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

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

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

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

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

Power Player Series Heats Up Election Coverage
Got politics on your mind as election season heats up? You’re not the only one! ABC News and Yahoo! News Political team have come together to keep politics junkies satisfied with a dynamic dose of up-to-the-minute news and in-depth analysis of the elections thought the new Power Player series available on Livestand and screen mobile platforms.

This new daily video political series will he headlined by ABC news’ political dream team, which includes George Stephanopoulos, Jake Tapper, Amy Walter and more. These political heavyweights will discuss and offer insight on all things elections, from Obama’s disappearing allies in the Republican party to the court case that could cost him the election. Tune in every weekday for political news from Washington’s most respected news sources!

Yahoo! Fantasy Finance Kick-Off
Too strapped for cash to invest in the stock market? Here’s your chance to have all the fun without any of the risk! Yahoo! Finance just launched their first-ever Fantasy Finance game, sponsored by TD Ameritrade, in which wannabe traders can test their trading skills and Wall Street smarts by investing $100K in purple play money into a wide selection of Stocks and Exchange Traded Funds (ETF’s) as listed on the major US exchanges.

Players will also have the chance to take a daily quiz for an additional $100 of play money to help increase their gains and the player with the highest total portfolio value at the end of twelve weeks will win the grand prize. The game is a great learning tool for budding investors of all ages and allows players the opportunity to emulate “real world” experience in the financial market. Happy trading!

Share Where You Are with the Latest Android Messenger App
Yahoo! has just launched a new version (v 1.6) of its Messenger Android app. Now, you can easily let your contacts know where you are by adding your location when you update your status message. If your friends are nearby, they may just meet you there!

The ‘Add Location’ button in the Status Message view lets you add your general location to all status updates. You can also add a specific place, like a restaurant or park. Unable to find a place or local business? You can manually enter a place or local business, which will be registered as a new location in our directory and can be used by other users on Yahoo! Messenger.

Adding a location to your status message is completely optional and will only be enabled if your Android phone allows us to detect your location via GPS satellites or WiFi and mobile networks. Once you declare your location, all your buddies will see where you are so you can easily rendezvous with them when you’re in the neighborhood. Try it out! Download it today from Google Play.

Flickr Announces new Meetup site.
Flickr has a longstanding reputation as the best place for photographers to connect and share their work online, but web connections can only take you so far. Flickr recently introduces a new Meetup.com feature to help bring Flickr users together in person!

The new feature will allow Flickr users to plan Flickr events, Photowalks, exhibitions and get togethers all over the world, which can now be organized and announced on the Flickr page at Meetup.com. Feel free to start and organize your own, or join in with existing ones in your neighborhood.

New Yahoo! Search Experiences for Recipes, Shopping and More!

Yahoo! Search debuted new, interactive results on top of the search results page for recipe, shopping and entertainment searches. We also introduced a new vertical search experience for recipes. Here is a quick overview on the new offerings:

• New Recipes results – Search on Yahoo! for a food item + recipes (for example: “apple recipes” or “artichoke recipes”) and a window will appear on top of the search results page with popular choices from leading food sites.
• New Recipes Search tab – Narrow down the results of recipes by preparation time, star rating, diet, meal type, occasion, or source via a new ‘Recipes’ tab.
• New Shopping results – Search for a product or category, like watches or cameras, and then easily compare products, find coupons and deals, and check out helpful buying guides.
• Updated Entertainment results – The new entertainment results on Yahoo! Search presents immediate answers about your favorite movies, music artists, celebrities and news stories.  Read the latest news, watch a popular video, or see what people are saying in the Twittersphere in one convenient place within Yahoo Search.

Users asked, we listened: Introducing Yahoo! Messenger 11.5

Here at Yahoo! we get a lot of user feedback – and we like that! It means that people are engaged with our products — and quite often, the user feedback is spot on. Such is the case with the newest version of Yahoo! Messenger for Windows. We prioritized user feedback over all else and have added some cool new features that will make your chatting more organized, efficient and fun. New features include:

• Tabbed IM: Conversations are now neatly organized in one convenient chat bar so you just have to go to another tab to start up a different chat.
• Easy Access to Recent Contacts: Odds are you only IM regularly with a   handful of your friends. Now your most recent contacts appear at the top of your list.
• Smart Archiving: Chat history is now categorized by friends, making it a snap to look up your chat history.
• New Social Games: Messenger now has more than 70 exciting games including titles like Backyard Monsters, Township and ourWorld.

