Yahoo has unveiled several new products, showing a big focus on mobile platforms.
The digital media company has been struggling against the growth of competitors such as Google, and has recently been forced to begin shopping for a buyer.
The latest products from Yahoo do, however, show an attempt by the Internet search pioneer to remain relevant to its 700 million monthly visitors.
The biggest announcement was Livestand for iPad, the long-awaited social newsstand app that combines content from third party publishers with Yahoo's own media network to create personalised reading material for users. The app competes directly with the likes of Flipboard.
Executive VP and chief product officer at Yahoo, Blake Irving, said at a press event at the company's headquarters yesterday: "Hundreds of millions of people rely on Yahoo every day, yet no two users are alike.”
Irving said the product launches reaffirm the company's commitment to personalise experiences across devices.
According to Irving, mobile is essential to Yahoo's strategy “to be where the customer goes”. The company also said t is aiming to cater for people in developing countries, who access the Internet primarily through mobile devices.
“We believe innovation in this space is happening on mobile first,” said Irving.
Social viewing
Livestand was first mentioned by Yahoo in February this year, and Irving said it has taken a long time to get the app right. The company will be sharing ad and subscription revenue with its publishing partners, and will reportedly run interactive ads on Livestand - the first of which will come from Toyota and DreamWorks.
The app then pulls up related tweets, hashtags, recommendations, related content and allows for discussions with friends.
The company has also released an HTML 5 version of Yahoo Mail for the iPad. It features a tile dashboard with top stories, weather, Flickr photos and Yahoo videos.
Looking ahead
Another mobile offering released yesterday is Yahoo Weather for Android, which is essentially a crowdsourcing effort to create a global weather image library. The collected images will then be used to “bring weather to life” by showing images that correspond to location, time and current weather.
Some new social features have also been added to Yahoo to expand on Yahoo News activity, with the addition of a conversations feature and a Social Sentiment Slider (a social opinion poll).
The Slider is available in the US, while Yahoo says the other features will be made available in the next few weeks.
Irving said despite the speculation over the future of Yahoo, the company remains excited about its new products.
"I am personally more bullish on Yahoo today than I was two weeks ago, or a year ago," said Irving.
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