Photo: Available from sharper65./ FLICKR: http://www.flickr.com/photos/41421819@N05/6227046130/in/photostream/

See the Year in Photos 2011 on Flickr.

Although there are nearly 6 billion photos on Flickr, Front End Manager Ross Harmes has been able to see first-hand how much of a difference a single Flickr photo can make. After checking in with the man responsible for taking a photograph that held a place on Flickr’s front page for five years, Ross learned that Flickr helped spur a significant career change. “This guy went from being a cement layer to now a professional photographer just because of the publicity he got from that one photo.”

Editors Note: This article is part of a series entitled “Life at Yahoo!,” that gives employees the opportunity to share their own stories about Yahoo!. To hear more of these stories, visit Yahoo! Careers, or visit us on Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter.

A recent Yahoo! Mobile/Razorfish study reveals interesting gender differences in usage and ranks the smartphone as the number one device in the home with 75% of votes, with a landslide 80% of respondents using their phones to multi-task while watching TV.

The more than 2,000 U.S. respondents that participated in the study were asked questions on their multi-tasking habits and device preferences, bringing to light some interesting trends and valuable insights. Following are the top 10 findings:

1. Did you see that?: An overwhelming 90% said that multi-tasking on their smartphone (while watching live TV & commercials) was to communicate with others (via text or phone).
2. Pass the remote: 60% access the mobile web (not apps or email) during TV commercials, 38% of which is related to the content they are watching. 15% of respondents admitted that they are never without their phone for the entire duration of a TV show.
3. Laptop vs. tablet: Searching for content related to what’s on TV at any given time is more prevalent for tablet users than laptop/desktop users — over half (57%) of people multi-tasking on tablets are searching for related content, while the same could be said for just 33% of laptop/desktop users.
4. Women want to know: Young women are the prime demographic to surf the Internet related to what they’re watching (65% of women under the age of 35, compared to 47% of men of the same age).
5. Mobile phone scapegoat: 52% of consumers use their mobile device to escape awkward situations. Women are more likely to use their phone as an excuse than men.
6. No need to stop & ask for directions: Overall, men (59%) are using their web-enabled mobile devices most frequently for navigational purposes.
7. Are you ready for some football?: Men were almost twice as likely to say that checking their mobile phone for sports news causes arguments with their significant other (29%) compared to women (17%).
8. Men are glued to stats: 58% of men are ‘fact checking’ on their mobile web browser while at a live sporting event, with nearly half (47%) checking out scores of other games and players.
9. The gender divide: Men are more likely to use their mobile device as a functional, all- in-one tool; whereas women are more likely to use it as an extension of the traditional phone, to update and connect with friends across their social networks on the go.
10. Mobile shopping is a man’s world: Online purchases on smartphones are more popular with men (70% under 35 years) than with women (64% under 35 years).

Any of this ring true with you? Check out the full report released today, available on http://www.razorfish.com.

To learn more about Yahoo! Mobile, check out mobile.yahoo.com and ymobileblog.com/blog. Search for “Yahoo!” in the iTunes App Store or Android Market to discover industry-leading apps, such as Livestand from Yahoo!, Yahoo! Messenger, MarketDash, Flickr, Sportacular and dozens more. With more than 100 mobile partnerships, you can find your favorite Yahoo! experiences on nearly every mobile device and platform.

Edwin Wong

Yahoo! Insights

Here’s what we’ve been up to:

A personalized living magazine just for you — Livestand for iPad is here: Livestand weaves together content from leading third-party publishers and Yahoo!’s global media network to create a visually stunning and deeply personalized digital experience tailored for you and your interests and passions. Whether it’s presenting the latest recipes, timely tweets, breaking news, or blog posts, Livestand brings you the content you care about like you’ve never seen before. Check out the video below, read more here, or better yet, visit the App Store and download Livestand for free today.

The perfect companion for your TV – IntoNow for iPad: IntoNow makes TV-watching more engaging, social, and fun with one touch of a button. Like magic, IntoNow automatically identifies what you’re watching – whether live or recorded – and displays related content and personalized recommendations on what to watch. It also lets you have conversations with friends who are watching the same shows, and follow Twitter feeds of actors and athletes on TV. It’s available today for free download in the App Store.

Today’s forecast is sunny with a touch of Flickr – Yahoo! Weather for Android: The new Yahoo! Weather app brings weather to life with beautiful photos that correspond with where you are, what the weather’s like, and what time of day it is. All the photos are from the Flickr community, with a crowdsourcing effort launching at http://flickr.com/projectweather to create a global-weather image library. The app is available as a free download in the Android Market in 35 languages and 63 countries.

A fresh way to look at email – Yahoo! Mail for iPad browser – Yahoo! Mail gives you a rich, vivid entry point on your iPad Web browser for viewing unread emails from your contacts, as well as customized local weather, trending video content, and personalized news. Read more here or head to mail.yahoo.com from any iPad to try it out.

Get your social on while reading the news – Conversations and Notifications on Yahoo!: A couple of new social features expand upon the Yahoo! News activity we launched last month to give you more ways to connect, communicate, and get updates from your friends. Want to chat about a story you’re reading? The Conversations feature lets you have small group conversations within Yahoo! News. The new Notifications feature will inform you of new social activity of interest across Yahoo! – such as feedback on reviews, responses to comments, or new conversations with friends. Both Conversations and Notifications will be available in the coming weeks.

Cutting-edge platform with a splash of lime – Cocktails: Livestand is built upon Cocktails, a powerful open platform for developers and publishers that uses many of Yahoo!’s popular developer tools such as YUI and YQL. Read more about this new platform offering here.

