – Organizr, Sets and Photo Page – to improve the overall printing experience.  For those members who have used other other printing options, our existing printing partners will still be available to you through the recently launched App Garden.

It’s hard to believe that it has been over a year since Getty Images partnered with Flickr to launch the groundbreaking Flickr Collection. We wanted to provide a quick update on how the collection has grown and some of the exciting new developments in our partnership.

When launching the Flickr Collection, our goal was to choose photos that created a commercially viable collection, while preserving the inspirational and unexpected nature of the images that are so prevalent on Flickr. We’re proud to announce that today the collection has grown to over 60,000 images, many of which have been licensed by Getty Images’ customers from around the world.

Since the announcement of the partnership, editors at Getty Images have been busy exploring the Flickrverse to find the right photos to be part of the collection. While we know they’ve enjoyed viewing your work, with over four billion images, it can sometimes be an overwhelming experience!

In the past, the Flickr community could set their account settings to reflect that they wanted to be contacted by Getty Images, but could not proactively present a portfolio of photos for consideration. We know how eager the 40 million + Flickr members have been to showcase their work and wanted to develop a solution.

That’s why, today, we’re very excited to announce a formal Call for Artists, meaning ANY Flickr member can submit their work to be considered for the collection through the Call for Artists group on Flickr.

Detailed guidelines can be found on the group page, but here’s a quick snapshot on the process for submitting your photographs:  A submission should include exactly 10 images that represent what you consider to be the best of your work. The Getty Images creative team will evaluate submissions based on style, subject matter and technical skill. If some or all of the photos – or other images from your photostream – are selected for the Flickr Collection on Getty Images, you will receive an invitation via Flickrmail. This invitation will clearly show Getty Images’ initial selection of images and introduce the enrollment process.

When we first launched, we aimed to create a “living collection” – one that mirrored the vibrant Flickr community itself. Now, with the community’s help, the collection will continue to grow and bring a new flavor of photography to Getty Images and its customers — an authentic view into the daily lives of people around the world.

We at Getty Images truly can’t wait to review the portfolios of the accomplished and experienced photographers that contribute to Flickr. With the community’s help, the collection will better represent, what is, in effect, the world’s image library.

Andy Saunders
Vice President of Creative Imagery
Getty Images

Happy Mole Day to you all! No, we’re not celebrating the burrowing mammal or even the chocolate-accented Mexican sauce. Mole Day commemorates Avogadro’s number — 6.02×10²³ — a way to measure infinitesimal things like atoms and ions. It’s celebrated from 6:02 a.m. to 6:02 p.m. on October 23rd. Get it? Here’s what our chemists concocted this week:

• Faces of the Flickrverse: Tagging has always been the fun part of Flickr, making it a cinch to find photos of anything from fungus to flugelhorns. This week, People in Photos made its debut, letting you add people to your photos, find photos of people you know, and manage which photos you’re in. If you’re tagged, you’ll get notified in your activity stream. If that sounds at all creepy to you, never fear – you’ve got plenty of privacy power. Opt out, opt in. More on the Flickr blog.
• Teach your phone to yodel: Sure, your mobile can probably mimic the sound of crickets, a dog bark, a vintage telephone, or sonar. But can it yodel? Now it can. In support of our Yodel Studio promotion, which seeks the world’s best new yodelers with a chance to be featured on our homepage and in our global marketing campaign, we’ve cooked up yodeling ringtones. And not just your government issue yodel. We’re talking hip-hop, a cappella, R&B, reggae, and bluegrass yodels. Download them here or text YODEL to 49737 in the US, 56263 in India, and 83338 in the UK. Oh, and don’t forget to submit your yodel and/or vote for your favorites. The deadline is November 8th.

