Yahoo! helps you connect with the people and things that matter most to you – wherever you are, including in Times Square.  While Yahoo! is the place where your world meets the world online, over 500,000 of you take in Times Square each day and it’s become a central spot for New Yorkers and people around the world.  We and our partners at the Times Square Alliance think it’s the perfect place to bring you free WiFi service (check out the landing page here)- for  New Yawkers enjoying your cawfee breaks and out-of-towners enjoying the Big Apple. Fuggedaboutit!

And don’t worry if you don’t have a laptop in Times Square – you can also access the service from your WiFi-enabled mobile phone. All you need to do is enable the WiFi feature on your phone, open your browser and click on the “Get Started” button on the mobile landing page. This will take you to Yahoo!’s mobile homepage (http://m.yahoo.com) where you can access your favorite content and services from across the Internet.

So, if you are  in New York City or will be anytime during the next year, come down (or up, depending on where you’ll be coming from) to Times Square to chat, play, search, and enjoy whatever else you do online with free WiFi service from Yahoo! and the Times Square Alliance.  And it’s all about Y!ou (in case you hadn’t heard).

Kelly Delaney
Buzz Marketing

After handing Yahoo!’s signature yodel over to the people – you whole-heartedly responded – by uploading more than a whopping 21,000 yodels to our online Yodel Studio! Each yodel has its own personality as unique as each of you.  There are hip-hop yodels, country yodels, rock n’ roll yodels, Bollywood yodels… I think you get the point.

Out of all of the yodels submitted, who really rocked the mic?  Based on number of views, we’ve selected the top 3 yodels from each market.  Now YOU can help us choose who will go to the next level and take it PLATINUM! Vote daily for your favorites!

U.S. Finalists:

Tiffany Jo from Arizona – Yodeling since she was five years old, “I choose to participate because I enjoy singing and yodeling. I thought it would be a great opportunity to do what I love.”

Carlo from Arizona – New to yodeling but been singing for a lifetime, “I searched through most of the songs that were available to use as background music until I found the one that brought out the most emotion out of me.”

Christopher from Oklahoma – “What inspired my Yodel was hearing all the Yahoo! Yodels in the past, and wanting to do something a little bit different! I decided to add a little bit of ME in my Yodel!”

UK Finalists:

Katherine
Hajar
James

And representing India:

Nishant
Ankitaa
Ayesha

One winning yodel will represent each country (US, UK and India) and will be featured on one of the world’s largest stages: Yahoo!’s homepage!  So declare yourself, “rock the vote” or in this case, yodel it out – in short, vote soon as polls close on November 15 (11:59pm PT) and the winner will be announced on November 16th! What are you waiting for, vote for your favorite yodel now!

When launching the Flickr Collection, our goal was to choose photos that created a commercially viable collection, while preserving the inspirational and unexpected nature of the images that are so prevalent on Flickr. We’re proud to announce that today the collection has grown to over 60,000 images, many of which have been licensed by Getty Images’ customers from around the world.

Since the announcement of the partnership, editors at Getty Images have been busy exploring the Flickrverse to find the right photos to be part of the collection. While we know they’ve enjoyed viewing your work, with over four billion images, it can sometimes be an overwhelming experience!

In the past, the Flickr community could set their account settings to reflect that they wanted to be contacted by Getty Images, but could not proactively present a portfolio of photos for consideration. We know how eager the 40 million + Flickr members have been to showcase their work and wanted to develop a solution.

That’s why, today, we’re very excited to announce a formal Call for Artists, meaning ANY Flickr member can submit their work to be considered for the collection through the Call for Artists group on Flickr.

Detailed guidelines can be found on the group page, but here’s a quick snapshot on the process for submitting your photographs:  A submission should include exactly 10 images that represent what you consider to be the best of your work. The Getty Images creative team will evaluate submissions based on style, subject matter and technical skill. If some or all of the photos – or other images from your photostream – are selected for the Flickr Collection on Getty Images, you will receive an invitation via Flickrmail. This invitation will clearly show Getty Images’ initial selection of images and introduce the enrollment process.

When we first launched, we aimed to create a “living collection” – one that mirrored the vibrant Flickr community itself. Now, with the community’s help, the collection will continue to grow and bring a new flavor of photography to Getty Images and its customers — an authentic view into the daily lives of people around the world.

We at Getty Images truly can’t wait to review the portfolios of the accomplished and experienced photographers that contribute to Flickr. With the community’s help, the collection will better represent, what is, in effect, the world’s image library.

Andy Saunders
Vice President of Creative Imagery
Getty Images

Victor runs Yahoo!’s accessibility program. He helps make it easy for people with all kinds of disabilities to use our sites. When I first met Victor, I had the same naïve reaction most people have – dumbfounded by how he could crank open his laptop and be fully self-sufficient reading email and surfing the web. That’s because I was clueless about all the remarkable ways that people with disabilities use technology.

Victor’s made it his mission to educate our designers and engineers, helping change their assumptions that accessibility somehow requires sacrifice or compromise. On the contrary, Victor argues that accessible design is better for everyone. Just as curb-cuts were designed for wheelchairs, they’re also a great convenience for strollers, luggage and shopping carts, right?

