DO MORE THAN JUST IM – MAKE VOICE & VIDEO CALLS TO FAMILY AND FRIENDS
Instant messaging is great, but it takes more than just IM to stay in touch with the people who matter most and more and more, the technology that enables us to easily do this is right at our fingertips. The new Yahoo! Messenger for iPad offers more ways than ever before to connect (and have fun!) with friends and family. Not only can you instant message, text, and share photos and videos, you can also make free voice and video calls to your Messenger friends, no matter if they are using a Windows PC, Android phone, iPhone, iPod Touch, or now, iPad.

Features of the new Yahoo! Messenger App for iPad^† include:

• Optimized for iPad: First official Yahoo! Messenger app for iPad – optimized user interface and design layout.
• Free Voice and Video^††: Make free voice and video calls to your Yahoo! Messenger friends.
• Free SMS^†††: Send free text messages.
• Affordable International Calls^††††: Make low cost international calls to landlines or mobile phones with your Yahoo! Voice Phone Out account.
• Photo & Video Sharing: Share photos and video in real-time, with your Yahoo! Messenger buddies.
• Windows Live Interop: Bring all your friends in one place: Add and IM your Windows® Live Messenger friends right in Yahoo! Messenger.
• Multitasking: Work with other iPad apps – a notification alerts you when an IM arrives, even when the app is running in the background.

To accommodate our friends across the globe, Messenger for iPad supports nine different languages including English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Traditional Chinese, Vietnamese, Bahasa Indonesia, and Romanian.

You can download the new version of Yahoo! Messenger by searching for Yahoo! Messenger in the App Store on your iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch.  Alternatively, click here to download the app through iTunes. If you already have the Yahoo! Messenger app, simply click the “update” icon in the App Store on your device.  iPad users will get the new iPad-optimized version, and iPhone and iPod Touch users will receive additional updates.

We think you’ll love Messenger for iPad as much as we do. Try it today and let us know what you think!

Andreas Nordin
Product Manager, Yahoo! Messenger

† Requires iOS 4.0 or higher.

†† Voice is available for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. Video is available for the iPhone 3GS/4, iPod Touch 4, and iPad 2.
††† Supports sending SMS to recipients in USA, Philippines, Vietnam, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Canada, Pakistan, Kuwait and Thailand. Recipients of SMS may be charged by their carriers.
†††† Available to premium users on iPhone and iPod Touch in US, Singapore, France, Germany and Spain.

The interactive app takes advantage of the iPad’s multi-touch capabilities so users can manipulate views of stock charts; the ability to scroll across hours, days or months of market action; plot points in time; and even compare multiple stock tickers in one compelling chart. Anyone interested in following the market, or specific stocks on the iPad can now use Yahoo! Finance’s reliable and personalized tools anywhere, anytime.

The potential for this is big. Imagine sitting in a meeting with colleagues discussing market trends you now have real-time pricing data at your side. Want to take a look at how your portfolio is doing today without booting up the computer? MarketDash makes it fast and easy. Every tailored detail fits perfectly to the iPad screen – breaking news, real-time stock updates, and your own personalized portfolio information.

We’ve become so dependent on our mobile devices that it’s important to have a seamless experience across all of the technology we use on a daily basis. That’s why Yahoo! Finance provides centralized storage of portfolios and watch lists. Add a stock to a watch list from your iPad and it will show up instantly in the Yahoo! Finance app for iPhone or Android phones or when you view your portfolio on Yahoo! Finance. No matter where users log into their account they will see updated and personalized portfolio data.

To download MarketDash, go to the App Store on iPad and let us know what you think!

Today, we are excited to make the new Yahoo! Local available in limited beta. With rich hyper-local content, this new product 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.

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.  As some of you may have noticed, we’re beta testing the experience in more than 30 neighborhoods and cities in the U.S., including San Francisco, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Brooklyn, NY as well as Birmingham, Ferndale, and Royal Oak in Michigan. We did this so that we can evolve the product quickly and enhance it based on a cross-section of user feedback and insights. You can access the new experience from your desktop or mobile phone by visiting: http://beta.local.yahoo.com.