Unmatched creative canvas for advertising: Yahoo! continues to evolve its advertising experiences to creatively engage with audiences and tell their stories. Read more about Yahoo!’s new tablet and social advertising offerings here.

I’m pretty sure you will have heard many times before, but it’s true, in the internet and media world: content is king.

It sounds simple, but what this statement doesn’t do is capture the innovation, the passion and the strives in technology which help Yahoo! deliver the most relevant content to 92 million users in Europe alone by a combining unique technology with human expertise.

First off, you may ask who am I? I am Noelia Fernández Arroyo, VP, Head of Audience in EMEA. I’ve been at Yahoo! for over 13 years. Jerry and the team initially hired me to launch Yahoo! Spain back in 1998. I joined the company because it had the ambition to improve the World through great technology and services, with editorial at the core and you know what, the principle still remains the same today. Yes, I’ve seen changes and have experienced challenges but I firmly believe in Yahoo!’s commitment and passion to create deeply personal experiences on the Web. Yahoo!’s passion, is my passion.

To that point, we have been investing in the right areas and focusing where we can win, and where we are winning! Did you know in Europe’s five largest markets Yahoo! reaches 92 million people, up over 7 million or 9% year on year against a market growth of 2% and we’re ranked number one or two in five categories across Europe: News, Finance, Sport, Flickr and Answers. We are in a unique position where we can leverage our innovation and technology with our European users to deliver compelling content to a mass audience, every day.

We have the best technology combined with talented, global editorial teams who help us turn around events and news that people care about on a global basis. Let me give you an example, the London riots were big news here in Europe, as it was globally. We were seeing a lot of activity on the streets, which was both prolific and sensitive in nature. The flexibility of the global publishing platform allowed our News and Front Page teams to respond quickly to create around the clock coverage and exclusive content in real time and through people’s own eyes. Interestingly, in August, the UK video streams rocketed by 191% on Yahoo! News showing the demand and consumption of rich content in parallel to news stories.

So, how do we do this?

Firstly, we keep investing strongly in our new global content publishing platform. It’s called the Yahoo! Publishing Platform. It’s global but puts power in the hands of local teams here in Europe working for local audiences; it allows us to act much faster to world events and activities and provides a platform for easy integration of rich video content.

So what does the Yahoo! Publishing Platform actually mean for the life of our Editors in Europe?

• In Italy, where Yahoo! Movies is on the Yahoo! Publishing Platform, it took just one hour to create recent coverage of the Cannes Movies Festival which delivered double the performance from the previous year
• We can create and publish original content easily and quickly: in Yahoo! omg! alone we publish over 35 original stories per day unique to Yahoo!
• The Yahoo! Publishing Platform recently launched for Yahoo! Video, Lifestyle and News. A combination of coverage of key events using the new platform led to a 20% increase in Yahoo! News page views in Europe[iv]
• omg from Yahoo! has also launched in Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK
• Yahoo! Movies in Italy launched onto the platform leading to a 60% increase in page views
• So far we have launched 95 products already onto the Yahoo! Publishing Platform

Through our science and technology, we can make informed decisions, based on scientific data rather than predictions and estimations. It allows the editors I work with to get ahead of the game and be first with the right content. This is where C.O.R.E. (Content Optimization and Relevance Engine) comes in, a technology that was developed by Yahoo! Labs a couple of years ago. Sophisticated algorithms and machine learning technology, combined with human expertise allows us to carry out deep personalization to our 674 million users globally and 92 million in Europe.

Did you know?

• Our Editorial team appropriately delivers on average, 35 stories per week day, per market, targeted to our users individual interests based on our own technology
• Yahoo! personalizes 2.2 billion content module experiences on our pages per day
• We show 13 million personalized homepage versions per day and the click through rate in the Yahoo! Magazine on the frontpage has increased by more than 700% in Europe as a result of this technology

So you can see why I am committed, focused and excited to be a Yahoo! and this is just a taste of what we are currently doing here in Europe. I know we have plenty of innovation and new products up our sleeves over the coming months, so watch this space!

Gracias and keep up the purple!

Noelia Fernandez Arroyo
Proud to be a Yahoo!

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.

Second Act from Yahoo! News took home the Reality Webby Award in the Online Film & Video category, edging out nominations from reputable sources such as The Washington Post. If you haven’t checked it out already, Second Act is a Yahoo! Originals show that celebrates real people who discover their passions and reinvent themselves to reach for their dreams. Second Act has always aimed high with inspired storytelling, emotional resonance and graceful, artistic execution and has now been recognized as such in the eyes of the creative industry.  We hope you’ve enjoyed the program as much as we’ve enjoyed producing it, check out our season 1 recap below:

Yahoo! Bus Stop Derby – developed with our partners at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners – came away the winner of the Mobile & Experience Marketing award in the Interactive Advertising category, beating out campaigns from recognizable brand such as Unilever. At the end of 2010, Yahoo! ran a highly engaging and interactive local market activation program that showcased Yahoo! Mobile apps. The purpose of this initiative was to encourage people to download and use Yahoo! mobile apps in a meaningful way while showcasing our digital marketing innovation that would generate buzz, water cooler talk, and exhibit thought leadership. The Yahoo! Bus Stop Derby was a two-month citywide gaming challenge held in San Francisco, using first-of-their-kind 72-inch touch screens in transit shelters featuring interactive games tied to four key Yahoo! mobile apps: Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Sportacular, Yahoo! Messenger, and Flickr.