We also improved spam protection, added quick access to all emoticons and added Romanian language support. Check out the new Messenger here.

Yahoo! Search Launched E-Commerce Site Search

Yahoo! launched E-Commerce Site Search launched E-Commerce Site Search on Yahoo! Small Business.  Yahoo! E-Commerce Site Search brings together many of the strengths in Y! Search – science, design and engineering, to provide a more relevant and engaging search experience. Using our new search, pilot stores have seen Search Conversionincrease by as much as 40% and Search influenced orders increase by up to 50%.

Calling all iPhone Users: Updated Yahoo! Search App Released

We have released an update to the Yahoo! Search App for iPhone and iPod touch, available now for download on the App Store. We’ve done a major overhaul to bring the familiar browser experience we all know and love on the iPhone and iPod touch, along with many new features that will enhance searching on the go! These features include:

• Local Tabs: Use the top navigation box to quickly find nearby bars, restaurants, ATMs and more with one simple click.
• Trending Topics: View the most current and popular searches by topic on the home page, with direct access to news, images and tweets.
• Voice Search: Skip the typing. Just talk and we’ll do all the work to help make the search easier and faster.
• Search and download iPhone apps: Search and find more iPhone apps that fit your lifestyle, with direct links to the App Store for quick and easy download right on the device.
• Sophisticated New Look: Rich, high-quality information for many search terms in a variety of categories including sports, news, entertainment and finance.

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

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.

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/

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

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

• 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

Let’s start with Yahoo! Mail.
After much testing, today we’ve reached a significant Yahoo! Mail milestone by bringing the best of the web – including photosharing, third-party apps and social features – to people’s inboxes… all 300 million inboxes around the world.

For photo hounds, we’ve introduced new multi-select and drag-and-drop functionality that makes it easier to attach photos, view thumbnail previews, and rotate images before you send them. And we’ve upped the photo and filesize limits from 10MB to 25MB.

We’ve also streamlined the inbox experience to further expand the social and open capabilities. A new Application Box brings third-party open apps like PayPal, Picnik, Xoopit, and ZumoDrive together with Flickr, Calendar and Notepad to make managing your email folders easier. Plus, we’re excited to add a new app to the gallery in a few weeks from Evite. With the Evite app you’ll be able to create invitations, check on events, and add items to your Calendar all from one place. And we are only scratching the surface on the apps available. Stay tuned as we roll out additional apps worldwide and specific apps for regional markets over the coming year.

Your inbox will soon be a bit more social, filtering out the noise by surfacing the most recent emails from your contacts and giving you birthday reminders. In addition, we’ve improved Yahoo! Contacts so you can automatically get updates when a contact changes their name, e-mail address or phone number.

We’ve also redesigned Yahoo! Mail for the mobile web (http://m.yahoo.com), giving you one-click access to check, compose and search email; allowing attachment downloads like Microsoft Office, PDFs and photos; and letting you access personal folders on the go. It’s available today on the iPhone and will be released on 400 other devices with HTML browsers on September 1st.

Here’s a video tour of some of the new features in Yahoo! Mail:

Introducing Yahoo! Messenger 10
With this new release of Yahoo! Messenger, the biggest news is the debut of truly high quality video calling. Using your Web cam, you can now have full-screen, face-to-face video conversations with crystal clear audio for free from right within your Yahoo! Messenger window. Messenger is also more getting social as we roll out new features to help you stay in closer contact with friends and family. A new “Updates” tab gives you a quick glimpse of what your contacts are up to – including status updates, Flickr uploads, Yahoo! Buzz stories, Tweets and more. Since our popularity only grows around the globe, we’re also letting you customize your client with one of 16 languages without having to download a different version. And finally, an improved iPhone Messenger app ensures the same great experience with your contacts’ messages even when you’re on the go.

Download the Messenger 10 Beta here: http://messenger.yahoo.com/winbeta. And be sure to check out a demo of what’s new in Yahoo! Messenger 10:

Testing the new Yahoo! Search.
To prove just how committed we are to continued innovation in your search experience, we’re testing a new search results page that ups the ante on personal relevance. We’re providing new tools for refining results that let you explore related concepts, display only results from popular Yahoo! and third-party sites, and narrow results by types of content like people, videos, and discussion forums.