Giving You the Best Local News and Information

When it comes to the best local news and information, we’re delivering relevant hyper-local neighborhood and city content created by the community, local publishers, and Yahoo! editors.  We’re featuring content from the best local blogs and newspapers.  And through a completely open ecosystem, we’re making it possible for any local publisher to be part of the new Yahoo! Local. By leveraging the power of the Yahoo! Contributor Network, the entire community can participate and publish stories on topics that matter to them. Individuals and organizations can also add events that are relevant to the local community.

Saving Money in Your Area

We are also fulfilling our commitment to personal relevance by delivering the best locally relevant offers from nearby spas, restaurants, and retailers – helping you save some cash while you support local businesses. This new hyper-local experience integrates our recently launched Local Offers program to provide consumers quick, easy access to the widest selection of local deals and offers from partners such as Groupon, LivingSocial, Gilt City, BloomSpot and more.

Convergence of Content and Advertising

There is a unique intersection between the content users find useful and what marketers want to advertise – especially in a local experience – and we recognize that. With the new Yahoo! Local we are fundamentally changing how users will interact with local content, including advertising. As we build out the experience, we’re exploring and experimenting with various advertising solutions that will enable our advertising partners to reach their target users.

What’s Under the Hood

Technology is at the heart of everything we do at Yahoo! This experience leverages our powerful geo-informatics and content enrichment platforms, including Where On Earth (WOE) and Placemaker, to identify and geo-tag every news story that appears on every page down to the neighborhood level.

During the coming weeks and months, you will see us continually improve and expand our new hyper-local product by rolling it out to more neighborhoods and cities and adding new features that will make this the best local starting point for our users.

Take the experience for a spin around the neighborhood and tell us what you think. Stay tuned for much more from the new Yahoo! Local.

Matt Idema

VP, Yahoo! Local

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

We understand that being a fantasy player and sports fan is not just about passion and the thrill of the game. It’s also about being social – with friends, family, and of course any rival-team supporters. Around this time each year, Yahoo! Sports becomes home on the web for fantasy football, providing fans with innovative features, the most reliable games, and expert advice. With that in mind, we’re excited to announce our Yahoo! Fantasy Football lineup for 2010:

• #1 Free Fantasy Football Game – With free live scoring, auction drafts, mock drafts, and killer mobile apps, it’s no wonder more Fantasy Football fans play on Yahoo! every year than on any other site. For the 2010 season (our lucky 13^th), we’ve made former Plus features like Draft Kit and Dues Tracking free, and added a new live auction draft app so team owners can stay organized and create winning teams.

• Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Football: Wherever, Whenever – Building on our highly successful mobile website and iPhone app from last season, we’ve expanded our mobile lineup and made a lot of improvements based on your feedback. Most notably, we’ve launched our first-ever Fantasy Football app for Android. And, as always, if you have any other mobile device, direct your mobile browser to m.yahoo.com/fantasyfootball.  It’ll be faster than the Jets defense during Monday Night Football.

• “Like” Your League – Just in time for kick-off, Citizen Sports is launching a new feature that offers a uniquely social way to stay in touch with your leagues and teams. While playing either Yahoo! Fantasy Football or Citizen Sports Fantasy Football this season, people can “like” their own Fantasy Team or League and receive personalized updates about players, injuries, lineup reminders, and more directly on their Facebook news feed and through Yahoo! Updates.

• Advice from the Experts – Each week, Yahoo! Sports fantasy football experts Brandon Funston and Brad Evans host Fantasy Football Live, the first interactive Fantasy Football pregame show. Fantasy Football Live begins its fifth season on September 12 at Noon ET/ 9am PT, the advice you need to win the league.

Millions of you depend on Yahoo! Sports and Yahoo! Fantasy Sports to fuel your fantasy football passion. Our loyal, highly engaged fans have made Yahoo! Fantasy Football the #1 game in the industry*. So whether you need to manage your roster from the stadium, boast to your social network about an awesome trade, or get expert advice and tips, we’ve got you covered!