But driving the point home sometimes means making someone walk a mile in his moccasins. Enter the Yahoo! Accessibility Lab, which has been toured by more than 75 product teams to date. It’s filled with a wide array of assistive technologies – screen readers, onscreen keyboards, interactive Braille displays, etc. When Yahoos arrive, they’re told they’ve just had a stroke and can’t type with their fingers. They’re given a rubber ball and asked to type their name. Um… Next, they’re fully paralyzed. “OK, try to send an email.” Uh… After they’re introduced to the technology solutions, they watch videos of disabled people in action.

All this leaves developers making accessibility a goal before they write their first line of code. It’s why anybody can access rich features and tools on products like Yahoo! Sports, My Yahoo!, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Messenger for the iPhone. It’s why third-party websites that are inaccessible in their own right are now entirely accessible via the new “favorites” area on the Yahoo! Homepage. Victor has helped Yahoo! make enormous strides since joining us four years ago, but there’s still more to come.

We spent some time following Victor with a video camera to not only understand his work, but to appreciate his daily experience. Commuting by train. Playing guitar. Making lunch with his wife Karo Caran, a fellow student from the Overbrook School for the Blind. We watched as sighted people had their first awkward interactions with him. He laughs when he describes how often people raise their hands when he asks questions during his new hire orientation briefings. Well-meaning commuters sometimes escort him to the wheelchair zone on the train platform. It took me a while to realize he’s not offended by questions like “Did you see my email?”

Here’s Victor’s video profile:

Spend any amount of time with Victor and you realize that his blindness doesn’t really make him all that different from anyone else – except that his computer talks to him. Really, really fast.

Read more:

• Victor’s post about screenreaders
• Victor’s post about the launch of our Accessibility Lab in Bangalore
• An interview with Victor about his life and music

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Video credits: producer, Nicki Dugan; cinematographer, Brad Williams; director/editor, Ricky Montalvo
Photo by gingervitis

• Faces of the Flickrverse: Tagging has always been the fun part of Flickr, making it a cinch to find photos of anything from fungus to flugelhorns. This week, People in Photos made its debut, letting you add people to your photos, find photos of people you know, and manage which photos you’re in. If you’re tagged, you’ll get notified in your activity stream. If that sounds at all creepy to you, never fear – you’ve got plenty of privacy power. Opt out, opt in. More on the Flickr blog.
• Teach your phone to yodel: Sure, your mobile can probably mimic the sound of crickets, a dog bark, a vintage telephone, or sonar. But can it yodel? Now it can. In support of our Yodel Studio promotion, which seeks the world’s best new yodelers with a chance to be featured on our homepage and in our global marketing campaign, we’ve cooked up yodeling ringtones. And not just your government issue yodel. We’re talking hip-hop, a cappella, R&B, reggae, and bluegrass yodels. Download them here or text YODEL to 49737 in the US, 56263 in India, and 83338 in the UK. Oh, and don’t forget to submit your yodel and/or vote for your favorites. The deadline is November 8th.

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

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

That was easy, right? Well, that’s thanks to ad agency creatives who turned simple brand messages into iconic household catchphrases. They make it look easy, but it’s not. And it can be even tougher when creating online advertising because there’s more to it than simply putting an ad on TV. We know all about that and are working with our advertisers to foster big, memorable ideas online.

Here’s a digital short that our creatives produced to pay homage to all those creatives out there:

For the full story behind this video, head over to our new Yahoo! Advertising blog.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

We decided to catch up with our chief marketing officer, Elisa Steele, to get some skinny on the effort. We asked her about the campaign’s genesis, the significance of the “It’s Y!ou” messaging, why we decided to launch a campaign now, why we went with a vignette approach in the campaign video, her favorite scenes, and why we introduced a new form of the Yahoo! yodel at the end of the new spot. Here’s the Q&A:

And we’re trying something new here — this is the first in a series that we’re dubbing Yahoo! Yodelcasts. We’ll interview Yahoos from all walks of life, share tips and advice, and take you behind the scenes. We’re all ears if there’s something you’re particularly interested in hearing about.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

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

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

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

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

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

Ya-hooooo!

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Today, we’re giving the Yahoo! yodel back to the people with the launch of Yodel Studio, a global casting call for the world’s best yodels. Yodelers who take us up on this challenge will personalize and reinterpret our yodel, competing for a chance to be featured in Yahoo!’s new global advertising campaign and on one of the world’s largest stages: the Yahoo! homepage. Your yodel will also be heard through the donation Yahoo! will make to local and global charities of your choice for each yodel submitted (up to $130,000).

To kick this whole effort off in style, Yahoo! is hosting live Yodel Studio events today in New York’s Times Square, London’s Covent Garden and tomorrow at Mumbai’s High Street Phoenix Mall. Professional recording studios have been built in each location with celebrities on hand to coach yodelers. Jewel, Pete Wentz, LeAnn Rimes, and Randy Jackson will join us in New York with super producer Rob Cavallo; Pixie Lott and the X Factor’s Sinitta will be in London; and Bollywood singer Shankar Mahadevan and musical artists VJ Nikhil Chinappa and Shaa’ir + Func will mentor in Mumbai.

And if you need some yodel inspiration – might I suggest channeling your inner Jewel?

So get yodeling soon – the deadline to submit your yodel online is November 8! Read more here.

Brian Mullin
Senior Director, Buzz Marketing

First, a quick review. We have hosted Open Hack Days since 2006 to foster collaboration and innovation within the developer community. This was our ninth event, preceded by shindigs at our California headquarters as well as in Taiwan, London, Bangalore, and São Paulo. We provide the hands-on workshops, tech talks, food, beer, