Posts filed under 'Yahoo!'
Yahoo! and McAfee today announced a partnership to deliver a safer Web search experience through Yahoo! Search. Launching in beta today, the new SearchScan feature by Yahoo! Search, powered by the award-winning McAfee(R) SiteAdvisor(R) technology, provides always-on alerts to users for “risky” sites with security concerns such as spyware, adware and other malicious software that can infect and damage a user’s PC. SearchScan also identifies sites that have shown bad email practices, flooding user in-boxes with spammy emails. SearchScan is available for Yahoo! Search users in the US, Canada, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and Spain. The McAfee Yahoo! partnership is a multi-year, global agreement with additional elements, including bringing Yahoo! Search to McAfee users, in the next few months.
By integrating McAfee’s technology into Yahoo! Search, sites that may harm the user’s computer just by visiting them will be eliminated from appearing in Yahoo! Search results. SearchScan also alerts users to potentially risky sites with a red warning sign in search results, allowing users to proceed with caution. During this beta period, SearchScan displays McAfee alerts optimal for the Yahoo! Search user and does not include all McAfee SiteAdvisor red ratings. (See Diagram 1)
After children’s safety, 65 percent of Americans online are more worried about clicking unsecured search listings than the threat of neighborhood crime, getting ones wallet stolen or email scams.* SearchScan addresses users urgent need to avoid visiting dangerous sites on the Web when conducting a search. The McAfee Yahoo! partnership represents a major step forward for safer searching online; users who conduct Web searches with Yahoo! will be warned about the many malicious and dangerous Web sites before they visit them.
“The new SearchScan feature from Yahoo! Search makes searching the Web even safer than ever before. No other search engine today offers this level of warning before visiting sites that can damage or infect a user’s PC and cost them valuable time and money,” said Vish Makhijani, senior vice president and general manager of Yahoo! Search. “Through this partnership with McAfee, we can offer users a safer search experience and drive more users to make Yahoo! Search their starting point on the Web.”
“We are very excited to have Yahoo! as a partner to make the Internet more secure for everyone,” said Tim Dowling, McAfee vice president, Web Security Group “The advance warning offered by McAfee SiteAdvisor is one of the strongest weapons in the battle against online threats. Research indicates that 4 out of 5 Web site visits start with a search, and consumers who use Yahoo! Search will now be alerted to high-risk Web sites. This protects users from known malicious threats such as browser exploits that will wreck their PC with a single click or spyware that can lead to identity theft.”
May 6th, 2008
So long to the days of the corporate e-leash. No longer are employees stressed by their wireless devices and made to feel harnessed by too much connectivity. According to Yahoo! HotJobs’ (http://hotjobs.yahoo.com) annual virtual workplace survey, 37 percent of employees feel more relaxed than stressed when they are connected to work by a wireless device, and another 42 percent are altogether indifferent to their wireless device, feeling neither relaxed nor stressed by it.
Along with the widespread acceptance of wireless devices may come a lapse in proper etiquette. Of those surveyed, 18 percent admit to being reprimanded for having bad manners when it comes to their wireless device. This behavior extends in and out of work with another 39 percent saying that they respond almost instantaneously when they receive a professional email or call outside of business hours.
“The gravity of leaving the house without your wireless device has become synonymous with that of leaving your keys at home, if not worse,” explains Tom Musbach, managing editor of Yahoo! HotJobs. “As the wireless device becomes more ubiquitous for personal and professional reasons, many employees develop a psychological need for constant connection. While this connection can be a positive from a professional standpoint, it’s important to remember that the use of wireless devices needs to be managed and certain missteps avoided.”
Boardroom Security Blanket
With 38 percent of respondents describing their wireless device as a necessity, these gadgets have become exponentially more integrated into workplace culture:
- The majority, 55 percent, of respondents use more than one wireless device to stay connected when outside of work;
- More than half, 55 percent, of respondents say that their office supports a virtual workplace culture – allowing employees to choose from where they’d like to work;
- Almost one in three, 28 percent, of respondents say that having the freedom of remote access via a wireless device helps them work more effectively than when they are in the office; and
- Almost one quarter of survey respondents admit to only putting their wireless device down when they are sleeping, and only 5 percent of respondents admit to being 100 percent offline when not in the office—down from 8 percent last year.