So cheer on, fans, and good luck this season!

Kyle Laughlin

Yahoo! Sports

* comScore, July 2010

So what does this mean for you? If you are one of the 300 million Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger users worldwide, we’re making it easier to access feature-rich Yahoo! experiences on two of the fastest growing mobile platforms in the market, Android and HTML5-capable browsers.  Get more details on the Yahoo! Messenger app on the Yahoo! Messenger Blog here.

With the new apps for Android, we created fast, easy-to-use and visually stunning experiences for Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger, providing rich full-featured experiences right on your Android device, and built from the ground up for the Android platform. We also introduced a Yahoo! Search Widget for Android to provide quick and convenient access to Yahoo! Search, making search easily accessible directly on your home screen. Check out more details on the Yahoo! Search Blog here.

In another exciting new release, we’re leveraging the cutting-edge features of HTML5 and introducing a new Yahoo! Mail web-app, plus a Yahoo! News site, for the iPhone and iPod touch.

The new Yahoo! Mail for mobile web is the most advanced mobile web-app we’ve ever created, making full use of client side databases and advanced caching capabilities, we’re offering faster access, powerful search, and rich content & message previews surfaced directly in the inbox. This amazing new experience is available in 28 languages in more than 200 countries. Read more about the all-new Yahoo! Mail on the Yahoo! Mail Blog here.

Our enhanced Yahoo! News includes a new layout with animated visual effects and navigation that utilizes touch gestures to deliver a compelling news experience.

We’ve been working hard, and listening carefully to our users’ feedback to understand what our consumers want, how a sophisticated mobile experience should behave, and how we could harness the latest cutting-edge technology. The result is a collection of incredible new experiences that represent our continued commitment to provide best-in-class products, while creating a modern and flexible platform for continued innovation and development. We hope you’ll love using these new experiences as much as we’ve loved creating them!

Here is a video with more on Today’s news:

Jason Titus
VP, Yahoo! Mail & Messenger

Irv Henderson
VP, global, mobile products

The growing popularity of tablet computers – spurred greatly by the buzz of the iPad – presented us with an entirely new kind of user experience to design and innovate against. Just like when we developed Connected TV and apps for the iPhone, we took this challenge and opportunity seriously, and leveraged everything that makes the iPad unique – gesture technology, vibrant display screen, geo-location technology, and the fastest Wi-Fi connectivity available. All of this, combined with a completely fresh perspective on where we want to take the future of the Web, made it possible to produce Yahoo! Entertainment for the iPad. It is truly unique.

Using editorialized, real-time content, Yahoo! Entertainment surfaces and recommends TV shows, entertainment news, TV listings, book reviews, and a wide variety of popular videos from across the Web. Our industry-leading entertainment properties on the PC attract nearly 200 million visitors each month worldwide*, making this a natural area for us to initially focus our creative energy on. We’re taking the content we know people love and combining it into a single, immersive app.

This is only the first of many incredible experiences Yahoo! will develop for the iPad – a form factor which offers a truly novel canvas for building engaging, fun, and innovative Web experiences. For more information, head to Yahoo! Entertainment or the iTunes® Store and start experiencing a new kind of Web, today.

Tapan Bhat, SVP, Integrated Consumer Experiences

* comScore WW Media Metrix, February 2010 (Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Movies, Yahoo! TV)

Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search iPhone App

Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search makes search even easier, without typing keywords or thinking about search terms. You simply draw a boundary on your phone’s map to discover local businesses within that location. Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search delivers robust local content without people needing to know the neighborhood. Initially available for restaurant searches in the U.S., Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search will launch additional local categories on an ongoing basis and will extend to international markets in the near future.

Yahoo! Search iPhone App

Maximized for speed, the Yahoo! Search iPhone app revolves around an innovative interface that delivers contextually relevant results quickly and efficiently. A rich set of features — tightly embedded maps, localized query suggestions that display as you type, intelligent search history, voice search, and rich content and information from Yahoo! and other sources that appear directly in the results — creates an optimal experience for finding exactly what you need. The Yahoo! Search iPhone app is available in 22 markets across North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia, and will continue to roll out to additional locations.