In addition to our two wins, our partners at Turner Sports won the People’s Voice award for Best Interactive Use of Video for their Ryder Cup Live Video player powered by Yahoo!. And of course, a big shout out to Yahoo! Finance, which was nominated for the Financial Services award in the Websites category and six Yahoo! properties recognized as honorees (some in more than one category), representing the top 10% of entries in their respective categories.

Congratulations to the Second Act from Yahoo! News and the Yahoo! Bus Stop Derby teams. They will be honored at the 15^th Annual Webby Awards on June 13^th in New York City.

Yahoo!’s royal wedding site will be an extension of Shine From Yahoo!, the leading Website for women’s lifestyle content, and demonstrates Yahoo!’s position as the premier Web destination for landmark global events. And speaking of global – the royal wedding site is localized and live in nine markets outside the US. We invite you to experience the royal wedding through all the features our site offers:

• Guestbook: The Royal Wedding Yahoo! Guestbook gives people a place to offer their marital advice and best wishes to Prince William and Kate Middleton, then share those wishes with users’ social networks.  Even celebrities have left messages for the couple on our guestbook!
• Photo galleries: View photos of the couple’s courtship, Kate Middleton as a child, and much more.
• Articles and blogs: The latest news on the royal wedding, plus articles on the wedding trends, fashion, the royal wedding’s participants and guests, and more.
• Wedding live stream: Watch the royal wedding live by visiting http://royalwedding.yahoo.com on April 29.
• Video:  Yahoo! will feature video from Associated Press, Reuters, and ABC News, along with original video content including a joint ABC News/Yahoo! News Web show called “Wedding Royale.” ABC News will also provide weekly flashback videos of the royal family. During the week of the wedding, Yahoo! will have a crew on the ground in London producing stories on topics people are most interested in.
• Mobile site: Yahoo! allows you to get your Royal Wedding fix anytime, anywhere, by visiting http://m.royalwedding.yahoo.com from your mobile phone.
• A chance to enter the “Live It Up Like Royalty” sweepstakes: By signing the Royal Wedding Yahoo! Guestbook or by “liking” Shine from Yahoo! on Facebook, users will automatically be entered to win a trip to Las Vegas to be treated like a king or queen.

Additionally, Flickr by Yahoo!, one of the world’s best places to post and share photos, features The Official British Monarchy Flickr stream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/britishmonarchy/tags/rw2011/ Join the celebration, the Yahoo! way. Cheerio!

Yahoo!’s ‘You In?’ campaign set out to create a ripple of kindness around the world over the holidays by leveraging our vast community’s social networks. We encouraged people to update their online status with how they were helping others and a call-out for others to join them. For instance, someone shared “I just paid the toll fees for 20 cars behind me. You In?”.

Through this campaign, Yahoo! inspired over 320,000 people from 18 countries to do random acts of kindness and encourage their friends and family to do the same. People updated their status on the ‘You In?’ website, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Profiles, Yahoo! Mobile, Facebook and Twitter. They also shared hundreds of photos and videos of their random acts of kindness on Flickr.

Congratulations to all the Yahoos who made this campaign a success!

If you have any questions, you can reach out to the Yahoo! for Good team at yahooforgood@yahoo-inc.com.

We live in a beautifully content rich world. More than 3.5 million photos get uploaded to Flickr every day. On email we receive nearly 2.5 billion emails each day, and many of us send hundreds of texts and tweets per month. Simply put, life is digital. In order to enjoy and share all this content, people want much more than a PC experience replicated on their tablet or phone—they want something fundamentally new.

As the premier digital media company, we see a clear opportunity to push the boundaries of personalization to deliver intelligent experiences specifically tailored for each individual.  This ultra personalized content experience is our vision for Livestand from Yahoo! – a digital newsstand, delivering a wealth of ever-changing content from multiple publishers, continuously programmed by a person’s interests and contexts.

With Livestand from Yahoo!, what you’re reading will be personalized based on your interests, your location and even the time of day.  Your experiences, which will begin on tablet form factors, will include intuitive touch interactions and an elegant design that focuses foremost on the content.

As the media landscape continues to evolve with mobile and tablet experiences top of mind, publishers and advertisers must expand their content to these platforms to stay in front of consumers.  We see an opportunity to provide publishers and advertisers with a pipeline for fresh and active content and to help them reach and engage their most valuable audiences.

With Livestand, we’re using ad formats that evoke the emotion of TV advertising with a highly-visual magazine-like experience.  And they’re combined with the effectiveness of an Internet ad that’s data-rich, actionable, even location aware.  It’s all personalized and in context – just like our content.

In the first half of 2011, you’ll see Yahoo!’s vast digital content library come to life through Livestand from Yahoo! – from Sports, News, Finance, Flickr, omg!, and the Yahoo! Contributor Network – as iPad and Android tablet applications.

Stay tuned here for more updates over the coming weeks.

Blake Irving, EVP, Chief Product Officer, Yahoo!
@Blakei

We are thrilled to announce that the neighborhood of North Beach in San Francisco is the winner in the Yahoo! Bus Stop Derby – a two month city-wide challenge that came to an end on January 28th.

Here’s how the competition shaped up:

1. North Beach: 363,650

2. Tenderloin: 329,625

3. Mission: 306,275

The first of its kind, the Yahoo! Bus Stop Derby was a unique experience using 72″ touch LCD screens located in downtown bus shelters. Riders were able to represent their neighborhood by playing interactive games and competing for a community block party with a performance by Grammy winning band, OK Go.

This innovative contest encouraged residents and commuters to engage with games that highlighted Yahoo! Mobile applications. Users were able to compete by choosing a neighborhood from a drop-­down menu on the game screen, then select from four fun and engaging Yahoo! Mobile app-related games themed around Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Sportacular, and Flickr .