Disconnect: Wireless Faux Pas
As wireless devices become further cemented into corporate culture, a spectrum of acceptable and unacceptable behavior has emerged:
Inappropriate wireless device etiquette (in order of least to most reprehensible):
- Answering a work call or email during personal time after work hours
- Talking on the phone while in close quarters (e.g. train, plane, bus)
- Talking on the phone while in the bathroom
- Answering the phone or emails while at a business dinner
- Accepting a personal call while in a meeting or presentation
Keep Your Device in Check
Moderation is key. Here are a few tips from Yahoo! HotJobs’ Tom Musbach for keeping your wireless device habits within bounds:
- Keep your device on vibrate to avoid interrupting others near your workspace.
- Take personal and any other conversations that might make your coworkers uncomfortable into a conference room or other closed off area to avoid being overheard. Only answer absolutely necessary calls when in close quarters.
- Don’t interrupt business meetings or dinners with calls or emails unless it is an emergency.
- Use text messaging and emailing when possible—it’s less intrusive.
- Let the person you are communicating with know that you are on a wireless device and that the conversation must be kept brief.
- Some buildings don’t allow wireless device use. Adhere to the signs and be respectful of the surrounding environment.
For more advice on making your wireless workplace work for you and other tools for managing your career, visit Yahoo! HotJobs at http://hotjobs.yahoo.com.
April 27th, 2008
Yahoo! today announced the release of Slurp 3.0 on the Yahoo! Search Blog:
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been preparing for the latest version of the Yahoo! Search crawler with some infrastructure updates, which recently caused a variance in our crawl behavior.
With everything now in place, the rollout has officially begun. The new Yahoo! Slurp 3.0 recognizes the same user-agent and all robots.txt directives for ‘Yahoo! Slurp,’ though it’ll identify itself as Slurp 3.0 in your web logs.
As the new software undergoes a phased rollout to our production crawlers over the next several weeks, you’ll see the following changes:
a) The crawlers will start crawling from a different and much smaller set of IP addresses, but it’ll still be from the crawl.yahoo.net domain. Any reverse DNS checks to identify our crawler will continue to work. Please note that if you’re using IP-based recognition of our crawlers, you might see a drop in crawl/coverage from Yahoo! We strongly recommend that you move to reverse DNS-based identification of Yahoo! Slurp if you’re using any other method to avoid this problem. The current set of IPs will disappear from your web logs in the next several weeks.
b) The crawlers will also publish a new user-agent, ‘Yahoo! Slurp/3.0.’ Existing robots.txt directives for ‘Slurp’ or ‘Yahoo! Slurp’ will continue to work, but if you have directives specific to ‘Slurp/2.0,’ they won’t be recognized by the new crawler (though usage of the ‘Slurp/2.0′ user-agent is very rare on the web, so you won’t likely be affected). We recommend specifying the shorter version of: User-agent: Slurp. Check out “How do I prevent my site or certain subdirectories from being crawled?” on our Help page for more details.
These changes will affect the main Yahoo! Web Search crawlers. Crawlers that similarly respect the Yahoo! Slurp directive but identify themselves more specifically, such as Yahoo! Slurp China and others, will not be impacted.
April 15th, 2008
Yahoo! and MLB Advanced Media, LP (MLBAM), the interactive media and Internet company of Major League Baseball, today announced a three-year video and advertising partnership that includes access to out-of-market MLB games on Yahoo! Sports. The agreement will make MLB.TV available on Yahoo! Sports, bringing Yahoo! users more than 2,400 out-of-market Major League Baseball games each year, live and on-demand, through the 2010 season. Additionally, Yahoo! will exclusively manage online advertising sales for MLB.TV in the 2009 and 2010 seasons.
This deal represents a continuation of Yahoo! Sports’ commitment to delivering the most compelling sports content on the web while significantly increasing the amount of high-quality video advertising inventory available to Yahoo! advertisers.
“This agreement exemplifies Yahoo! as the partner of choice to premier media organizations, as we’re providing MLB.com an opportunity to extend its reach to the largest possible audience, while at the same time maximizing monetization of its video subscription product,” said Todd Teresi, senior vice president of the Yahoo! Publisher Channel. “Partnering with MLB.com allows Yahoo! to offer our users an unmatched baseball experience, and also presents our advertisers with a new opportunity to reach a large, engaged audience of baseball enthusiasts.”
Yahoo! Sports will offer MLB.TV to fans in 11 countries, including the United States, Canada, Mexico, UK, Philippines and Germany. The games will be available through a co-branded player on Yahoo! Sports at http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb and MLB.com. During the first year of the deal, Yahoo! and MLBAM will jointly sell advertising for the video inventory, using Yahoo!’s advanced video ad format, Clickable, in addition to traditional pre-roll and post roll formats. For the remaining two years of the agreement, Yahoo! will be solely responsible for selling video advertising inventory for MLB.TV. All of this will be powered by Yahoo!’s industry-leading advertising management platform, AMP! from Yahoo!.