Head over to the Yahoo! Search Blog and the Yahoo! Mobile Blog for more detailed information and features on these two new apps.  Both apps are available starting today from the iTunes® Store at http://itunes.com/apps/yahoosearch and http://itunes.com/apps/yahoosketchasearch.

Today, Yahoo! launched the Yahoo! Mobile Blog, which you can find at ymobileblog.com.  The blog will provide you with interesting information on what’s been happening in the industry, and behind the scenes at Yahoo! Mobile — from new products and features, to quick tips and tricks to market trends and predictions.

Below, you will find the first post from Irv Henderson, VP of global mobile products for Yahoo!.  In it, Irv discusses the purpose of the blog, background on Yahoo! Mobile and his views on what’s to come for 2010.

To add the Yahoo! Mobile Blog to your RSS reader, click here to subscribe:

• Homepage is more apptastic: If you’ve been playing with our new homepage apps, you’ve discovered our gallery of recommended apps. This week, we added more than a dozen new ones, with more to come. You can balance your personal budget with Mint, learn how to pair the right wine with your meal with an app from MyRecipes and Snooth, discover weekly deals at Target, get movie info from Flixster, or manage posts and comments on your WordPress blog — all from the Yahoo! Homepage. And because we’ve opened it up to third-party developers, expect that list to grow. More on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog.
• New Yahoo! Search: Notice anything different about Yahoo! Search? After a month of testing, we’ve rolled out a brand new Yahoo! Search that ups the ante in personal relevance. You’ll see new tools that let you explore related concepts; display only results from popular Yahoo! and third-party sites like Wikipedia, YouTube and IMDB; and narrow results by types of content like people, videos, and discussion forums. We also give you quick access to our Search Scan/SafeSearch tool, to protect you from viruses, spyware and spam, and Search Pad, which lets you take notes during your queries. More on the Yahoo! Search blog.
• Yahoo! Messenger kills bugs dead: The bug hunters on the Messenger team have released new versions of both Yahoo! Messenger 10 Beta as well as Yahoo! Messenger for iPhone. In the former, they’ve fixed issues with webcam detection, added messaging to tell you when your friend needs to upgrade versions, offer better handling of unanswered calls, and explain when your Internet connection downgrades you to a voice call. Over on the iPhone, they’ve addressed the mysterious contact list disappearances. Download the upgrade in the iTunes App Store. More here and here on the Yahoo! Messenger blog.
• Zimbra milestone: Ok, what do Zimbra and South Africa have in common? People. Fifty million of them now have paid Zimbra mailboxes, just a bit more than the population of Africa’s most southerly nation That milestone comes amidst the launch of Zimbra Collaboration Suite 6.0, which now lets you more easily sync to your mobile, read and write emails with tabbed views, create presentations without external software, receive read email receipts, choose from among calendar views, and remotely wipe your phone if you lose it, among other features. More over on the Zimbra blog.

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

• Look ma, no wires: Those who manage their lives via Yahoo! Calendar and own an iPhone will rejoice – you can now sync the two! Tapping into the CalDAV open standard, we’ve collaborated with Apple to let you bring all your precious deets into your iPhone Calendar. You can also share your calendar with friends and family and likewise see their events on your phone. Nothing to download, no wires — it’s all over the air. That’s mighty George Jetson. More here.
• Tweeting your tunes: The latest version of FoxyTunes is out and it’s all atwitter. FoxyTunes, the toolbar that lets you control tunes from within your browser, now lets you easily tweet about the music you’re listening to. A project started about two years ago, TwittyTunes is officially a new default feature within FoxyTunes. And remember, you have 140 characters, which is enough to tweet, “Listening to a song I love: The Dandy Warhols – The Legend of the Last of the Outlaw Truckers aka the Ballad of Sherif Shorty.” What’s more, you can also share your song via Facebook, Skype, Yahoo! Messenger, Last.fm, and Yahoo! Status. It’s a musical meetup. More here.

