Crowds of starstruck pedestrians formed around a recording studio that we erected overnight in Times Square as yodels echoed through the canyons of the city. We invited anyone and everyone to come inside and give us their best interpretation of the Yahoo! yodel. What was at stake? The potential fame and bragging rights of having their yodel featured on the Yahoo! Homepage and in our new advertising campaign.

We camped out on Military Island for 12 hours in a brick building that included a dressing room with costume gear, a rehearsal room with gold records on the wall, and a state-of-the-art recording studio. Celebrities were on hand to mentor yodelers — Jewel, Pete Wentz, LeAnn Rimes, Randy Jackson, and Rob Cavallo, chief creative officer of Warner Music Group and one of the world’s most highly acclaimed music producers. (Jewel said her dad was so proud that all those years of coaching her to yodel had finally paid off.) Kimberly Caldwell of American Idol fame was our tireless emcee and we even had America’s Got Talent’s Manuela “The Yodeling Dominatrix” Horn to help rally brave souls. And house band musicians — with many Grammys among them — sat atop the marquee of the Hard Rock Cafe (Hollywood Squares-style), ready to give a live riff for each yodeler. We heard rap yodels, bluegrass yodels, punk yodels, funk yodels, hip hop yodels, the list goes on. We even had two Cirque du Soleil performers stop by for a rendition. And they were all projected on the Jumbotron for the crowd to enjoy (or, at least, be amused by).

The last time we sought the best new Yahoo! yodeler, back in 2003, we ended up launching the singing career of a 9-year-old girl named Taylor Ware. Yesterday, one lucky performer (pictured above) — a foot messenger whose boss told her she could come perform before she delivered her last package of the day — caught the eye of Pete Wentz and Rob Cavallo, who spent extra time coaching her and left with her MySpace info and email address. Remember the name Chanese Elife, people — she might have a bright future ahead!

We also held events in London and Mumbai because, you know, yodeling knows no geographic bounds. The top winners for each country will be crowned on November 15th, based on which videos receive the most views. So head over to the gallery and check out the contenders. You’ll help them find an audience of more than 500 million people.

For more on the event, read Lyndsey Parker’s Yahoo! Music blog posts, browse photos in our Flickr photostream (slideshow below), and watch video highlights from our NY, London, and Mumbai events:

Ya-hooooo!

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

This larger than life greeting welcomed me to work one morning, as I shuffled in with a case of the Mondays. Quite startled, I looked over to our headquarters guard shack and out spilled the purplest, most enthusiastic human being I’d ever seen — waving energetically with a big infectious grin. Did she know me? Who cares – she said I was gorgeous! Suddenly, it felt more like a Friday.

The thing is, she tells everyone they’re gorgeous.

Meet Shewondia Mills, a Yahoo! security guard who has become a veritable campus celebrity since she joined the team less than a year ago. Her iconic personality cracks a smile on everyone’s face — you can’t even help it. Every morning, she douses herself in Yahoo! spirit, which she embodies like no one before her. She is literally purple from head to toe — her fingernails, her eyelids, her eyelashes, her lipstick, her hair, the lenses of her glasses. People walk and drive out of their way to get her signature greeting, which lifts the soul and rescues the brain from its PowerPoint-induced haze.

Shewondia consistently proves that a little extra pride goes a long way. She has collected more “Backyard Bravos” (online awards employees send to fellow Yahoos on our intranet) than anyone else at the company, including Carol Bartz, Jerry Yang, and David Filo. Just today, she snagged second prize in the Guardsmark Security Officer of the Year award, taking home $5,000. And visitors are quite taken with her welcome wagon, including a New York Times reporter who recently came to interview our CEO.

Here’s a video that takes you behind the scenes with Shewondia, giving you a sense of her inimitable style and why her pride so purple.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

This year, delegates from 90 countries gathered to hear distinguished speakers like the UN’s Kofi Annan, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, Twitter’s Biz Stone, Bob Geldof, and the heads of the world’s largest advertising agencies. And jury members judged more than 22,000 pieces of the most creative advertising from every corner of the globe. In short, it was the place to be for ad types.

Since advertising is one of our passions at Yahoo!, you can imagine we wanted to support the festival, Yahoo!-style. Our goal was to communicate that the world’s biggest ideas should live on the world’s biggest stage –- the online arena. So, Yahoo! had an innovative, local presence at the festival. Naturally, we placed ads in local media saluting the creatives, but we also deployed an awesome purple van and hit the streets with a giveaway that literally declared “Nothing Creative Happens in Penny Loafers.”