On Saturday, February 5th, the North Beach community will celebrate their win and host a block party at The San Francisco Art Institute overlooking iconic San Francisco landmarks such as Coit Tower and Alcatraz. The block party will feature a free performance by Grammy-winning band OK Go, local food vendors and games.

For additional information on Yahoo! Bus Stop Derby & block party, visit: http://www.busstopderby.com/

Since the debut of Yahoo! Connected TV at CES 2009, we have defined the category of Internet-enhanced television, working with top TV brands to bring the TV app experience to life across Sony, Samsung, LG, Toshiba, and VIZIO TVs. This year, we’re taking the TV experience into a new era through the introduction of a ground-breaking feature we call broadcast interactivity.  Imagine a TV experience that brings you even closer to the programs and brands you love by letting you interact with the programming in a way you never could before. You’ll be able to play along while watching your favorite show, vote for a reality-TV participant, get more information about characters, or make e-commerce purchases using a TV app.

Yahoo! is collaborating with television network powerhouses ABC, CBS, HSN, and Showtime and top brand advertisers Ford, Mattel and Microsoft on content for a pilot program launching in the first half of 2011, and will showcase examples of the new feature during CES.  Read more about it at the Connected TV and Yahoo! Advertising blogs.

That’s not all though. We’ll also be demonstrating new ways to take advantage of the many connected devices we use today – from mobile phones to tablets and Internet-connected TV and more:

• D-Link Internet-Connected Media Player, Featuring Yahoo! Connected TV: D-Link announced plans to launch the first ever Internet-connected media player, featuring the Yahoo! Connected TV platform. The D-Link device will provide consumers access to the Yahoo! Connected TV experience without the purchase of a new TV.
• New Yahoo! Connected TV Apps:  Today the Yahoo! Connected TV experience centers around a collection of more than 100 easy-to-use TV apps that run the gamut from social networking to music, games, news, weather, finance, shopping, and more than 50,000 movies and TV shows on demand. New TV apps launching at CES include CNBC, Clear Channel Radio, NBC, QVC, mgMedia, and more.
• Flickr App Preview for Windows 7 Devices:  We’re making it even easier for you to share and organize your photos using the leading online photo sharing community in the world. The Flickr apps for Windows 7 phones and the Slate tablet – launching in a few weeks – will provide a sleek user interface and unique inter-connectivity between phones, tablets and laptops.  Check out more details on the Flickr blog.
• Yahoo! Local for Mobile:   Our goal with the new Yahoo! Local is to be the best place for people to find what’s happening in their neighborhoods, whether they’re at home or on the go. With rich hyper-local content, the new Yahoo! Local provides people a truly personalized experience across desktop and mobile (currently available via the mobile web on iPhone and Android), enabling them to discover and contribute to the best local news, deals, and events nearby, all in one place. Check out more details on the new Yahoo! Local for mobile on the Yahoo! Mobile blog.

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to keep up with more of the latest news, pictures, and videos featuring Yahoo! at CES 2011.

Cheers,
Irv Henderson

The campaign will use interactive games to highlight Yahoo!’s mobile app offerings to San Francisco residents and commuters, many of whom spend their down time at transit shelters using smart-phones to get information and stay connected on the go. Users will compete by choosing a neighborhood from a drop-­down menu on the interactive game screen at any transit shelter, then select from 4 fun and engaging Yahoo! Mobile app-related  games themed around Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo!  Messenger, Yahoo! Sportacular, and Flickr.

Participants earn points for  their neighborhoods as they compete against each other in the games, playing in either single-player or competitive mode against other neighborhoods around the city. A wide variety of neighborhoods across San Francisco are represented, including SOMA, North Beach, Mission, Castro, Hayes Valley and many others.

At the end of the campaign, the winning neighborhood will get a free concert from Grammy Award-winning rock band OK Go at a local neighborhood venue.

For complete rules and regulations, as well as a list of the Muni bus stops through out the city that will be included, please visit derby.yahoo.com

Game on, San Francisco riders!

Today’s announcements include the following partnerships and product enhancements:

Share More With a Social Dimension Everywhere on Yahoo!

Yahoo! Messenger Beta – With the new Yahoo! Messenger Beta available today, people can now play social games from publishers like Zynga, ELEX and OMGPOP, share their status across networks, and view, comment on, and “like” updates from Yahoo! Pulse, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter – all from their instant messaging client. Interoperability with Facebook Chat also broadens the group of friends that people can instantly connect and chat with on Yahoo! Messenger. To get the new version of Yahoo! Messenger, visit here and click “Download Now.”

Yahoo! Contributor Network – Announced yesterday, Yahoo!’s new platform enables people to reach an audience of millions by publishing their fresh and authentic content on Yahoo!. The Yahoo! Contributor Network is an evolution of the Associated Content platform and will bring contributions from more than 400,000 writers, photographers, and videographers to the Internet’s largest media destinations, including Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Sports, and even the Yahoo! homepage, among many others. For more information, see here.

Zynga – Starting this week, the first phase of integration with Zynga will allow people to launch, play, and share Zynga’s popular games like Mafia Wars and FishVille on Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Games, My Yahoo!, Yahoo! Toolbar, and Yahoo! Pulse.

Twitter – Building on Yahoo!’s Facebook integration, people can now also connect their Yahoo! and Twitter accounts globally to see and share Twitter updates on the Yahoo! homepage, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mail, and Yahoo! Pulse.

Discover Local Treasures With Yahoo!