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Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Avast, me hearties! Yon ‘morrow is International Talk Like A Pirate Day. If’n ye’d like to bellow like a true buccaneer, ye best be practicin’ smartly ‘fore the dawn. “Yes” tis an “aye,” “no” tis a “nay,” yer neighbor tis a “bilge rat,” an’ yer boss be a “scallywag.” “Wow” be “blimey!” an’ “gangway!” is what ye yells from yer car window. An’ ye best learn how to chat like a pirate, too. Here’s what we got shipshape this week:

• Unleash your inner curator: If you’re a photo nut, it’s easy to get sucked into exploring the more than 3.4 billion photos on Flickr. And if you’ve ever wanted to collect and horde your favorites by theme, have we got a new feature for you. Introducing Flickr Galleries, which gives members a handy way to celebrate the creativity of their fellow photographer. You can curate together up to 18 public photos or videos in one place – Big Ben, blue eyes, snails, cats with thumbs, mannequins, what have you. To get started, just click on the “Add to Gallery” icon on the menu bar. Just five days out of the gate and it’s a very popular feature – you’ve created more than 25,000 galleries to date. More here.
• Out with the old: The Messenger team has news for anyone using Yahoo! Messenger versions 6.0 through 7.5. As of September 30th, we’ll be retiring those oldies. If you’re using anything below 8.0, you’ll find you won’t be able to sign in. That’s the price of progress, right? (We wouldn’t want you to be that guy still using a mobile phone with an antennae.) While Messenger 9.0 and the beta of Messenger 10 are rich in features like video sharing, full-screen video chat, spam protection, and more, we realize people like options. So after September 30th, you can also try Yahoo! Messenger for the Web or the IM built into Yahoo! Mail. More here.
• Celebrate en Español: In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, Yahoo! En Español has teamed up with Kodak to invite Latinos – and Latinos at heart – to “Muestra Tu Herencia” (Show Your Heritage). Folks are invited to upload photos of friends and family through October 31st as well as leave comments. For every photo uploaded, Yahoo! and Kodak will donate $4 to the Hispanic College Fund (up to $20,000). And as of October 12th, we’ll unveil a digital photo mosaic of all the submitted photos as a tribute to Hispanic families across the U.S. Muchas gracias!

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Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Today, of course, is the eighth anniversary of the September 11th attacks in NYC, the Pentagon, and rural Pennsylvania. To ensure we never forget, the National September 11 Memorial & Museum just put out a call for people from around the globe to “Make History” with their images, videos, and stories as a permanent digital archive. Here’s how we made history this week:

• F-F-Fantastic phone apps: For the millions of you with touch-screen phones, you can now download some of Yahoo!’s most popular services. Call them the Three F’s: Finance, Flickr and Fantasy Football (or is that four Fs?). With interactivity reminiscent of their Web-based counterparts, these apps let you access our services on the go from an iPhone, iPod touch or select Blackberry models (including Bold, Tour and 8900 series). For now, Finance and Fantasy Football users can download them in the U.S. and Canada, while the Flickr app is also available in the UK, France, Hong Kong, and Singapore. For a deeper dive, check out our post earlier this week.
• Inviting apps & jumbo files: The new and improved Yahoo! Mail just debuted three new apps that turn your inbox into even more of a productivity hub. Head over to that handy Applications box and you’ll notice new apps from Evite and pingg — two options for sending and managing invitations. They sensibly integrate with tools like Yahoo! Calendar, Yahoo! Address Book and Yahoo! Maps to take the stress out of party-planning (and -going). And the new Attach Large Files app, courtesy of the folks at drop.io, lets you upload and share files up to 100MB. You can also collaborate by commenting on files, leaving a voicemail for more context or dialing in to a conference call for a real-time powwow. Read more here.
• Neighbors helping neighbors: Let’s say that waffle iron you plugged in blew your kitchen fuse and it’s been a blue moon since you last called an electrician. Where do you turn? The best tips are often from the people you bump into every day in your neighborhood. And we’ve just made it easier to get their word-of-mouth recommendations. Yahoo! Neighbors, a new feature on Yahoo! Local, lets you get answers to everyday problems. Use it to find local services or post questions and tips for the community. For a taste, check out this thread from some users in Dallas in search of a driving school.
• New souped-up Messenger for Mac: For all you Mac users, there’s a new beta version of Messenger available for download. Yahoo! Messenger for Mac 3.0 comes with a bunch of new bug fixes to help it run more smoothly. You’ll also get the Messenger Insider window that’s available on Windows versions, giving you a daily snapshot of what’s happening on Yahoo! and around the world. Want to take it for a test drive? Download it here and read more here.