Our Mission: Project Flip Flop
How do you show the creative community that you really love them? You make them comfortable, of course! Members of Project Flip Flop canvassed the Croissette with pairs of purple Yahoo!-branded Havaianas flip flops, slipping them on the weary feet of anyone with a festival badge. Meanwhile, our purple van circled the streets and our own Purple Pedals bike rode the promenade to document the mission. By the end of the week, thousands of feet were happier.

The response was très fantastique!

• Fast Company wrote that the flip flops were the most sought after prize at Cannes;
• The Cannes Daily covered the campaign (page 12);
• A creative director from a global agency said to me, “Thanks for letting us be free!”;
• The head of marketing for one of the largest global brands in attendance asked for pairs for her children;
• Even the Twitterverse played along. One tweet suggested that we put this campaign up for a Lion next year. Another from halfway around the globe asked to add a pair to a Yahoo! footwear collection.

To see the mission in action, check out this short video (below), view our Flickr album, and see some of the images that our Purple Pedal picked up.

Creativity is the secret sauce in the best advertising and we want your Yahoo! experience to be well seasoned with it. For a look at the creativity that snagged the Lions, check out the official site at canneslions.com.

Elisa Steele
Chief Marketing Officer

Okay, so, not quite 3D…but the national television morning show kicked off a short segment that looks at top stories (and some scintillating Yahoo! Search insight) from Yahoo! Buzz. We are extraordinarily well represented with former MTV veejay and uber-smart charmer Ananda Lewis. Every Monday, she will alternate with Fox anchor Dylan Lane in running down the weekend news, features, and celebrity tidbits that received the most attention (and votes on Yahoo! Buzz).

This week we covered which scenes unnerved “Twilight” heartthrob Rob Pattinson in his big-screen stint as Salvador Dali, the awful accident involving NFL wide receiver Dante Stallworth, and how bailed-out insurance AIG has managed to outrage taxpayers once more. You can watch the clip below. It’ll also appear on the Buzz Log and the Mike and Juliet site each week.

Vera H-C Chan
Yahoo! Buzz senior editor

Today we have some exciting enhancements related to video on Flickr to announce:

• Video for All Members: We want to see what the rest of the community has to share, so we are extending the ability to upload video to all of our members. Free members can upload two videos per month, in addition to the 100MB monthly photo upload limit that’s already in place. Video, like photos, is quickly moving beyond a means to simply preserve memories and into a social activity that allows people to communicate and connect. As more devices have the ability to capture both, we’re seeing Flickr members capture videos along with photos to share their view of the world.
• Flickr in HD: Another trend that we’ve noticed is the growing appetite for higher-quality video. With the recent introduction of Nikon’s D90, Canon’s EOS 5D Mark II, Flip Mino HD, and others, it’s even easier to shoot videos in HD. Because our focus has always been on allowing our members to showcase their vision in the best way possible, we’re also enabling HD video uploading and viewing today. Only Pro members can upload videos in HD, but our entire community will benefit by being able to view high quality videos.
• Flickr Clock: All of us at Flickr love creative ways of exploring and visualizing imagery, and Flickr Clock is a new way that we want to celebrate and showcase the amazing video across the Flickrverse. Through Flickr Clock, members will be able to share their vision of what’s happening at any given minute around the world. We’ll be able to display these videos according to the approximate time that they were taken, so you can see what’s happening at different moments in time. Please help us build it into something truly unique and upload your best videos here.

It’s been truly amazing to see how creative our members can get using this medium – check out some of my favorite groups: My Day Yesterday, Timelapse Videos and Video! Video! Video!

And as with the rest of Flickr, we are continuing to evolve the video experience to make it more compelling, accessible and easy to use. So grab your cameras, and capture and share “long photos” of your own!

Here’s an HD demo from a fellow Flickrite’s commute to work:

Kakul Srivastava
Flickr General Manager

Now I’m co-owner of Dapple, purveyor of the first line of environmentally-friendly products that deal with baby-specific cleaning challenges. And thanks to Yahoo! Small Business, our business is skyrocketing –- even in the current economic climate.

In March, on a whim, my partner Tamar Rosenthal and I applied to Yahoo! Small Business and fwm‘s “Seeds for Success” grant program and were later named one of the three finalists chosen from among 5,500 entrepreneurs. Over the last six months, we competed for the grand prize by working toward milestones with our website, sales, partnerships, PR and marketing, and more. More than 660,000 people recently cast their votes on Yahoo!. And lo and behold, we won!