We’re also using advanced science to detect what you’re searching for based on your search history. For example, if you search for “cat” and then later for “jaguar” we can figure out that you’re looking for content about the animal and not the car.

We’re running random bucket tests (no opt-in at this time) of this new version of search with a small subset of our users. In case you’re not one of the lucky millions, here’s a sneak preview of what we’re testing:

Finally, following the lead of the new Yahoo! Homepage, which now proudly wears our corporate color, we are introducing a new “universal header” across every Yahoo! product and service in the U.S. It not only sports a purple logo, it also features a Yahoo! Search box that integrates Search Assist on every page. We never want you to have to go far to find what you’re looking for.

Check out screenshots of our various enhancements as well as more details of today’s news at our Press Room and over at the Yahoo! Messenger Blog and the Yahoo! Mail Blog.

Bryan Lamkin
SVP Yahoo! Applications

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

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

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

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

• Home sweet home: We’ve remodeled the house but we’re letting you pick out the furniture. The new Yahoo! Homepage is here! And it’s all about you. Load it up with your favorite websites by choosing from one of more than 65 apps or adding a link of your own. Also, your news is now hyper-local and you can also toggle the main news module for more of the big news that matters. And you can take it all with you — PC to mobile sync is coming very soon. If you live in the U.S., you can opt-in today by visiting http://yahoo.com/trynew. Our friends in France, India, and the UK will soon have access to localized versions and we’ll start rolling out to other markets in the next month. Take a tour and read more here.
• Roadtrip photos: If you’re one of the many people who researches travel destinations by checking out online photos, you’ll start packing your suitcase when you see the new travel image refiner on Yahoo! Image Search. You can now take a virtual tour of popular points of interest when you search for a destination. Which Hawaiian isle is right for you? Search for Hawaii and click on the thumbnails for islands like Maui, Oahu, Kauai, and popular spots like Haleakala National Park and Waimea Canyon. Try it with Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Rome, Sydney, New York City, San Francisco, and beyond. More here.
• More mobile Messenger: Attention, iPhone users – the latest Yahoo! Messenger app update is out and it is spiffy. Now you can get notified of a new message even when the app is closed. Make that, even when your iPhone is asleep! You can choose whether you get an alert on your home screen, an alert sound, or a badge featuring the number of messages — or all three, or none. Another new addition – you can now stay signed in for up to two weeks. Again, that’s even when your app is closed. And finally, you can now BUZZ! your friends – one of the most requested features for the iPhone app. Ask and ye shall receive! More here.
• Back to class: Yep, it’ll soon be time to trade flip-flops for Mary Janes – school is right around the corner. But we’re here to ease the pain. Our new Back to School site helps you choose the right backpack, find green school supplies, get safety tips, find ways to cut down your back-to-school budget, and even adjust to a new school. We give you a roster of shopping bargains, like dorm room essentials, MP3 players, and student duds. There’s also a study zone with fun learnings, games, and cool Avatar gear for when the time comes to drop a school bus in your background. And if you’re tired of the same ol’ same ol’, there are great healthy school lunch recipes. In the meantime, make the most of those flip-flops!

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

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Stephen Colbert doesn’t shave his head for just anybody. But sometimes that’s what it takes to get attention for a worthy cause.

This week, Comedy Central’s Colbert Report is broadcasting from Baghdad’s Camp Victory in support of U.S. troops serving in Iraq. In a show of solidarity, he’s now sporting a high-and-tight haircut. But he’s also putting the spotlight on a different part of the military –- the children who make great sacrifices of their own while their parents serve our country.

That’s where my organization, DonorsChoose.org, comes in. Together we hope to give these kids a leg up. I founded DonorsChoose.org nine years ago after witnessing the scarcity of materials in our country’s public schools, I never could have imagined the extent to which American citizen philanthropists have responded. In that time, we’ve raised over $34 million for public school classroom projects around the country.

As part of our “Support Our Troops” campaign, launched in partnership with Colbert, DonorsChoose.org is running a friendly competition among the Armed Forces –- Army, Air Force, Marines, Navy and Coast Guard — to see which branch’s supporters can have the biggest impact on classrooms. As of today, we have raised more than $130,000, and the Army is barely hanging on to the lead (check out the leaderboard as the tension builds in real-time).