Local Offers – Yahoo! is launching its Local Offers program with more than a dozen partners to provide a wide selection of local deals, coupons, and other offers – from nearby spas, restaurants and other local retailers. Currently in limited beta in the U.S., Yahoo!’s Local Offers program will make it easy for millions of people to find the best local deals and savings on Yahoo!. Launch partners include Groupon, LivingSocial, Gilt City, BloomSpot, BuyWithMe, DealOn, Zozi, CrowdSavings, Lifebooker, FreshGuide, Scoop St, Goldstar, HomeRun, Tippr, Coupons.com, and Valpak, with more partners to come.  For more information, please see the press release here.

Local Search Enhancements – Locally relevant “Quick Apps” will empower people to find restaurants they want and take action on things they discover in a more productive Yahoo! Search. Apps launching later this week include a new and improved Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search for visually zeroing in on a street or neighborhood to find local restaurants – now available across connected devices, including PCs, iPhones, and iPads.  Other new apps will enable easy comparisons of local restaurants and let people make reservations through OpenTable right on the Yahoo! Search results page.  For more on these and other Yahoo! Search enhancements launching this week, visit the Yahoo! Search Blog.

All of these new features are built on Yahoo!’s cloud and technology platforms, allowing for in-depth partner integrations and broad distribution across Yahoo!’s consumer products. For example, the integration with Zynga is enabled by the Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP), which facilitates easy social sharing of game notifications across Yahoo!’s massive audience.

For hundreds of millions of people around the world, email is a critical part of their online communications, connecting them to the people who matter most to them. With that in mind, we are rolling out Yahoo! Mail Beta — a faster, safer, more personally meaningful communication experience – seamlessly across PC, mobile and tablet devices. Here’s what we focused on:

Blazing Speed: We’ve re-architected Yahoo! Mail Beta from the ground up to provide lightning-quick performance. It’s at least twice as fast as previous Yahoo! Mail versions, and significantly faster in key geographies. The Yahoo! Mail team has made several technological advancements to make this happen, from utilizing Yahoo!’s cloud technology to focusing on user-flow optimization. Check out our post on the YDN blog for more on the great technology that’s making this possible.

Reaching Everyone: There are even more ways to share your stories with the people who matter most to you in Yahoo! Mail Beta – no matter what device or what service they use. We’ve added Twitter integration alongside Facebook, as well as richer IM and SMS experieneces, offering you more ways to share directly from your inbox. You can tweet or retweet or send a text message out to friends while pulling together an email.  And you can also easily check out photos and videos from Flickr, Picasa, and YouTube via a new feature that automatically shows slideshows right in your emails when your friends send you links from these sites.

Simple yet Powerful Search: When you’ve got unlimited storage (as you do with with Yahoo Mail) – you have a lot of email!  Our new search interface helps you get the messages you need quickly and easily.  You have the power of sophisticated searches at your fingertips, allowing you to sort and refine by sender, attachment file, date, or folder location.

Stay Safe From Spam: We all know spam is incredibly annoying; it can also be malicious. That’s why we’re proud to be No. 1 in spam protection, blocking over 130 billion spam messages each month. And Yahoo! Mail Beta gives you an even better spam-free mail experience by leveraging the power of Hadoop technology to keep you one step ahead of the spammers.

Take it With You: With this new communications experience, we’re making sure your encounters will be equally fabulous whether you’re emailing from your laptop, iPhone, iPad or Android device. No more relearning how to get things done each time you switch from one connected device to another.

So wherever you are in the world, check out Yahoo! Mail Beta now – a single speedy, simple, safe, and seamless stop for all your online communications.  We’ll be making lots of enhancements and improvements during this beta period, and we can’t wait to hear your feedback.  For more details about Yahoo! Mail Beta, visit the Yahoo! Mail blog, and to find out about related policy updates, check out the Yahoo! Policy blog.

- Kakul Srivastava, vice president of product management, Communications and Communities

Next time you take your laptop, tablet or smartphone to your neighborhood Starbucks, you are in for a surprise: the new Starbucks Digital Network, in partnership with Yahoo! launched today in our U.S. company-operated stores. Think of it as premium content to go with premium coffee.

The team at Starbucks wanted to enhance the time our customers spend in our stores, so we had a vision to create something new, localized, unexpected… and online. The Starbucks Digital Network was developed to provide customers instant access to a collection of hand-picked premium news, entertainment and lifestyle content along with free downloads, local insights and events from nearly 20 different content providers including iTunes, Nick Jr. Boost, Rodale, WSJ.com and Yahoo!  It’s all free and only available at Starbucks.

Starbucks knew we wanted to create an in-store online network, and we also knew we needed a strategic partner to bring our vision to life.  We selected Yahoo! as our partner because we needed their experience in building and managing a network of this magnitude. Yahoo! is known for offering unique and compelling online experiences and employs some of the best technical minds in the business.

There are other key synergies in this partnership. We wanted the network to be searchable, and integrating Yahoo! Search was an easy choice. Additionally, Yahoo! delivers compelling content to their customers every day, and we wanted to include that content on our network. We are happy to see that Flickr, Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Finance and Yahoo! News are available for customers who are interested in social-sharing and receiving breaking news.

We hope you stop by your neighborhood Starbucks and experience the Starbucks Digital Network, in partnership with Yahoo!, for yourself. Between October 20 through October 27, we’re offering special content you’ll only find on the Starbucks Digital Network including exclusive free tracks from Fistful of Mercy featuring Ben Harper and Dhani Harrison courtesy of iTunes, the opportunity to donate $15 to a local school through DonorsChoose.org and a first look at a bestselling author Anita Shreve’s new novel that doesn’t hit shelves until November 30.

