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Yahoo! Accelerates Social Momentum

Yahoo

Continuing its commitment to be the center of people’s online lives, Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) today announced new product integrations that continue bringing the best social experiences from across the Web to Yahoo! consumers around the world.

“More and more, people rely on social sites to share and discover information that matters to them, making Yahoo! uniquely positioned to provide people with all of the mainstream methods of content discovery – social, search, communications, and editorial,” said Cody Simms, senior director of Social Platforms and Yahoo! Developer Network (YDN) at Yahoo!. “Starting with Facebook, we are bringing all of these elements together to give people one simple, trusted place to share information and connect. We think this offers great benefit to people across the web, and it’s key to helping Yahoo! extend our reach and increase engagement.”

Today’s announcement covers:

• Facebook Integration — Yahoo! has reached an important milestone in its partnership with Facebook. Starting this week, people who use both Yahoo! and Facebook can link their accounts and view and share updates with friends across both networks. People who connect their accounts can consume their Facebook News Feed on the Yahoo! homepage and in Yahoo! Mail and other Yahoo! sites and services. Additionally, people who create and share content on Yahoo! sites – including Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Sports, Flickr, and many Yahoo! entertainment sites, such as omg!, Yahoo! TV, and Yahoo! Movies – can easily share their actions with friends back on Facebook. Additional integrations will be ongoing.

• A Refresh of Yahoo! Profiles — Launched in October 2008, Yahoo! Profiles has allowed people to manage their identity and activities across Yahoo! from a central location. Yahoo! has refreshed the experience to make its privacy settings easier to use and to give people a central dashboard to manage what they share on Yahoo! from the external social accounts and apps that they have linked to Yahoo!, starting with Facebook and with others to come later this year. Yahoo! Profiles has been renamed Yahoo! Pulse to better reflect its broader ability to manage Yahoo! settings, privacy, and account links. The updated experience is available at http://pulse.yahoo.com.

“From news to sports to entertainment, Yahoo! sites provide ideal experiences to share with friends,” said Ethan Beard, director of Facebook Developer Network. “By integrating with Facebook on a global scale, Yahoo! is building upon an already valuable brand to give people easy ways to share the content they enjoy on Yahoo! with their friends on Facebook.”

Social and Yahoo! – Recent Milestones

Over the last few months, Yahoo! has been weaving the best social experiences from across the Web into the Yahoo! network to create more personally relevant online experiences for consumers worldwide, using its global cloud computing infrastructure. Upcoming and recent milestones include:
• Zynga Partnership- Later this year, Zynga, the company behind hit social games such as Farmville and Mafia Wars, has agreed to integrate its games into the Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP), making them available to people throughout the Yahoo! network.
• Koprol Acquisition- The recent acquisition of Koprol extends Yahoo!’s social, mobile, and local offerings and focuses on the intersection of location, community expertise, and mobile experiences.
• Yahoo! Updates “Firehose”- Earlier this year, the Yahoo! Updates firehose API — which aggregates social updates from Yahoo! and other sites across the Web and makes them easily available to publishers and developers — was rolled out.
• Citizen Sports Acquisition- Strengthening Yahoo!’s overall social strategy, the recent acquisition of Citizen Sports brings the world of sports to Facebook and mobile devices through innovative applications.
• Facebook Contacts Integration- Yahoo! Mail launched import contact functionality from Facebook into Yahoo! Contacts so people can build a more robust online address book.
• Facebook “Like button”- Facebook users who visit Yahoo! Finance and Yahoo! Sports can now easily “like” items such as sports teams or stock quote pages and share those actions with friends on Facebook.
• Twitter Partnership- Earlier this year, Yahoo! announced a global partnership to integrate Twitter’s real-time social experiences across Yahoo!. Yahoo! Search results already draw from the full stream of public tweets, and the broader agreement is scheduled for implementation later this year.
• Developer & Publisher Solutions- A suite of social APIs and services enable publishers like the Huffington Post and thousands of others to leverage the power of the Y!OS social platform via partnerships with JS-Kit Echo, Meebo, Gigya, Jan-Rain, among others. More information is at http://developer.yahoo.com/publisher.

Yahoo! is deeply committed to privacy – not just as a written policy, but as a fundamental consideration applied to each and every Yahoo! site and service. Yahoo! offers simple controls so that everyone can change who sees their updates, or turn off their updates stream at any time. To find out more, go to Yahoo.com and search for “Yahoo! privacy settings” or visit http://pulse.yahoo.com/y/settings.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Yahoo

Yahoo! says ‘Hello, India!’ to enable Flickr Communities connect offline

Yahoo! India hosted unique community events for Flickr across Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore this month to provide an offline platform for Flickr photo and video enthusiasts. Designed around the theme “Hello, India!”, these community events celebrated the growing success of Flickr in India and served as a vibrant platform for people to connect with their communities, meet new friends and exchange their exciting experiences.

“Hello, India!” community events brought together nearly 200 Flickr community members in each city and helped them connect through the language of photography.

Flickr offers a compelling online photo-sharing platform that is at the centre of people’s online lives. Yahoo! India already boasts of over 2.29 million Flickr users (comScore, March 2010) with over 12,500 groups connected with the term “India”. Globally, Flickr already has over 4 billion photo and video uploads and a monthly unique visitors of 85.9 million, worldwide (comScore, March 2010). Flickr allows users to effortlessly upload, organize, edit, control, share, explore and do more.