Literally hundreds of projects have been submitted by teachers at military-serving schools across the country. Just a couple to inspire you:

1. Say Sí to the Army!
2. From A to Bravo Zulu!
3. Military Students Travel the World – Through Books!
4. General Lee’s Black Bears

I’d also like to give a shout out to Yahoo! for creating the Colbert Avatars. Now you can dress yourself as Stephen Colbert and accessorize with things like an eagle, bear, Colbert Nation hat, Che Colbert tshirt, fireplace, and a desk, and help us spread the word about the Support Our Troops campaign.

The good news is you don’t have to shave your head to help. Just please go donate to one of the many classroom projects waiting for funding. And if you need further inspiration, check out the video clips from this week’s Colbert Report.

Charles Best
Founder and CEO, DonorsChoose.org

Yahoo!’s tech gurus have just returned from quite the trip! Last week, the team packed their bags and headed to Bucharest, Romania to host Yahoo!’s 14th Open Hack. It was a huge hit with over 350 hackers and developers from 19 countries around Europe joining us for a day of technical sessions and presentations, followed by an all-night 24-hour hackathon.

Over the course of the weekend, hackers consumed..

1090 cans of Red Bull
115 liters of Pepsi
55 lbs of coffee

..to keep them energized and awake throughout the hackathon  event.

After a day and a half of crazy cramming and hacking (and piles of pizza!), hacks were judged on their originality and technical excellence by a panel of judges that included Yahoo!’s Chief Technology Officer, Raymie Stata; Todd Hay, who heads up the Yahoo! Developer Network, as well as notables from Romania’s tech community. Hackers then joined Raymie Stata for a keynote followed by the Open Hack Europe 2011 recognition ceremony.

Hack days are a great way to encourage innovation and share ideas across the developer community and this year’s event didn’t let us down – the buzz around Yahoo! products and APIs was huge!

Judgesrated the following as the top hacks:

TheBatMail
Best Product Enhancement
TheBatMail application integrates directly into Yahoo! Mail and features threaded discussions, social discovery and email editing.

Map of Deforested Areas in Romania
Hack for Social Good
Map of Deforested Areas in Romania works with satellite images to identify deforestation in Romania and can be used by the general public and NGOs to monitor and compile deforested areas in the country.

Take a Hike
Best Yahoo! Search BOSS Hack
Take a Hike tracks the popularity of political parties and current politicians, showing stats and other useful information about the local political climate.

Tourist Guide
Best Local Hack
Tourist Guide finds the most popular places for tourists to visit using the number of uploaded pictures on Flickr and Panoramio and check-ins with Foursquare and Gowalla.

The Yahoo Farm – “Cloud Data in Your Bedroom“
Hacker’s Choice
This crafty hardware hack gathers data about your local weather, incoming Yahoo! Mail, and Messenger buddies via Yahoo! APIs and presents it as ascale model diorama of a country farm, complete with yodeling sheep and a working windmill.

YMotion
Best Mashup
Ymotion helps you get an idea about the mood of your audience at a presentation or a popular tourist location by using facial expression recognition techniques.

Yahoo Social Programming
Best Messenger Hack
Yahoo! Social Programming is an Eclipse plug-in based on the Yahoo Messenger API that enables programmers around the world to share their code in real-time.

Top Hacker
Alexandru Badiu was also named Best in Show for contributing three hacks to the event (Playlist-O-Matic, Take a Hike and Quick Info), which is quite an accomplishment in itself and even more so considering the time constraint!

We’re all beat from the festivities, but thrilled that we got to meet such inspiring new members of our developer community.  We are already looking forward to our next Open Hack event, taking place in Bangalore in July – we hope to see you there!

Check out the @openhackday Twitter handle or the Facebook and Flickr sites for more buzz around the event.