Whether your drink of choice is a hot latte or a cold Frappuccino, treat yourself to the new Starbucks Digital Network, in partnership with Yahoo!

- Adam Brotman, Vice President Starbucks Digital Ventures

Hurricane Earl:

• The path of Hurricane Earl: searches are off the charts on Yahoo! for “hurricane earl path” and “earl hurricane track”
• Searches for the “National Hurricane Center” are up 344% this week
• Searchers are looking on Yahoo! for “hurricane tracking map” up 366% this month

From hurricanes and earthquakes to floods and tornadoes, it’s likely we will all be impacted by the threat of a natural disaster at some point in our lives, yet the unpredictable nature of these events doesn’t mean we can’t establish a plan in advance.

Emergency Preparedness

• Searches for “hurricane preparedness” and “storm preparation” are off the charts this month on Yahoo!
• Yahoo! searches for “72 hour emergency kits” are off the charts this week
• “Portable generator” searches on Yahoo! are up 54% this month.
• Yahoo! searches for “free first aid kits,” “emergency kits,” and “emergency preparedness” are off the charts this month.

***off the charts refers to searches that received little to no searches the week/month before and are now gaining interest***

Disaster Awareness

• Yahoo! searches for “hurricane” were up 53% this month, with 59% of searches coming from men. Top states searching for “hurricane” this month are: Louisiana, Florida, Texas and North Carolina.
• Searches for “2010 hurricane names” on Yahoo! are up 298% this week, with 57% of searches by females and the majority coming from women ages 35-54. Louisiana, Florida, North Carolina and South Carolina were the top states searching for this term.
• Yahoo! searches for “NOAA Hurricane Center” on Yahoo! were up 240% this week.

And, as you prepare for the possibility of a Natural Disaster, Yahoo! Health shares the essentials for your disaster recovery kit, including the following items to name a few:

• Three-day supply of water for each person (one gallon of water per person each day), stored in plastic containers and three-day supply of food, such as canned fruits, vegetables, juices, granola bars and other compact items
• Kitchen items, including: a manual can opener, a mess kit, all-purpose knife, aluminum foil, plastic wrap, and resealing plastic bags
• First-aid kit, including: spare pairs of eyeglasses and prescription medicines
• Fire extinguisher, Crow bar, Heavy-duty gloves
• Portable radio and batteries; solar and hand-cranked radios are available that need no batteries and are better choices for long-term storage of emergency equipment

There’s not enough room here to go into all of the insights Yahoo! Labs has published and presented this year – that’s what our website is for, and we highly recommend you check it out  – but to give you an idea, we recently discussed more than 25 papers at the ACMSIGIR and ACMKDD international research conferences in July. You’re not familiar with information retrieval and knowledge discovery? No worries. Here are a few highlights that will give you a feel for our work:

• Automatic Construction of Travel Itineraries Using Social Breadcrumbs: Every minute, thousands of images are uploaded to Flickr. In this study, the images and associated meta-data (like time stamps and geo-codes) became “social breadcrumbs” that Yahoo! Labs scientists used to create a roadmap to some of the world’s most popular intra-city travel itineraries, including Barcelona, London, Paris, New York, and San Francisco.

• Twitter Under Crisis: Can We Trust What We RT?: Yahoo! scientists examined Twitter usage during the 2010 Chilean earthquake, focusing on users’ differentiation of false rumors and legitimate news. The conclusion Yahoo! Labs scientists found was that users questioned the alleged rumors, almost self-regulating the truth of each other’s assertions, which shows that social networks may have the potential to correct their own mistakes.

These are just a couple, but I hope they pique your interest. There’s a lot to learn out there, and what we collectively know about the Web is changing every day.

In addition to publishing research papers and working with the academic community, Yahoo! Labs works very closely with product and engineering teams here at Yahoo! to continuously innovate and make sure our products – like Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, the Yahoo! Homepage, Search and many more – are using the latest scientific ideas and breakthroughs. So even if you’re not familiar with the latest algorithms for calculating the relevance of a website, there’s no doubt: Almost every second you spend with Yahoo! is one that’s been improved, in some way, by Yahoo! Labs.

For example, we use a technology we call content optimization that was developed in Yahoo! Labs. This helps to decide which stories will be featured in the Today Module on our homepage. All kinds of variables are factored in, from which stories seem to be gaining in popularity around the Web at that time, to what topics might be relevant to your local area and what news is about to take off, based on the years of experience and expertise of our editors. All of these factors and more get computed constantly at Yahoo!, and with that data we’re customizing your homepage, serving as many as 32,000 different versions  every five minutes. You get to see the page that’s most interesting to your world, and so does everyone else — it’s all based on science.

If you’re curious about the identities of these mad scientists working to make your Yahoo! experience better and more intuitive, here’s an up-close view from Science Week:

As you can see, they’re normal folks just like you and me. They’re just really obsessed with the science of the Web.

You can see more photos from Science Week by checking out our Flickr stream. And you can track all the innovations and interesting projects from Yahoo! Labs by following our Twitter feed.

-Prabhakar Raghavan

Yahoo! Chief Scientist and Head of Yahoo! Labs

For the first time ever, Yahoo! invited this diverse group of women—who cover topics ranging from living a vegan lifestyle to the impact of political issues on moms—from across the U.S. and Canada to Headquarters for a day (and a couple nights) of inspiration, education and fun. Dubbed “the mother of all conferences”, conversations were sparked between the 62 attendees and Yahoos from Shine, Flickr, Yahoo! Safely, Yahoo! for Good, Yahoo! Green, Social Products, Yahoo! Editorial, Yahoo! Accessibility and Ad Products.

The small group setting allowed for interesting insights, personally relevant conversations and honest, actionable feedback. Yahoo! was able to showcase practical products, services and areas of expertise that were immediately helpful to the bloggers. And the bloggers were able to connect with various Yahoos to tell us what they’d like to see from our products and how Yahoo! can be even more relevant to them as bloggers, moms and consumers. Like each moment of the day, the success of the event and Yahoo!’s relationship with this vital audience, was summed up in a tweet and a couple blog excerpts:

Caffandaprayer: Brands wanting to a) create brand enthusiasts & b) educate tech-savvy users about new/updated products could learn from Yahoo #ymotherboard.

Beccarama, a Yahoo! Mother Board member from New York wrote, “Yahoo! Takes Women Seriously. Yes they wanted to hear from us the mom-blogging community, but they also have an incredible amount of savvy, funny, smart women leading and managing their company.”

Suddenly Single Journey, a Yahoo! Mother Board member from North Carolina wrote, “Oh how I loved loved loved our morning breakout sessions. We worked with Flickr and Shine. How many people can say that? And everyone wants to help us be even bigger and better. How often do you have a corporation like Yahoo! urging you on to success, backing you and supporting you every step of the way.”

Read more about the event and see what the attendees had to say at YodelingMamas.

I’m honored to have the opportunity to stand in front of a thousand or so Hadoop technology leaders and developers to talk about how Yahoo! uses Hadoop and the cloud to deliver the right content and the right ads to the right people every second of every day. As the world’s largest user of Hadoop, there’s no doubt in our minds here at Yahoo! that it brings us significant value and is ready for mainstream, enterprise use. In fact, we believe Hadoop will play a big part in the future of the Web.

Everyone knows that the volume of content being published and shared on the Web is growing at a crazy pace. At Yahoo!, we want to help filter out the noise by bringing you the content that’s most personally relevant to you. But doing that requires us to make sense of this BIG data and do it superfast, which would simply be impossible to do if we didn’t have the major data processing power of Hadoop. In the amount of time it takes sunlight to reach the earth (8.3 minutes), Hadoop processes more than 300 million calculations with our data.

And that’s just one example of what Hadoop can do — we’re thankful for the passionate and brilliant Hadoop community and the supportive sponsors of this week’s Summit, all of whom are doing amazing things with this technology as well. Should be a great summit — for those of you who are just dying for more geeky details, follow #hadoopsummit on Twitter, or look for our photos on Flickr.

—Blake Irving, EVP, Chief Product Officer, Yahoo!

Follow Blake Irving on Twitter: @blakei

Soccer is the most popular sport in the world and Yahoo! Sports is the #1 destination, reaching more than 20 million users each month-it makes perfect sense to team up with the world’s leading soccer star-David Beckham.  Earlier this week, Yahoo! announced David Beckham would be Yahoo!’s global football ambassador throughout the World Cup. Beckham will be featured in our marketing campaign, provide content for Yahoo!’s World Cup site, tweet and post Yahoo! content on his Facebook page, judge a World Cup Flickr photo contest and more.

And at the conclusion of the Tournament, Yahoo! will host a live global press conference/Q&A with David Beckham in London, which will allow fans from around the world to ask questions of the superstar!  Finally, for several months following World Cup he will be a featured analyst for Yahoo’s football coverage as the world makes the transition back to the regional leagues and competitions.

Yahoo!’s World Cup program is a true global, integrated marketing campaign. It includes live kickoff events in various cities around the world, fun ways to share with your own social networks, a cool online interactive global game to play and a chance to WIN the first-ever Yahoo! Sports Pass (the ultimate prize for sports fans!).

This month, we have also begun launching even more exciting elements of Yahoo!’s campaign.  Our campaign is digitally led with a huge focus on and off the Yahoo! network across all segments with, of course, online activation as one of the major drivers to show the power it has to drive business and build brands.  We will execute a dynamic takeover of the homepage on June 17th illustrating Yahoo! properties in a 3D experience–entertaining, engaging and inviting users to make the web their own with Yahoo!.

Our TV spots, developed for video use on the Web as well, hit screens this week on MTV, VH1 and Comedy Central.  The “Entertainment” spot was also featured on the Glee finale!  Our campaign is cohesive and impactful, communicating one idea-Yahoo! brings Your World together with The World.  We’re continuing to focus on driving deeper engagement through unique demonstrations and trials of our products.

On the cusp of the launching the next release of our campaign, our creative advertising agency, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners has received some very special recognition in the industry. Not only have they been named “Agency of the Decade” by AdweekMedia, but recently, at the CLIO Conference Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein were honored with the CLIO Lifetime Achievement Awards, one of the most prestigious honors in advertising. It recognizes outstanding and ongoing contributions of individuals who lead the industry and gives public recognition of something that we already knew — that we’ve got some of the world’s most talented creative partners helping us continue to build the Yahoo! brand.

Here is a preview of the actual ads that you will start to see in major cities soon:

Look for lots more great stuff to come!

Elisa Steele, EVP & CMO, Yahoo!

Starting this week, we will be bringing this vision to life in the Yahoo! products you use every day.  We are starting to integrate Facebook in a big way, a result of the agreement we first signed with Facebook last December. People who use Yahoo! and Facebook can now link their accounts to view and share updates with friends across both networks.  This means you can see your Facebook News Feed from your Yahoo! homepage, Yahoo! Mail, and other favorite Yahoo! sites and services.  When you create and share content on our properties – including Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Answers, and many of our entertainment sites, such as omg!, Yahoo! TV, and Yahoo! Music – you can share that content on Facebook.