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

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

• Buzzing the world: There’s news and there’s news people really care about. That’s what Yahoo! Buzz helps you filter. And now the site has made it even easier to keep tabs on what your contacts and the greater community find most interesting. As part of a fresh redesign, a new “Buzz Updates” tab surfaces the submitting, voting, and commenting activity from your friends and others. And given Yahoo! Buzz’s runaway success as the (insert shameless self-promotion) most popular social content service in the US, Yahoo! Buzz got its passport and just landed in India. Now readers all over India can keep tabs on what’s hot in everything from Bollywood to business in Bangalore. More here.
• Just tell me: The iPhone is truly the one thing I’d want on a desert isle, but let’s face it — its keyboard leaves something to be desired. That’s why Yahoo! Mobile just launched voice search for our Yahoo! Mobile iPhone app. Now you can search for anything — flight numbers, restaurants, gas stations, web sites — by just moving your mouth. You can also customize your “My Interests” tab with your voice — just click on “add anything” and say the topic you want to explore and add to your page. Our voice-enabled search is now available on more than 80 different devices/platforms – from Blackberry (including the newest ones) to Nokia to iPhone and Windows Mobile. Download the app or your update.
• Catch that play?: You can read about sports online, but it’s video that really gets the adrenaline flowing. Yahoo! Sports just revamped their video player so you can do more with the play-by-play. It now has a larger viewing window and you can watch videos in full screen. You can also share links or embed your favorite plays in your blog or what-have-you. And handy big thumbnails make it easier to browse through the video library. Check out this Lakers’ dunk. And then go get air sick.
• Group update: Six months ago, you might have noticed activity updates from your friends popping up in places like Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Profiles. They’ve included activity on Twitter, Flickr, Yahoo! Buzz, MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Music, delicious, and more. This week, Yahoo! Groups joined the fray. Now the questions, answers, advice, and photos you share with your group can also become an update for your Yahoo! connections, offering more airtime for the content you’ve created. And don’t worry — you have complete control over what you want to share. Read more here.
• Make it green: If you fancy yourself a MacGyver type and have an idea for a great new “green” gizmo, get thee to Yahoo! Green‘s new “Make It Green” campaign. We’re searching for the best new green products and do-it-yourself projects so we can turn them into real products. What’s in it for you? A chance to star on the PBS TV show Everyday Edisons, a check for $2500, and the glory of knowing that your little planet-saving idea is lining the shelves of stores. Not particularly inventive? That’s ok — just go give a thumbs up to whatever idea you like best. You’ve got until June 30th. Check it out.

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

That’s why we’re rolling out a radically overhauled m.flickr.com site today. What we’re most excited about is that now –- for the first time -– you’ll actually be able to play Flickr videos back on your phone. Ever since we launched video, we’ve let you upload your “long photos” directly from your cell, but we think the playback functionality is pretty huge. It’s based on the Yahoo! Video Platform and takes advantage of its ability to serve content to a wide variety of phones, screen sizes, and video/audio codecs. We’ll be rolling video playback out over the coming weeks for handsets that support streaming video, starting with the iPhone and iPod Touch today and more to come.

The new m.flickr.com sports a sleek new interface that makes it significantly easier to view your photostream and sets, and puts recent activity (yours and your contacts’) front and center. We’ve also added a bunch of new capabilities, like letting you add contacts, favorite images, and change your privacy and permission settings –- all while you’re out walking the dog. And, in support of our “eyes of the world” vision, we’ve also added the ability to explore the latest “interestingness” photos.

iPhone users have been playing with our new mobile incarnation since we released our beta in October and now we’re expanding the experience to any smart phone that supports browsers like Webkit, Firefox Mobile, and Opera Mobile.

The mobile phone has become central to how many of our users take pictures and how they share their view of the world with the important people in their life. We think the new Flickr mobile experience reflects all the cool possibilities that today’s advanced and rich mobile web has to offer, combined with all the functionality Flickr members know and love.