It’s wild to think that just six months ago, we had no products on shelves, no retail presence. Just a few prototypes and a lot of hope. After we earned Yahoo!’s grant of $25,000 in cash and services, it was the perfect storm. We were able to produce our first two products, found small retailers in our New York City neighborhood willing to be our first test market, and built our web site. I can’t describe the kind of endless credibility the Yahoo! name gave us. We later struck deals with two major national retailers, attended trade shows, won an iParenting Media Award for best product, and got a lot of great attention from mommy bloggers. We’ve sold more than 25,000 units to date, have distribution in 300 stores and strong interest from big national chains, and now have six products in our line.

As part of our prize, we got mentoring advice from some really legendary figures through fwm (Finding What Matters). For example, fwm’s Carolyn Kepcher, of “The Apprentice” fame and Yahoo!’s program co-sponsor, helped us shore up our business plan while being a great sounding board. Cathie Black, president of Hearst Magazines, taught us about breaking through closed doors “in a ladylike way” but never giving up. Brand guru David Vinjamuri helped us create thoughtful packaging (e.g., pump dispensers are far more convenient for harried moms) and branding that resonated with our customers. Beauty maven Bobbi Brown gave tips about carefully growing our business. And Scott Smigler from Yahoo! partner Exclusive Concepts helped us recognize how important a successful Web site is as part of the mix and was amazing in revamping our Yahoo! Small Business Web site.

We’ve experienced many ups and downs in our journey and we’re often humbled by the hard work and dedication of other passionate entrepreneurs. If you’re on the edge of jumping in and think you have a great idea with a lot of promise, we say “go for it!” But put on your seatbelt and hang on –- the ride is incredible. As for Dapple, we plan to use our grand prize winnings to bring you even more baby-friendly cleansing products in the near future.

Dana Rubinstein
Co-Founder, Dapple

Why Purple? Back in 1996, our humble digs needed quite a bit of renovation so our co-founder, David Filo (notoriously frugal), went out to buy some paint at the store. Once everyone had painted most of one large wall under dim fluorescent lighting, they stepped back and realized Filo had bought light purple (it was probably on sale). From that day on, Purple stuck.

But Purple ’s not just about the paint on the wall. It’s not just the blend of blue and red. It’s not just the latest trend in gardening and fashion (though it is). Purple is the color of innovation and ingenuity. It’s fun and youthful, but also courageous and daring. It represents a spirit of individuality but also a sense of connectedness with others. For us, it represents the spirit of our company, our culture and our products –- Purple is Yahoo!.

As a resident brand marketing guy (though we often say that the Yahoo! brand is too important to be left in the hands of brand marketers), I’m pleased to share that we’re launching a variety of Purple projects over the next few days and weeks. We’re embracing our Purple and sharing the spirit and pride with hundreds of millions of users who, perhaps, feel a bit of that spirit and pride as well.

“Start Wearing Purple” is the theme (and theme song) of this effort to celebrate Purple. It’s not about selling Yahoo! clothing – though we do have some amazing new limited-edition gear coming in from partners like Pony, tokidoki, big wave surfing legend Jeff Clark, Mimoco, and more. “Start Wearing Purple” is about celebrating that unique, charmingly eccentric side of all of us. You’ll see and hear about Purple Picks, the best Purple content from across the web hand-picked by Yahoo!; Purple Photos on Flickr and omg!; Purple Pranks with our friend Charlie Todd from Improv Everywhere; Purple Bikes that take photos; and even some Purple Acts of Kindness. And you’ll meet the Pioneers of Purple, inspiring people who’ve changed the world by following their passions and pursuing their dreams. “Start Wearing Purple” is, quite simply, an invitation to embrace and share the Purple in you.

Check out what we’re up to at startwearingpurple.com. And may some of that Purple pride rub off on you.

Purple reigns,
Nick Chavez
Senior Director, Brand Advertising

When you operate in this country, the fifth largest in the world, you have to go big (and maybe even a little bit crazy) to get noticed. That’s why Yahoo! Brazil is producing a lunar eclipse. That’s right. This Saturday night, Brazilians will be treated to a partial eclipse of the moon, courtesy of Yahoo! Brazil.

The team down there is partnering with Celestial Marketing, an American company that has expertise in eclipse productions and cosmic phenomena, to pull the Earth ever so slightly to create a penumbral shadow on the moon. They’re also working with Brazilian astronaut Marcos Pontes to get Brazilians fired up about it. The eclipse will be broadcast on Yahoo! Brazil and those watching in the streets can download special viewing cards.