“We are all photographers now documenting and sharing individual perspectives that make up a collective memoir of the world,” said David Fusco, Flickr International Project Manager. “We appreciate one another’s contributions. We learn, we share, we grow, it’s what makes Flickr so special.”

Flickr is an awe-inspiring collection of photos and video that makes for endless exploration and discovery of beautiful, stunning, touching moments that people capture around the world. It enables interaction and control amongst its community of members and allows anyone to share their authentic photos and personal video clips publicly or privately. Whether communicating with friends and family, conversing about shared interests, or capturing breaking news, members can upload and share photos and video from anywhere at anytime.

“Flickr has established itself as the eyes of the world, with millions of people all over the planet sharing photos and video of every imaginable aspect of life,” said Arun Tadanki, Managing Director, Yahoo! India.

“Our community events in India witnessed an overwhelming response which truly testifies Flickr’s popularity. Yahoo! India already has over two million Flickr users. With Flickr, we want to help people make their photos and video available to those who matter to them. We want to enable new ways of organizing photos and video,” added Arun.

“Once I started using Flickr, I have become a regular. A window of Flickr is always open and I keep updating my destinations on Flickr regularly. It is a virtual visual gallery for amazing captures of my travels. Flickr is a platform for me to share my photos and seek feedback from people who share interest in photography, by being member of such groups,” said R. Sreenivasan, a member of the Delhi Photographers Group & Co-founder of Career Launcher.

Flickr also has an open application programming interface (API) that allows anyone to write their own programme in new and different ways. The Flickr App Garden is a place where developers can showcase the applications they have created. Flickr also provides a rich and seamless mobile-web experience with m.flickr.com , allowing users to easily manage, share and explore photos from their mobile phones.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Yahoo India

Farhan & Deepika to pick best love stories on Yahoo!

Yahoo! India, the leading Internet company today announced its association with the much awaited film Karthik Calling Karthik (KCK), starring Farhan Akhtar and Deepika Padukone. As the exclusive online partner, Yahoo! India will host the film microsite (http://kckcontest.yahoo.in/) and launch the ‘Love @ First Click’ contest where users can submit their Internet love stories. Farhan and Deepika will choose the best love story and meet the winners in person.

“Today, relationships have found a whole new expression through the Internet. A recent Yahoo! Valentines opinion poll indicated that over 50 percent of the people felt online romance has taken over off line romance. We are excited to partner with a film that showcases a contemporary love story with Internet as an integral part of building and managing relationships,” said Nitin Mathur, Director-Marketing, Yahoo! India.

http://kckcontest.yahoo.in/ features a Yahoo! Fan Group for Deepika and Farhan, besides a KCK Photo Gallery that has all the latest photographs and videos from the film. 50 lucky winners will also get KCK audio CD’s signed by Farhan / Deepika.

Popularity: 4% [?]

MIPS Technologies Leverages Yahoo! TV Widgets for MIPS-Based™ DTV Platforms

Leading Processor Supplier for DTV Market Developing Reference Implementation of Yahoo! Widget Engine

INTERNATIONAL CES, LAS VEGAS, Nev. – January 7, 2010 – MIPS Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq: MIPS), a leading provider of industry-standard processor architectures and cores for digital consumer, home networking, wireless, communications and business applications, announced today integration of an optimized Yahoo! Widget Engine for MIPS-BasedTM digital home devices. MIPS will develop an optimized reference platform running the Yahoo! Widget Engine for digital TV and set-top box applications. Leveraging this reference implementation, MIPS® licensees will be able to quickly develop devices incorporating Yahoo! TV Widgets. Yahoo! TV Widgets enable popular Internet services and online media to reach viewers through applications specifically tailored to the needs of the television watcher.

“This is another important step in our commitment to deliver full solutions, optimizations and reference platforms that speed our customers’ product development cycle,” said Art Swift, vice president of marketing, MIPS Technologies. “Yahoo! TV Widgets are capable of providing an entirely new connected and personalized television viewing experience. With number one market share in processors for digital TV and other connected digital home markets, MIPS is pleased to be enabling that experience on our customers’ platforms to reach the majority of DTV manufacturers.”

“Yahoo! enhances the television viewing experience for millions of consumers around the world by bringing personally relevant experiences to Internet-connected TVs,” said Arlo Rose, senior director of product management and design, Yahoo! Connected TV. “By combining our TV Widget technology with the global distribution of partners like MIPS Technologies, we will further enable consumers to access the exciting content developed by Yahoo! and third-party developers across a broad range of living room devices.”

According to Michael J. Palma, IDC Senior Research Analyst for consumer semiconductors, “MIPS Technologies is the leading architecture platform for digital multimedia solutions. The MIPS architecture is the market share leader in processor architectures for digital TVs, digital cable set-top boxes, digital satellite receivers, digital video recorders, DVD players, Blu-ray disc players and IPTV set-top boxes. For the digital TV segment, the MIPS architecture accounts for over half of processors. MIPS is also the number one processor architecture for connectivity solutions including Wi-Fi, DSL consumer premises equipment (CPE) and cable modems.”

For more information on Yahoo! Connected TV please visit http://connectedtv.yahoo.com

Popularity: 3% [?]