So grab your phone, bookmark m.fllickr.com, and enjoy photos and videos with a big smile on that small screen.

UPDATE: Just a clarification. Video playback is available for videos uploaded yesterday onward. Over the next few months, we’ll work to make the entire catalog of videos viewable on our mobile site.

Kakul Srivastava
Flickr General Manager

• Buzz on the run: You’re about to walk into a really hot party and realize you have absolutely nothing to talk about. Whip out your mobile phone, fire up Yahoo! Go, and fly your way over to the new Yahoo! Buzz widget. You’ll find the top stories in various categories from the last 12 hours. What’s more, iPhone users can “buzz up” their favorite stories at http://buzz.yahoo.com/iphone. There. Now you’re armed and dangerous with the latest on Obama, McCain, Troopergate, and that giant insurance company you now own part of. More here.
• Call me Ishmael: The National Maritime Museum has made Britain’s finest archive of maritime photography available on The Commons on Flickr. You’ll find photos dating back to the beginnings of photography in the 1840s, including expeditions to the Arctic, exploring the Port of London, seaside images by Francis Frith, and turn of the century passenger ships. Know the names of the people depicted, or precise locations, or any other information? Get thee tagging. More here.
• Satisfy song hankerings: When you just have to listen to that song right now, and don’t feel like downloading a player, hauling out your credit card, and restarting our computer, turn to Yahoo! Search. It now offers full song playback directly from your search results page. For thousands of popular artists and songs. Just search for an artist’s name and expand the FoxyPlayer (our browser-based player) that’s peeking out from the left side of your browser, click on a song, and listen to the whole darn thing. High-fives to our buddies at Rhapsody. The only catch — you’re limited to 25 songs a month. But still, how cool is that? More here.

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

• iPhone connection: You own an iPhone. Maybe you’ve downloaded apps for Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Friendster, MySpace, Bebo, Dopplr, etc. But you find yourself wishing you could just see ALL of your social network updates in one place. Introducing oneConnect for the iPhone. It’s a new iPhone app that gives you a single status dashboard for your bevy of connections — all from your snazzy little phone. But perhaps my favorite part is that you can now have bona fide IM conversations on your iPhone (and even see who’s online). One more reason your iPhone makes you the coolest person in the room.
• Your new home!: We know Flickr users don’t generally like it when we move their furniture around. But I think they’re going to like their new homepage setup. It won’t go live for a few weeks, but the sneak previews give you a good sense of how they’re using the space. It’s not radically different, but you’ll get more of a sense of activity, better view intro groups, and a lot more control over what you see, and what you don’t. More here.
• Wanna go Pro?: You really want that unlimited feeling of a Flickr Pro account, but you’re still paying off the airfare from your summer boondoggle? If you upgrade your account before the 30th, you can enjoy three months of free unlimited uploading goodness (or make somebody’s day by passing that code along to them). Not sure what Pro gets you? Check out the FAQ.

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

With a few quick taps on the screen of your iPhone, your entire network of contacts from social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and Twitter are at your fingertips. Add to this the ability to send Yahoo! instant messages or SMS messages to those in your phone book and suddenly your address book has become more powerful and useful than ever.

With the “Pulse” feature, you get an aggregated look at what’s happening on many of your favorite social networking sites. Whether it’s a new video posted on YouTube, a friend’s new suggested song on Last.fm, or your college roommate’s latest world travels on Dopplr, you can keep up with everything that is going on throughout the day in one convenient location. With the “Favorites” feature, you can pull aside your favorite contacts to quickly keep tabs on just their activity, call them or send a quick message or email.

And did I mention it’s free?

If you have an iPhone or a iPod touch, download Yahoo! oneConnect at the iPhone App Store—and pass along the word to your friends in all of your social networks so they can stay connected on the go too! (They will thank you for it, we promise.)

For more on Yahoo! oneConnect, go to http://mobile.yahoo.com/oneconnect/iphone

Joe Hayashi
Senior Director, Yahoo! Mobile