What’s this all about? We’re told it’s in honor of a new phase that Yahoo! Brazil will enter. I guess all will be revealed on Saturday. But as they say in Brazil, “Nao subestime o roxo”… or never underestimate the purple.

Check out how amped up they are in São Paolo (and brush up on your Portuguese):

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

I know this first hand because Matt came by to dance here at Yahoo!. If you’ve never heard of Matt, go check out wherethehellismatt.com. He traveled to 42 countries in 14 months to make his most recent video, “Dancing 2008,” which has been viewed more than 8.5 million times since he posted it in June. His scenery included a tulip field in the Netherlands, the DMZ in Korea, the “Painted Ladies” in San Francisco, children in Yemen, Bollywood-style dancers in India, bushmen in New Guinea, and free spirits in Paris.

I emailed Matt on a lark, with an invitation to come do a video with Yahoos in Sunnyvale. What you see here is the effect of one incredibly willing Internet phenomenon, as I dragged him hither and yon across our campus to shoot 33 scenes in less than seven hours. This video closed a recent company all-hands meeting — webcast to 14,000 employees worldwide — as a reminder that, in spite of the extraordinary events of last seven months, this is still one helluva great company.

You can download the song “Praan” (Bengali for “life”) at Amazon. It was composed by Garry Schyman and that incredible voice belongs to 17-year-old Palbasha Siddique of Minneapolis.

Thanks for the dance, Matt.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

So what’s changed? It’s still the same del.icio.us, with a few great changes. Since we’ve grown from 300,000 to 5 million users since being acquired by Yahoo! two and a half years ago, a new platform was in order. It’s now faster, more reliable, and will enable us to keep up with our rapid growth.

We’ve also retooled our search engine to make it faster and smarter, with new features like searching across your social network. Delicious search gives you access to the shared memory of the Web — those sites with the most interesting or relevant content, based on human criteria. Instead of millions of links, we return the ones that real people say are the most valuable. Delicious search is social search.

But perhaps the most obvious change is the face lift we’ve given the site, with the goal of improving usability and making it easier for new users to understand. For more on the changes, head over to the Delicious blog. Or, watch this video that animates the transition from old to new:

Delicious has always been about helping people to remember, share, and discover the best of the Web, and this remains our core mission. With this release we’ve made improvements in each of these areas, and we will continue to do so. You will also see us start to harness the power of the Delicious community and give people new ways to manage and explore the overwhelming amount of information we deal with in our online lives.

Delicious is been built on the feedback of our users. We welcome you to join the conversation and the community. Come on over to delicious.com and let us know what you think on our discussion forum.

Stephen Hood
Director of Product Management
Delicious

Yahoo! Mail goes vintage: Frustrated by not being able to to get the email address you want? We’ve heard you and we’re doing something about it with the introduction of two new email domains: ymail.com and rocketmail.com. If “rocketmail” sounds familiar it’s because it’s vintage Internet. RocketMail was one of the first free webmail services in the ’90s, was acquired by Yahoo! in 1997 and formed the basis of the first version of Yahoo! Mail. So, whether your style is brand spanking new (ymail.com), hip vintage (rocketmail.com) or comfortable classic (yahoo.com), head on over to http://new.mail.yahoo.com/addresses and get the email address you’ve always wanted.

Media Player gets foxy: Check out the latest wily addition to the Yahoo! Media Player. Through a rather clever integration with FoxyTunes you can now control all of the music inside your browser as well as outside of it. The latest version of FoxyTunes enhances any page that has music on it by automatically adding the Yahoo! Media Player to that page. This allows you to play any track on that page or even the whole page as one big playlist. The best thing is that once you start playing a web page with the new player you can instantly control it with FoxyTunes, even while surfing in other tabs or browser windows – just make sure to leave the page that’s currently playing somewhere in the background. And, if you close that page, your FoxyTunes will automatically switch back to your regular media player, be it iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, etc. Now that’s foxy!

Kids and technology – a parents’ guide: Wondering where to find the best information on keeping kids safe on the web? Well, look no further. Yahoo! Kids launched a new Parents channel this week bringing together some of the best resources in the business. Larry Magid, longtime technology journalist, Internet safety advocate and co-director of ConnectSafely.org, will be blogging alongside Ann Collier who’s been providing some of the best kid-tech news to parents on NetFamilyNews. Together they co-authored “MySpace Unravelled: A Parents’ Guide to Teen Social Networking.” So head on over to learn how to help your kids navigate the online world safely.