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Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Can you remember when a mobile phone was just used for making calls? Did you ever think that you would have access to the Internet, photos, video, music, and more in something size of a deck of cards? For technology companies, advances in mobile have created playgrounds for building some pretty amazing consumer experiences – the kind that make you forget you’re not sitting in front of your PC.

Today we’re taking a huge step in bringing more of Yahoo!’s most popular properties and services to mobile devices around the world. You can now have Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Fantasy Football and Flickr, with much of the same interactivity as on the PC, on your iPhone or iPod touch (via the App Store) and select BlackBerry models (Bold, Tour, and 8900 series). It’s all part of our effort to help you stay connected.

The new Yahoo! Finance app, available on the iPhone or iPod touch and compatible BlackBerry models, helps you stay on top of the market, your portfolio, and the latest news, research, and analysis with powerful interactivity. The app lets you:

• Follow the broad market indices or a specific company
• Access the top financial news stories
• Follow your personalized portfolio from Yahoo! Finance
• Drill down into specific company information (news, chart, financial metrics)
• Get currency conversions on the go
• Watch streaming video from Tech Ticker

The new app is available in English for the U.S. and Canada and we expect to support more languages and countries in the near future, so stay tuned!

The new Fantasy Football app, available on the iPhone or iPod touch and compatible BlackBerry models, ensures that when you’re away from your computer or TV, you’ll still be in the know when your team puts points on the board. You’ll have up-to-the-minute access to rosters, players, live scores via Stat Tracker, and the latest expert analysis and news. The new app lets you:

• Edit your bench (add and drop) directly from your phone
• View matchups, standings, player and team stats, etc.
• Get live scoring just like on the PC
• Get news and expert advice just like you’re used to on the PC

This app is available in English for the U.S. and Canada – those football-loving nations.

Flickr fans will be amazed by the functionality in their new Flickr iPhone/iPod touch app – starting with the Ken Burns-effect on famed Flickr images when you first launch it. In addition to being able to share and discover photos and videos, you can also take advantage of location-based information when uploading new stuff. The new app lets you:

• Easily upload and tag photos and video while on the go
• Automatically geo-tag before you upload (opt-in required)
• Add and view photos and videos by tags & sets
• Share photos with friends via email
• Search photos and videos from the Flickr community all over the world by subject, people, or places
• See your contacts’ recent photos and activity
• Make comments and mark photos as favorites

The new Flickr app is available in English, French and traditional Chinese for the U.S., Canada, UK, France, Hong Kong, and Singapore – with more to come.

And don’t despair if you don’t have an iPhone/iPod touch or one of the compatible BlackBerry devices. You can always access these three popular services from the mobile web – just head to Flickr (http://m.flickr.com), Yahoo! Finance (http://m.yahoo.com/finance), and Fantasy Sports (http://m.yahoo.com/fantasy). And be sure to visit the new Yahoo! Mobile Homepage (http://m.yahoo.com) and personalize it with your favorite content and services from across the Internet.

Keep an eye out for additional mobile offerings across a lot more devices as we continue to bring the best of Yahoo! to mobile users around the world.