“Yahoo! has been a valuable partner with MLB.com in the past and this agreement represents an important evolution of our relationship with an industry-leading gateway to the Internet,” said Kenny Gersh, senior vice president, Business Development, MLBAM. “We are excited to leverage the popularity of watching live baseball games via MLB.TV with Yahoo!’s remarkable distribution portal and its well-established advertising sales capabilities.”
MLB.com launched its most significant MLB.TV upgrade to date on Opening Day of the 2008 season by offering MLB.TV Premium subscribers live out-of-market games in an enhanced video player with a television-quality picture through MLB.TV NexDef(TM) at either 800k or 1.2MB. An MLB.TV Premium subscription, available for $119.95 a year or $19.95 a month, also includes access to the Emmy Award winning MLB.TV Mosaic application, giving fans the opportunity to watch up to six live games simultaneously. MLB.com also offers its out-of-market subscription product at 400k for $89.95 a year or $14.95 a month.
“Yahoo! Sports has established itself as the leading online sports destination by partnering with organizations like MLB Advanced Media to offer the most compelling sports experience to our users,” said Jimmy Pitaro, general manger, Yahoo! Sports. “The addition of MLB.TV to Yahoo! Sports helps solidify our position as a true leader in online sports.”
The agreement also provides that Yahoo! Sports will distribute MLB.com’s FastCast, a quick highlights-based recap of the previous day’s games, and can utilize select other MLB.com video content within Yahoo! Sports’ original programming. MLB.com began offering live streaming video of games in August 2002 and launched the first full-season subscription video product in professional sports the following April. Since that time, more than one million fans have subscribed to MLB.TV.
April 13th, 2008
Yahoo! announced today that it will begin a limited test of Google Inc.’s AdSense for Search service, which will deliver relevant Google ads alongside Yahoo!’s own search results. The test will apply only to traffic from yahoo.com in the U.S. and will not include Yahoo!’s extended network of affiliate or premium publisher partners. The test is expected to last up to two weeks and will be limited to no more than 3% of Yahoo! search queries.
As previously announced, Yahoo!’s board of directors is exploring strategic alternatives to maximize stockholder value, including exploration of potential commercial business arrangements. The Company noted that the testing does not necessarily mean that Yahoo! will join the AdSense for Search program or that any further commercial relationship with Google will result. The Company further stated that it would not comment on the nature or timing of any potential relationship.
April 12th, 2008
Zimbra, a Yahoo! company and the leader in open source, next-generation messaging and collaboration software, today announced the availability of its ZimbraME (Java Mobile Edition) client and source code for businesses. Beginning today, users of any Java-enabled mobile phone will have access to the industry’s most complete collaboration solution. The ZimbraME client provides Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) Open Source and Network Edition users worldwide with free access to the Zimbra experience with e-mail and calendar on mass-market Java-enabled mobile phones. This extends Zimbra’s reach of services to the broadest range of devices available in the market and builds on Yahoo!’s leadership in e-mail and mobile Web services and as a key starting point for consumers.
“ZimbraME is key to delivering on our strategy and commitment to provide the best experience and widest range of desktop and mobile support of any messaging platform in the market today,” said Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra co-founder and Yahoo! vice president. “In an increasingly mobile world, a large percentage of people use mass-market handsets and expect to have access to information without needing a smartphone.”
ZimbraME is an over the air downloadable Java-based application for mobile devices that allows ZCS users to access their mail, contacts and calendars. It retains the powerful search capability found in the Zimbra AJAX client.
ZimbraME source code is available to the Zimbra community (www.zimbra.com) for feedback and enhancement, as well as to implement ZimbraME on the devices of their choice. Popular mobile devices supporting ZimbraME include the BlackBerry 8800 and 8820 series; the Motorola RAZR2; Nokia E61 and N73 handsets; the Sony-Ericsson W950i handset; and the Samsung SGH-E900 handset, adding to Zimbra’s longtime support for wireless platforms that includes Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm and iPhone. Additionally, Zimbra supports native sync to BlackBerry handsets via the BlackBerry Enterprise Server.
ZimbraME features include:
– Complete Collaboration: Real-time access to email and calendar functionality;
– Mobile Web 2.0 Functions: Ability to tag messages, view them as conversations, save searches, and have access to other Web 2.0 features via mobile handsets;
– Powerful Server-side Search: Access to Zimbra’s flexible, powerful server-side search, including the ability to search an entire inbox regardless of the memory limitations of any device.