• Musical revival: Blowing its doors off their hinges, Yahoo! Music has fully embraced the open web with launch of its new Artist Pages. You’ll find downloads from iTunes; albums from Amazon; streams from Pandora, Last.fm and Rhapsody; music videos from YouTube and Yahoo!; photos from Flickr; and tickets from Ticketmaster – for more than 500,000 artists. And you call the shots on whatever modules you want to see. Eventually artists will be able to publish directly into their pages and developers will beef up our modules gallery. Music to our ears. More here.
• Instant iGratification: No need to get all twitchy when you leave your desk — Yahoo! Messenger is now available for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Released into the wild this week, the free Yahoo! Messenger app can now be found in the iTunes App Store. It’s got a lot of the same bells and whistles — photo sharing, stealth mode, status messages, archiving, emoticons. More here. What?! You don’t have an iPhone? Lucky for you Yahoo! Messenger works with other phones, too — check the roster here.

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• Video free for all: Flickr made several video headlines on Monday. First, they granted free video uploads to all users (hooray!). Then they introduced HD video uploads for Pro users (yahooo!), bringing the magical and glorious world of crisp, aperture-rich high-definition video to the viewing masses on Flickr. And, finally, they introduced Flickr Clock, a unique new toy that lets you explore videos taken across the Flickrverse by time of day. Oh! And unrelated to video, free Flickr users are no longer relegated to organizing photos into just three sets — let’s hear it for unlimited sets for your 200 most recent photos.
• In the loop on Mail: If you noticed something different when you logged into Yahoo! Mail, that’s because the team has been sprucing up the page with more new social features. As we said in December, we’re working on bringing you a “smarter inbox.” Initially, you could see your friends’ Yahoo!-related updates (i.e., stories they’ve buzzed on Yahoo! Buzz, hotels rated on Yahoo! Travel, etc.). But now you can see their updates from across the web — sites like YouTube, Blogger, Yelp, Picasa, and more. And there are many more Yahoo! sites now live, including Yahoo! Sports and Flickr. More here.
• Inquisitive iPhone: If you own an iPhone in the U.S., I suggest you run — don’t walk — to the App Store and download yourself a copy of the new Inquisitor app. This new mobile version of Inquisitor makes searching on your iPhone a breeze by autocompleting keywords and making search suggestions, so you can spend less time typing and more time finding. Here’s the buzz on Twitter. Obama’s not your president? Sit tight — it’s coming to your world soon.
• That’s my Mac calling: If you’re a Mac head and like calling your friends via Yahoo! Messenger, listen up. One of our engineers has written a plugin that lets you automatically dial a friend from within your Mac Address Book. Just install the script, open a friend’s contact card, right-click on the phone number, select “Call with Yahoo! Messenger,” and start gabbing away. Make sure you have Yahoo! Messenger for Mac 3.0 Beta 4. More here.

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• Mobile makeover: The gang at Yahoo! Mobile rolled out a beta program this week for a comprehensive new mobile service known as, simply enough, Yahoo! Mobile. It will come to a cell phone near you next month on the mobile Web, as an iPhone app, and as an app developed for smartphones from Nokia, RIM, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and Motorola, as well as those running Windows Mobile. It will replace Yahoo! Go and packages a variety of great mobile offerings into one location — search, email, messenger, address book, calendar, news, social networks, and even managing all your favorite non-Yahoo! content. To sign up for the beta, just enter http://mobile.yahoo.com in your phone’s browser (and be patient — it make take up to a few weeks to be admitted to the program). Here’s the press release.
• Ogling at the Oscars: Let’s face it — next to finding out the Academy Award winners, we care most about how everyone looks on the red carpet. That’s why the Yahoo! Search team has built a new Oscar-related carousel for Yahoo! Image Search. After Sunday’s show and parties, enter keywords related to Oscar-nominated films or actors and you’ll find a rolling gallery of the newest photos above the regular search results. Toggle your way through Slumdog Millionaire, Mickey Rourke, and Kate Winslet eye candy. More here.
• Watch with me: Raise your hand if you’ve ever IMed a video link to share a laugh with a friend, only to be disappointed when it takes them a few hours to finally get around to watching it. Wouldn’t it be cooler to watch that video together, at the same time? The scientists and engineers at Yahoo! Research think so and have just released a piping hot new version of Zync, a synchronized video player for Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 for Windows. You can now simultaneously view videos on Yahoo! Video, Flickr and, of course, YouTube — with Yahoo! Music and Yahoo! News to come next week. Just paste the video link into your conversation and click the “Watch With Me” button — share, watch, chat. No download necessary. Now go watch the woman who missed her flight in Hong Kong with someone.