David Ko
SVP, Yahoo! Mobile

Today is Carol’s birthday!  As you know, she’s been working overtime since she arrived at Yahoo! in January. However, we heard that when she does get some time away from work, she likes to get her hands dirty in her garden.  So, in celebration of Carol’s green thumb and purple spirit, the Yahoo! Green Team got together and planted an herb garden right here at Yahoo!’s headquarters in Sunnyvale   This is the start of Yahoo!’s first ever Purple Garden, and we’re dedicating the garden to Carol.

To get ready for this birthday dedication, a dozen or so Yahoo! gardeners gathered on a Tuesday morning several few weeks ago, ready for some gardening action. They dug into planter boxes and planted basil, thyme, oregano, cilantro, mint, parsley, dill, and purple sage.  The garden boxes were distributed around our main courtyard to soak up the sun.  Today, after a few weeks of growing, the plants were ready for their presentation to Carol!

The Purple Garden is more than just lovely landscaping.  Our café’s Catering Director (also an avid gardener) helped us to select herbs which would not only grow well in the Silicon Valley climate but also be most popular in Yahoo!’s cafés.   That’s right – the herbs in these garden boxes will be used right in our very own URL’s Café.   We’re very excited about this opportunity, especially since our café is installing a food waste dehydrator, which converts food waste back into a nitrogen-rich soil fertilizer.  We’ll be using that very fertilizer to provide nutrients back to the Purple Garden plants, giving us a small taste of the human food web right here at work.  And Yahoos can take extra nutrition home with them when they snap off a sprig of thyme or mint for use in their own home-cooked meals.

Growing an herb garden at the office is a great way to remind ourselves that the combination of good planning, hard work, and attentive dedication can reap great rewards.  Fresh, flavorful, and delicious rewards, in this case!  Happy Birthday, Carol!

Danielle Bricker

Yahoo! Green Team

Today is a day near to my heart — Particularly Preposterous Packaging Day. On this occasion, we are united in cursing impervious plastic packaging that even your sharpest scissors can’t cut. And those maddening wire twisties that slow the toy-to-child introduction rate by a factor of 27. Manufacturers, are you listening?! Here’s what we made easier to open this week:

• Photo hunting: There are more than 3 billion photos and videos on Flickr — guaranteeing that you’ll find awesome captures of just about anything. Now it’s easier to wade through that massive library with the new Flickr Search. The search results page has been redesigned with new “view” controls that let you dictate whether you want the thumbnails as small, medium, or detail. There’s also an option to view search results as a slideshow. You can also click on a particular photo to launch a popup preview with more info. And, since Flickr is all about serendipity and discovery, you’ll see links to the groups, photographers, tag clusters, and places that relate to your search. Try this search for polka-dotted poodle. More here.
• Fresh and Delicious: The team over at our favorite social bookmarking site unwrapped some tasty treats this week. Delicious now has new search tools, including the ability to search within a date range and filter by tags. You’ll also find rich content (YouTube videos, Flickr images, Yelp data) right on the search results page. Since we all want to know what everybody’s up to, Delicious has added the “Fresh Bookmarks” tab to let you see the most recently-saved bookmarks that are buzzing on Twitter. And speaking of Twitter, you can now tweet your bookmarks from right within Delicious. Ditto for emailing. More here and over on the Delicious blog.
• More Messenger movies: Baby panda videos. Movie trailers. Tour de France photos. The kind of stuff we love to share. If you have Yahoo! Messenger 9.0, it’s now all that much easier to ping friends with great videos and photos. The team had added support for a slew of sites to Messenger’s inline media player — ranging from Hulu, Facebook, and Vimeo to twitpic and CollegeHumor.com. All that because you told them to. Ask, and ye shall receive. More here.

Finally, a shout-out to reader Dennis Marks for suggesting we ditch the date in our Product Pulse headlines in favor of content clues (made good sense to us!).