“The addition of ZimbraME was instrumental to our choice of ZCS as a platform to support our customer base,” said Tom Riley, CEO, Crossroads Wireless. “ZimbraME will provide our users a Web 2.0-like experience on practically any wireless device, giving them functionality previously only available to them via a smartphone or on their PC.”
Pricing and Availability
The ZCS 5.0 Open Source Edition is free. The commercially supported ZCS 5.0 Network Edition is available for a 60-day free trial on the Zimbra website. Zimbra’s Hosted Demo (www.zimbra.com/demo) is available for an immediate test drive of ZCS.
ZCS Network Edition includes product support as well as software subscriptions to new releases, updates and patches. ZCS is available on-premise or as a hosted service and is available at a significant educational or non-profit discount. Please contact sales@zimbra.com for information. Users can discuss topics related to the Zimbra Collaboration Suite and provide feedback at www.zimbra.com/forums/.
April 4th, 2008
Yahoo! today announced the launch of Yahoo! Shine (http://shine.yahoo.com), a new website for women that aims to provide the information most relevant to their daily lives. The site offers nine categories ranging from Fashion & Beauty to Parenting, and will feature content from many of the most popular lifestyles publishers, including Conde Nast Publications and Hearst Corporation. Additionally, a new editorial team will develop original stories on a daily basis, and hand pick the best user blog posts to feature prominently on the site. Yahoo! Shine creates a single destination for the approximately 40 million women between the ages of 25 and 54 who already come to Yahoo! each month, making Yahoo! a more relevant starting point for this audience.
The new site will help create a better experience for women on Yahoo!, while providing Yahoo! advertisers with a single lifestyles destination to reach this coveted demographic. Yahoo! Shine brings together the resources of several existing Yahoo! sites, including Yahoo! Food and Yahoo! Astrology, and will incorporate content from Yahoo! Health. Bringing these resources together is an example of Yahoo! Media’s focus on building larger category sites for mass audiences, rather than focusing on niche topics and smaller audiences.
“We’re executing on Yahoo!’s starting point strategy by ensuring that women who start their day with Yahoo! are offered a more relevant experience,” said Scott Moore, senior vice president and head of Yahoo! Media. “Yahoo! Shine adds an important piece to our Media portfolio, which already includes sites that are number one in the News, Sports, Finance and Entertainment categories.”
Editorial Model
Lifestyles publishing veteran Brandon Holley serves as Yahoo! Shine’s editor-in-chief, overseeing a team of seasoned editors who each bring a unique point-of-view to their topic. The editors join Yahoo! from many of the leading print and online lifestyles outlets, including Lucky magazine, The Wall Street Journal’s Career Journal, and BluePrint magazine. Editors will program content in nine categories daily by featuring partner content, stories from a women’s blog network, and developing original stories. Yahoo! Shine’s nine categories are:
Fashion & Beauty, Parenting, Food, At Home, Healthy Living, Entertainment & Culture, Work & Money, Astrology, Love and Relationships
“You can count on us to bring attitude and personality, and find humor in almost every topic we cover, whether it’s a post on men who wear skinny jeans, how you can get back into your skinny jeans, or whether you’ll be taken seriously if you wear jeans to work,” Holley said. “Yahoo! Shine speaks to you as a friend, telling you the secrets and tips to simplify your life.”
Yahoo! Shine offers a blog platform for all users to share their thoughts and discoveries in a trusted environment. Editors will handpick entries from these blogs to feature alongside the partner and editorial content.
Like Yahoo!’s other category-leading media properties, Yahoo! Shine has partnered with the top content providers in its category. Yahoo! Shine’s partners will create original content and feature choice magazine content. Partners include:
– Conde Nast Publications and CondeNet - Glamour, Self, Bon Appetit, Lucky, Allure, Domino, Cookie, Style.com, Epicurious.com
– Hearst Corporation - Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar, Good Housekeeping, Marie Claire, Real Age, House Beautiful, Daily Green, Country Living
– Rodale, Inc. - Prevention, Women’s Health, Men’s Health, Best Life
– Time, Inc. - InStyle
– Eating Well Media - Eating Well
“Yahoo! is an ideal partner for us because they are pioneering a unique way to present content online,” said Christopher Johnson, vice president, content and business development, Hearst Magazines Digital Media. “With more than 130 million visitors each month to Yahoo! in the U.S., Yahoo! will become a giant megaphone for us and allow Hearst’s network of bloggers to elevate their voices and be heard by a much larger audience. Increasing the visibility of our blog content is a key element in driving additional traffic and converting passive readers into loyal fans.”