Internet Explorer – more del.icio.us: Last month we unleashed an early beta release of an Internet Explorer version of our del.icio.us bookmarks extension. And this week you can now officially begin to enjoy social bookmarking on Microsoft Windows XP and Vista operating systems. While the features are similar to its Firefox 3 extension counterpart, this little number also has more unique additions including faster searching within larger accounts of bookmarks and signals for new network activity and links for you. Learn more and download it now here.

Smithsonian goes to the Commons: The Commons photo collection on Flickr welcomes its fourth member in the shape of the Smithsonian Institute. As you’d expect the collection is rich in history – from photos by the Institute’s First Photographer, Thomas Smillie, to portraits of Artists, Scientists and Inventors (yes even Albert Einstein makes an appearance) and People and The Post. The contemporary collections include American Celebrations and a documentary from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. And don’t forget to check out collections from the other three members: The Library of Congress, Australia’s Powerhouse Museum and The Brooklyn Museum.

• Video revisions: Head on over to Yahoo! Video and you’ll see we’ve spruced up a few features. By popular demand, you’ll now find a bevy of sharing options under each video so you can shoot it off to the world via Digg, Facebook, MySpace, del.icio.us, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. We also made it easier to check out stats, which now includes how often a video has been favorited. And, perhaps coolest of all, you can now play back videos without leaving the search results page. Makes looking for just the right baby hamster video a cinch. More here.
• Didn’t you see my blog?: If your friends get sore when you don’t keep up with their latest blogging brilliance, we’re here to help. Upgrade to Yahoo! Messenger for Windows (9.0, Beta) and your friends’ most recent blog post will show up as their status message, courtesy of the MyBlogLog wizards. You’ll also be able to keep track of their MyBlogLog activity, like when they add contacts, join communities, or add tags. As the MyBlogLog team eloquently put it, they’re helping transform your IM it into a “socially aware RSS Reader.” More here.
• Final for Firefox 3: A while back, we tested the waters with a Firefox 3 extension beta for Del.icio.us bookmarks. And now it’s official. After hundreds of thousands of downloads and copious user feedback, it’s live and kicking (and better and more stable, thankyouverymuch). It’s a great way to search and manage your bookmarks and keep tabs on your Del.icio.us network. More features are coming down the pike. Still using Firefox 2? It works just fine there, too. More here.

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

What do you do if you’re the CEO and president of a company that’s become the preoccupation of the business section and you’re about to go on stage in front of hundreds of tech moguls, investors, and journalists at “D: All Things Digital” for a chat with the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg? You cue the video!

Here’s a short video prelude we pulled together for Jerry Yang and Sue Decker to help pull the elephant squarely into the middle of the room this afternoon at the 6th annual D conference in Carlsbad, Calif. It’s a parody of the vast quantities of advice that both execs have been receiving about Yahoo! in recent months. And we got a little help from our friends — Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett, Sequoia Capital’s Mike Moritz (our first investor), PBS’ Charlie Rose, Sony’s Howard Stringer, Intel’s Paul Otellini, Dell’s Michael Dell, Cisco’s John Chambers, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg.

For Yodel Anecdotal readers, we’re posting a special version with an exclusive Buffett outtake at the end. It’s clear why Warren was invited to cameo on “All My Children.”

Yahoo! will be filing a definitive proxy statement and accompanying WHITE proxy card with the SEC in connection with the solicitation of proxies for its 2008 annual meeting of stockholders. Stockholders are strongly advised to read Yahoo!’s 2008 definitive proxy statement when it becomes available because it will contain important information. Stockholders will be able to obtain copies of Yahoo!’s 2008 definitive proxy statement and other documents filed by Yahoo! with the SEC in connection with its 2008 annual meeting of stockholders at the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov or at the Investor Relations section of Yahoo!’s website at yhoo.client.shareholder.com. Yahoo!, its directors, and certain of its officers may be deemed participants in the solicitation of proxies from stockholders in connection with Yahoo!’s 2008 annual meeting of stockholders. Information concerning Yahoo!’s directors and officers is available in its preliminary proxy statement filed with the SEC on May 22, 2008.

(Incidentally, this video is the dog that ate my homework and is the reason why you loyal readers found last week’s content a bit sparse. I’m a multi-hat operation.)