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

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

So long, bunnies ears. Hello, digital clarity. If you have an analog television, today is D-Day (in the U.S. at least) — the long-fabled digital switchover is here. If you haven’t gotten your converter box yet, your TV is SOL — and static-y ghosts have gone the way of Pong, Betamax, and the 8-track. Here’s what we digitized this week:

• Rock on, iPhone: There’s just something about radio — that element of surprise, that anticipation of what’s coming next, that man-I-haven’t-heard-that-song-in-years sensation. That’s the promise of our new Yahoo! Music iPhone app. Powered by CBS Radio, it lets you browse through 300+ stations within more than 20 genres (from Bollywood to Goth to Naughty Comedy), skip up to six tracks an hour, find local stations via GPS, share stations with friends, and buy music you like via iTunes. Never get stuck listening to Muzak again. Read more here, then download the app.
• Cirrus, cumulus, Flickr: The fact that Flickr has democratized photography and turned many hacks into professionals is not lost on Getty Images, the legendary stock photo agency. So back in March, we debuted the Flickr Collection on gettyimages.com, allowing mere mortals to license their work for commercial use. Today, Getty has introduced “photo clouds,” a new way to navigate groups of related photos within the Collection. You can join the community and create your own cloud around topics like “winter,” “out of Africa,” “bizarre photos,” and “fishy.” (Note the spiffy massage music that soothes as you explore). But wait! There’s also a screensaver, desktop widget, and a new Facebook app that lets you create a photo cloud to reflect your status mood. Brings new meaning to cloud computing. More here.
• Go commando with Colbert: If you’re addicted to Comedy Central’s Colbert Report, you probably know Stephen Colbert has been broadcasting from Iraq this week in support of troops stationed there. But he’s also leading an effort to make sure the children of said troops are getting what they need from a public school education. He’s teamed up with DonorsChoose.org to raise funds for military-serving schools, pitting the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard against each other. You can help by making a donation or spread the word by sporting a Colbert Avatar, with critical accessories like an eagle, bear, Colbert Nation hat, Che Colbert T-shirt, fireplace, and a desk. More here.

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

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Tonight marks the end of an era. After 17 years, Jay Leno will give his last “Tonight Show” monologue, joining Steve Allen, Jack Paar, and Johnny Carson in the ranks of former hosts. From taking Hugh Grant to the woodshed for using a prostitute to hosting the first sitting American president on a late-night show, Leno gave you plenty of reasons to delay your bedtime. Here’s what we pulled on stage this week:

• Photos without the jail time: If you’ve ever hesitated before throwing that copyrighted photo into a presentation or web page, you’ll celebrate this news. Yahoo! Search has added a Creative Commons license filter to Yahoo! Image Search to help you quickly identify photos that are OK to reuse or modify. No other search engine saves your bacon that way. Not only do we keep you out of trouble, you’ll never even the see the photos you don’t have permission to use — it’s like Eve didn’t even know the apple existed. More here.
• Search that sport: That little search box just made you a better sports fan. Yahoo! Search has added a sports team shortcut that helps you keep track of your favorite teams, leagues, and events simply by typing in a keyword or two. When’s the next Lakers game? Who’s winning the French Open? Just go to Yahoo! Search. The sports team shortcut covers the NFL, MLB, NHL, and NBA, and college sports leagues including the NCAAF and NCAAB. More here.
• 360 comes full circle: Yes, it’s official — Yahoo! 360 is coming to an end. We know, we know — it took us a while to pull the plug. But rather than rush the process and risk losing your precious photos and prose, we wanted to make sure we had a solution in place — Yahoo! Profiles. You can move your content over to your profile, where your connections can keep tabs on you, or take it to go. You can export your entries to blogging platforms like WordPress, Blogger, and MoveableType. More here.
• Comments with a click: And in the hilarious third-party app category… Feeling too lazy, bored, tired, or uninspired to write a comment for that Flickr photo? Good thing some clever souls from Virginia have developed the Flickr comment generatr. You can choose between simple (“this is super :-p”) or verbose (“i eat up the framing and foto ;-) good job my friend”). Now you can be meaningless without even trying.

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