Beyond Facebook, your activities on Yahoo! are another important way of bringing social experiences together. Globally, Yahoo! now has more 80 sites producing socially infused content, including three million photos and videos uploaded daily to Flickr, 1.1 million answers provided daily on Yahoo! Answers, and thousands of comments posted daily on articles across Yahoo! sites. These social actions – what we call Yahoo! Updates – can be found in many places across Yahoo!, within products you use and on Yahoo! pages you visit every day.

Our vision is to provide a central hub for people’s online lives, and we understand that requires a Web you can trust.  That’s why this week Yahoo! is making privacy settings even easier to use with a central dashboard.  Rolling out this week as a re-fresh of Yahoo! Profiles, Yahoo! Pulse is a dashboard that makes it simple to set and manage your activities and privacy on Yahoo!.

Expect more to come and until then, share, update your status, and tell us what you think.

Jim Stoneham, Vice President of Communities

Cody Simms, Senior Director, Yahoo! Social Platforms and Yahoo! Developer Network (YDN)

Today we are excited to preview the next phase of the Yahoo! marketing campaign, showcasing the amazing content and experiences people can find only with Yahoo!.  We want people to experience first-hand how Yahoo! is the place where all the things, people, experiences, information – everything you care about – come together. It’s a place that gets to know you, a place that surprises you.  And we’ll demonstrate it by letting you sample the products, see them in action and have experiential encounters.

Keep in mind, this is just a sneak peek into the fun ideas and experiences we are dreaming up.  Starting May 18^th and throughout the year, you will begin to see finished new elements of the campaign, with many fun surprises across the Y! network, web and within venues such a cinemas, television and even in the air (on planes!).

The Yahoo! marketing campaign will show users how to tap into Yahoo’s industry-leading products and make the Internet far more personally relevant.  Starting a band? Yahoo! Search– a smarter, more personal search, will help you find the gear, gigs and guitar heroes you need to rock out.

Going to the movies? Yahoo! can entertain and enhance the cinema experience. Starting in the lobby before the movie starts, we will showcase Yahoo! products and properties through interactive panels. Using the new Sketch-a-Search app we can help you find a restaurant for after the movie.  At the start of the film, we’ll integrate Yahoo! Search into the movie trailers, simulating a Search Wow Module.

At 30,000 feet, Yahoo! will make it fun to travel. As passengers relax on airline flights, we entertain by showing how Yahoo! brings my world and the world together through our creative campaign and tailored Yahoo! content. Each flight will feature our full video campaign, and depending on the flight and time, Yahoo! content such as Funny or Die and other pieces of Yahoo! entertainment.

Keep track of the highest bid on a vintage skateboard on eBay, share your latest photos showing you landing that kickflip on Flickr and find out who’s dating who on Facebook —all from the comfort of your Yahoo! Homepage.

We can’t wait to share the new campaign where you spend a lot of your time- online. While scrolling through the “live” images you can add all your favorite items to your Yahoo! homepage. Making it relevant and personal.

So the next time you hop on a plane, check your email or go to the movies. Yahoo! can bring YOUR world and THE world together in one convenient place—wherever you are.

As the newest Yahoo! employee, at the risk of being highly corny, I’m delighted to yodel my first purple-hued shout-out to the 600 million people and tens of thousands of advertisers and publishers who enjoy Yahoo!’s products every day.

Some of you might ask why anyone would say goodbye to surfing and cycling the Central Coast of California or travelling the globe with their family to take on the job of leading products and technology at Yahoo!  My answer’s pretty easy – meet just some of the brilliant people at Yahoo! that want to change the world, and then scan the amazing list of leading products around the globe these people have delivered at scale.  When I think about what this company has meant to anyone who has used the Internet, worked in the Internet industry, or wanted to reach people across the world, there is simply none better.

From wildly popular services like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Flickr and Yahoo!’s mobile sites and apps, to Yahoo!’s best-in-class content properties like Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance and Yahoo! Sports, to many, many other great products across the world, Yahoo!’s product portfolio continues to be the envy of the industry.  Those incredible services and their respective audiences bring tremendous value for advertisers, which is why Yahoo! serves up 10 billion ads across its network every day and is the #1 publisher of online display advertising. How can anyone not want to be a part of that?

And that’s just what consumers and advertisers see from the outside.  Inside Yahoo!, there’s technological and scientific brilliance everywhere you look.  With 500 patents, one of the world’s largest cloud computing infrastructures, and top scientific talent across computer science, machine learning, economics and social sciences, I’m awed at the caliber of people I’m going to be working with. The intellectual horsepower doesn’t stop there – I’m looking forward to working with some of the smartest and best-in-class talent around the world in marketing, advertising sales, partnerships, programming, service engineering and operations.  The commitment Yahoos have shown over the years to delivering the best experience to both consumers and advertisers is one of the key things that attracted me here.  We’re in the business of delivering bespoke experiences to our consumers, partners and advertisers and I’m looking forward to working with all of you to build on that reality.

This week marks an exciting new journey for me personally, and I’m thrilled to be sharing my experiences and background with the world class people at Yahoo!  We have big opportunities, as well as big challenges ahead of us, and I’m getting ready to dive in and work with this great team to make Yahoo! even more central to daily online life than it has been over the past decade and a half.

My first day in the office will be May 17^th and I can’t wait to get started. Stay tuned for more as I get settled and dig in with my new team.

‘Nuff said.

-Blake Irving, EVP, Chief Product Officer, Yahoo!

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.

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

• 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.

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

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

• 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!

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

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

• 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.

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

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

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