Photo by Asa Mathat/AllThingsD.com

Much to my wife’s delight, among other things I contributed were five pairs of sneakers and athletic shoes and I was able to actually watch people pick them up and give them a new home. (Yes, people WILL wear other people’s shoes…) Hopefully they will get some great use and their new owners will think hard about what THEY could give up to turn their personal trash into someone else’s treasure.

I’m told Yahoos brought in more than 2,000 items from closets and basements throughout the Bay Area that might otherwise have been destined for landfills. The more interesting things I saw included a vintage map of Silicon Valley businesses from 2000, a red lacy bra (which seemed to disappear quickly), last-generation Tivos, Rockem Sockem Robots, vacuum cleaners, a complete set of Star Trek: Next Generation VHS tapes, bunny slippers, fleeces galore, Yahoo! schwag (Yahoo! Chicago stickers, anyone?), and gently used sporting equipment. Items that had not seen the light of day for years were suddenly adopted by new guardians, who promised to put them into immediate use. Although I think the snow skis might have to wait until next season…

We duplicated this fair in six California, New York, and Oregon offices. And whatever wasn’t claimed was carted away by local charities like the Salvation Army.

So if you see me around campus with size 10.5 Adidas shell-toes, know that they will be well cared for and infused with the spirit of giving.

Hmm… I wonder what size Jerry wears?…

Here are some photos and a video recap:

Lucas Mast
Senior PR Manager
Connected Life

It was a little HD experiment created by Brad Williams, the production lead for Yahoo!’s Tech Ticker program. It’s his version of “Koyaanisqatsi” in three minutes.

Beats Muzak.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

• Moving pictures: Been living under a rock? Then you don’t know that Flickr now supports video! The much-anticipated feature went live earlier this week, letting the Flickrverse capture life’s little moments as “long photos” to share with friends, family, or the world. Uploads are limited to 90 seconds and are available to Flickr pro users. Check out what people posted to the (no longer) Super Secret beta pool and get your questions answered here.
• Watercooler ammo: Grab your coffee and donut, fire up Firefox, and bookmark Good Morning Yahoo!, a new morning video news program that gives you the quick-and-dirty lowdown on the latest in news and entertainment. Brought to you by Yahoo! News and the good people at Dunkin Donuts, it packages a daily mix of news videos and fun features culled by Yahoo! News editors. It’s updated live from 6:00am to 12:00pm ET weekdays. Don’t leave for work without it.
• Ask and ye shall receive: The gang at Upcoming is all ears and has made some recent tweaks based on user suggestions. You can now upload flyers and photos to help promote your event, including a special call-out for an official photo, logo, etc. And you can send a message to everyone watching or attending the event you’ve created. Keep those ideas flowing.
• Can you read it now?: Along with wisdom, experience, and distinguished graying temples comes a lack of patience for small fonts. But the My Yahoo! team has delayed your need for bifocals just a bit longer by offering the ability to increase the font size on your special page. Just go to the “Personalize this page” button and blow up those pixels. No looking down your nose at that.

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

Yes, those videos you’ve been accumulating on your hard drive or cell phone finally have a great place to hang out, meet other videos, and be loved.

Adding the ability to share videos on Flickr is a natural extension of our mission to be the “eyes of the world” — letting our members share what they see with the people who matter most to them, be they family and friends, or the world. As we set about adding video to one of the world’s most loved photo sharing experiences (Flickr has over 25 million members worldwide who have collectively uploaded over 2 billion photos), we did a lot of homework. We spoke to our members, took surveys, played with very many video experiences on the web, and, of course, took lots of video. Through the process, we learned a few surprising things:

• Most videos being captured today are essentially “long photos” — short clips that are captured on digital still cameras or mobile phones rather than long format video taken by traditional video cameras
• People aren’t sharing these clips much. If they are, it’s either via playback on their camera, DVD, or sending a large email file.
• While certainly there is video being shared on the web, most of it is re-broadcast content, such as clips from TV shows. If it’s user recorded content, much of it is material that is trying to be like broadcast content.

The video equivalent for the personal, authentic moments that are the hallmark of photos found on Flickr is actually pretty tough to find.

Until now. Check out some of the great videos shared by members of our Beta program:

So here’s how it works. If you’re a pro member, you can go to Flickr and start uploading your videos now. Video on Flickr works the same way as photos. Features you know and love like easy uploading, tagging, sets, sharing, privacy settings, adding to groups, geo-tagging, interestingness, and stats all work for video just as they do for photos. We support videos that are up to 90 seconds long each and up to 150MB large. Your unlimited storage limits still apply — so go ahead, push that to the limit.