“We’re delighted that Yahoo! has turned to so many of our magazines and websites for content for its new women’s website,” said Rick Levine, vice president, editorial operations, Conde Nast Publications. “By speaking to Yahoo!’s huge audience, this partnership will give our great editorial properties a significant growth opportunity.”
Building on Yahoo!’s Advertising Leadership
The female (age 25-54) audience, which Yahoo! has designated as “Chief Household Officers,” is a highly sought-after demographic for advertisers. It is made up of heavy Internet users, who are frequently the household purchasing decision-makers. Yahoo! Shine creates an opportunity for advertisers to reach this audience in an environment that is relevant and meaningful to women, and several advertisers have signed up to participate at launch. Yahoo! believes the site will be especially attractive to advertisers in the consumer packaged goods, pharmaceuticals and retail categories, where combined online advertising spend is expected to exceed $1.8 billion in 2008, based on competitive spending analysis done by TNS Media Intelligence.
Visit http://shine.yahoo.com or go to Yahoo! and search “Shine.”
March 31st, 2008
Yahoo!, MySpace, and Google today announced they have agreed to form the OpenSocial Foundation to ensure the neutrality and longevity of OpenSocial as an open, community-governed specification for building social applications across the web. Yahoo!’s support of OpenSocial and role as a founding member of the new foundation are landmarks for the rapidly growing specification which will now offer developers the potential to connect with more than 500 million people worldwide.
The OpenSocial Foundation will be an independent non-profit entity with a formal intellectual property and governance framework; related assets will be assigned to the new organization by July 1, 2008. The foundation will provide transparency and operational guidelines around technology, documentation, intellectual property, and other issues related to the evolution of the OpenSocial platform, while also ensuring all stakeholders share influence over its future direction.
“Yahoo! believes in supporting community-driven industry specifications and expects that OpenSocial will fuel innovation and make the web more relevant and more enjoyable to millions of users,” said Wade Chambers, Vice President – Platforms, Yahoo!. “Our support builds on similar efforts with the OpenID community and will expand the opportunity for developers and publishers to benefit from an open and increasingly social web.”
“OpenSocial has been a community-driven specification from the beginning,” said Joe Kraus, Director of Product Management, Google. “The formation of this foundation will ensure that it remains so in perpetuity. Developers and websites should feel secure that OpenSocial will be forever free and open.”
The OpenSocial Foundation website at www.opensocial.org will serve as the portal for the community to find all information about OpenSocial and the foundation as they evolve. Developers and website owners can now visit www.opensocial.org for the latest specifications, links to other resources, and the opportunity to get involved.
Engineers from Yahoo!, MySpace, and Google will continue to work together and with the OpenSocial community to further advance the specification through the new foundation, continuing several core elements of OpenSocial since its announcement by Google, MySpace, and many others in November 2007:
- all specifications are available under a Creative Commons copyright license
- public community involvement shapes the specification’s direction
- an open source reference implementation called Shindig is being created and developed as a project in the Apache Software Foundation incubator, available at http://incubator.apache.org/shindig/
About OpenSocial
OpenSocial addresses an emerging problem for developers who are eagerly building applications people can enjoy with their friends: before OpenSocial, if a developer built a “favorite photos” application to work on one social network, it would have to be built all over again to work on another site. OpenSocial tackles this problem at its technology roots, providing common “plumbing” that lets social applications run on many different websites without requiring duplicate work from either developers or the websites.
The result is a vast distribution platform for social applications, whether they are for sharing photos or playing games or arranging real-world meetings or any number of other activities – everything is more fun, interesting, and useful when users can involve their friends and contacts.
Steady Evolution, Important Milestones
Millions of people around the world are beginning to see the benefits of the OpenSocial platform as new features appear on their favorite social networks. MySpace launched the MySpace Developer Platform, which uses the OpenSocial APIs, and began rolling out applications to its users. orkut has also started making OpenSocial applications available to its users, and hi5 will do so at the end of March.
Thanks to the Shindig reference implementation, most websites can have a proof of concept of OpenSocial applications up and running in days. That means websites need only to make this small time investment in order to make thousands of new social features available to their users.
Global members of the OpenSocial community include Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, XING, and others. In time, OpenSocial will unlock more powerful and pervasive social capabilities across the entire web, as developers’ applications can easily reach users across any of the websites, web applications, or social networks they use.
March 26th, 2008
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