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• Mobile search gets easier: The Mobile team just rolled out a bevy of updates to the Yahoo! oneSearch Shortcut to make searching on your cell even swifter. A new auto-locate feature uses cell tower triangulation and Wi-Fi to detect your whereabouts so you don’t have to do any work. They’ve spiffed up Search Assist so that it remembers your recent search history (big fingered people rejoice!). And finally, it’s now available for Windows Mobile devices. More here.
• Messenger for Mac mo betta: The latest beta release of Yahoo! Messenger for Mac came out this week with new features and squashes for more than three dozen bugs. They’ve fixed issues around file transfers, display images, voice, chat rooms, stealth settings, and webcam. When you report IM spam, the offender is also added to your ignore list. And you can now choose a new message style for your conversation windows, just to shake things up. More here.
• Honest Abe in pictures: Our 16th president hit the big two-oh-oh this week and to celebrate, the Library of Congress hooked up with Flickr Commons to give you a revealing look at Abraham Lincoln over a period of 20 years. You see him from the earliest known photo through to the Civil War years, along with views from his funeral. Born into the era when photography burst onto the scene, Lincoln has been called the most photographed man of his day. More on the Flickr blog.
• So long, MyWeb: With three bookmarking services, it was time to streamline. MyWeb will ride off into the sunset on March 18th, making room for Delicious (social bookmarks) and Yahoo! Bookmarks (private bookmarks), both of which have seen recent upgrades and new features. If you’d rather take your bookmarks elsewhere, you can also migrate to third-party services with our handy export tools. More on the Yahoo! Search Blog and our help pages.

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• Send a loud smooch: If you’ve ever wanted to make your Yahoo! Messenger emoticons come to life (with sound), now you can! Choose from eight audible emoticons like the cowboy, happy face, the devil and more. Here’s how. Once you have an IM window open, click the audibles icon (the one with the lips) right above your text box (works only on Yahoo! Messenger 8.1 or 9.0). Click the “More Audibles” button on the right, select “See All Audibles,” then choose the “emoticon” option, and let er rip! Yeehaw! Read more here.
• Ultimate fighting: Not the spandex-wearing kind, think mixed martial arts fighting with grappling holds and kicks. On March 1, sports fans everywhere can view the Ultimate Fighting Championship event, UFC 82: Pride of a Champion live via pay-per-view on Yahoo! Sports (we’re the new online distributor for UFC, so more of these to come). Who will be crowned the champion – PRIDE Champion Dan Hendersen, or UFC Champion Anderson Silva? That much you’ll have to tune in to find out.
• For you suits: No more ink on your fingers from reading the Wall Street Journal. Now add the new Wall Street Journal module to get all your in-depth business news and financial info all day long right from your My Yahoo! page. For WSJ.com subscribers, the module keeps your top business stories above the fold and for the rest of us, we get access to free daily articles and free video links. Check out the other modules you can add here.
• Pick’em good: If you’ve ever been on the fence about Fantasy Sports, we’ve upped the ante on Yahoo! Sports. For this year’s college basketball Tourney Pick’em, a perfect bracket pick for all 63 games could land you $5 million (thanks to KFC). And for all you stat skeptics, for the very first time we’re guaranteeing $10,000 to the entrant with the highest scoring bracket. We’ve even added some new feature like customized scoring, a public group directory, and a user-generated Popular Picks bracket. Happy pickings.

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• Vista IM revisited: Thanks to you bug hunters out there, we’ve squashed some issues in a refreshed version of Yahoo! Messenger for Vista Preview. It’s now more stable and responsive and features enhancements like a new look. There’s more work on the roadmap, but our thanks to the diehards for helping make it a better experience. More here.
• Indie action: Even if you’re not knee-deep in powder, rubbing elbows with moguls of independent film, you can still follow the action at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. Yahoo! Movies’ Independent Film Guide gives you an overview of this year’s films, the latest news, and photo galleries of the attending stars. No tickets or Uggs required.
• Idol module: If you love off-key performances, Simon’s barbs, Paula’s tears, dawg encouragements, stunning comebacks, and Kajagoogoo hairstyles, now’s the time to add EW.com’s new American Idol module to your My Yahoo!. You’ll get show recaps, commentary, and predictions every time you log in to your page. Hurry, auditions are underway. Find it here.

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