Why 90 seconds?
Most video that people capture is, in actuality, fairly short-format content captured on digital still cameras. Our research suggests that most of it is actually under 60 seconds, and 90 seconds should be a pretty comfortable limit. As with (most) other features on the site, we’d love to hear feedback.

Why pro only?
Pro members are the most active, dedicated members of the Flickr community and are the foundation to all we do at Flickr. Starting with them seemed like the right way to introduce such a significant new feature to the site.

So what are you waiting for? Free your videos — share them on Flickr.

Kakul Srivastava
General Manager, Flickr

We’re popping the hood today on a new advertising management platform, AMP! from Yahoo! (you might have seen it referred to as Project Apex). It’s been under development for some time now by an army of engineers, product strategists and managers, and user-interface design experts — all intimately familiar with the online advertising industry. They understand the pain the industry currently feels in how things are done.

Here’s the core premise that’s fueled this new platform: Online advertising is growing increasingly sophisticated, yet it’s unnecessarily Byzantine to buy and sell. The online media landscape is incredibly fragmented. And, today, the process of finding your target audience, booking inventory, negotiating pricing, seeking approval, creating tearsheets, testing ads — it’s living in an 8-track world. Let’s just say people are doing a lot more faxing and phone calling than should be necessary in 2008. It’s terribly inefficient.

AMP! will not only automate all of these processes and take the cycle time down from weeks to minutes, it will enable a new, more open paradigm, taking participants from private walled gardens to a new world where they will be able to buy and sell across the entire Web – all in one interface, with a few clicks of a mouse. It’s like a stock market for ads — the more efficient the marketplace, the more value in it. The impact is hard to overstate. This is simply not possible today and we think that’s really hobbling the industry’s ability to focus on what matters most — developing great creative and getting it front of the right person.

We recently previewed AMP! for our partners in the Newspaper Consortium and there were “ah ha!” moments visible across the room, with execs throwing out comments like “blown away,” “revolutionary,” and they even put “sexy” and “ad serving” in the same sentence.

AMP! from Yahoo! is real. We will start rolling the platform out in phases beginning next quarter, and will open it up for additional publishers as well as advertisers, agencies, and ad networks throughout the rest of 2008 and into next year. And you can see what the newspaper execs were so excited about by checking out this short video:

Sue Decker
President

This Cambridge, Massachusetts, start-up has developed a video publishing platform that boasts partnerships with more than 30 major media companies, including Fox News, Scripps Network (properties like HGTV and The Food Network), Gannett (including USAToday.com), Sony BMG, CBS Sports, Hearst Magazines, CNET, and the Financial Times. A list that grows more distinguished as time goes on. Maven helps these publishers distribute and/or monetize their content through a unique new advertising platform, which includes a great new non-intrusive ad format.

Adding Maven to our arsenal of capabilities is an important milestone as we focus on providing advertisers and publishers the best possible tools for reaching their audiences — on our network and beyond. For advertisers, it means more inventory, more choice, more audience reach. For publishers, it means being able to better monetize their content and reach more eyeballs. For consumers, it means consistently free access to high-quality video content and ads that are less disruptive, more relevant. It’s win-win all around.

We’re delighted to welcome the Maven team (led by founder and CEO Hilmi Ozguc) and its fantastic technology to the Yahoo! family. We look forward to joining forces to take video to the next level.

Hilary Schneider
EVP Global Partner Solutions

Reporting from both the Silicon Valley and the NASDAQ MarketSite broadcast studio in New York, we plan to provide the most in-depth technology investing coverage on the web. Expect Tech Ticker to be both quirky and opinionated. Our renowned editorial team couldn’t be stronger:

• Sarah Lacy, Correspondent, Silicon Valley: A 10-year Valley veteran, you may read her biweekly BusinessWeek.com column titled “Valley Girl.” She literally wrote the book on the business and culture of the Silicon Valley.
• Aaron Task, Correspondent, New York: He covered Wall Street for a decade at TheStreet.com, is a frequent guest on major business news programs and his daily podcast “The Real Story” was an award winner on iTunes.
• Henry Blodget, Contributor, New York: You know the history. Now meet Henry Blodget 2.0, author of the award-winning blog, Internet Outsider and now CEO of Silicon Alley Insider. Outspoken and battle-tested, Henry will never be at a loss for an opinion.
• Andy Kessler, Contributor, Silicon Valley: A former Morgan Stanley analyst, Andy turned $100 million into $1 billion as co-founder of a technology hedge fund. He began his career designing chips at Bell Labs and is now a best-selling author.

And me — I’m Diane Galligan, executive producer of Tech Ticker. I’m especially excited to join the Internet’s #1 finance website after nearly a decade of producing financial news with CNBC and CNN.

Expect 4-8 video segments a day, including breaking market analysis, CEO interviews, and even documentary style editorials. If you’re thinking this sounds a lot like FinanceVision, it’s not. We’re offering short video-on-demand clips that are focused on a single sector of the market, rather than live streaming coverage of the entire stock market. FinanceVision was actually ahead of its time. We hope to learn from their experience, and take advantage of the many ways the Web and Web video have since evolved.

The videos can be found on the Tech Ticker site, or in the headline feeds of the tech stocks we cover. And what about our coverage of Yahoo!? The answer is simple. We have not only the freedom, but the mandate, to call it as we see it.

You can go to http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker see for yourself. Let us know what you think is working, what’s not and what you want to see. In the meantime, check out the video below for an inside look at what Tech Ticker’s all about with Sarah Lacy.

Hope to hear from you — and enjoy!

Diane Galligan and the Tech Ticker editorial team

A Proggy recognizes “animal-friendly achievement in 21st century culture and commerce…contributing to a more humane life for our entire society.” Whether they realize it or not, the thousands of Yahoos fed by Bon Appetit Management Company in our headquarters cafeteria (known as “URLs”) and beyond are provided with made-from-scratch food choices that minimize our impact on the environment. We are availed with dozens of vegetarian and vegan options, organics galore, ingredients from local farms, antibiotic-free meats, sustainable seafood, and biodegradable to-go containers. The kitchen staff even saves the vegetable oil from our fryers to create biodiesel fuel.

While an award for a corporate cafeteria might not seem worthy of great fanfare, it illustrates a big theme we Yahoos care about — finding innovative ways to help the planet. Many of the earth-friendly details are a result of input from Yahoo!’s Green Team, a volunteer army of employees who keep their eyes open for small changes that can make a big difference.

Here’s a quick video tour of URLs with Chef Bob Hart. He didn’t cook for the Grateful Dead, but he serves a mean gardein.

Kate Gerwe
Yahoo! Green Team
Senior Director, Marketing, Corporate Partnerships

As part of a fundraising effort for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, Yahoo! recently launched Foosapalooza, a month-long tournament that culminated last week in the crowning of Yahoo!’s best foosball players (well, in Northern California anyway). Our 110 teams (with names like Your Mom, The Old Guys, Foos Your Daddy, 13 Armless Men and a Dream, Peg Legs, Confooscius, and Toooooooooor!!!!!) raised more than $10,000.

Foosball is an old tradition at Yahoo!. All of our offices around the world have at least one table. This wasn’t your father’s foos tournament — we have some formidable players around here. We’re talking wristbands, sweat towels, and strict enforcement of U.S. Table Soccer Association regulations (e.g., no banging the five rod).

For the finals last week, we hosted exhibition games in the Foos Pit with some of the world’s best players, including Rob Atha from the U.K, who is ranked #2 globally. We even had a “Play the Pro” challenge. Live play-by-play commentary of the semi-finals and final game was supplied by foosball pro Mark Torres of Inside Foos.

The following teams made it to the semi-finals:

• Your Mom: Neal Sample, John Van Stralen
• The Euros: Alexandre Deve, Richard Sandenskog
• ehwb3: Daniel Wong, Vijay Raghunathan
• The Rollers: Bruce S. Lee, Jacob Rosenberg

Who won? I won’t spoil it for you — check out the video below. The winners each took home a Tornado foosball table, generously donated by a few of our engineering execs. Check out photos of the finals here and here.

Next year? “The Ocho” may be calling. Oh, and if you’d like to be the proud owner of a three-foot Foos Dude, signed by pro players, bid on our auction through October 12th.

Rich Ezekiel
Foosapalooza Tournament Master
Director of Product Management, Digital Home Products

When we approached Beck’s management (working a skateboard angle), we suggested a low-key acoustic set, assuming he wasn’t big on corporate events. Instead, they rolled up with three tour buses, two semi’s filled with staging and lighting equipment, a puppet show, bear costumes, and a video they custom produced for the grand finale. Safe to say every expectation was exceeded.

After the concert, Beck et al lingered to check out the hack action, pick up some schwag and talk to some “epic genius freaks.” One thing is for sure — we’re all wondering how we’re going to top this.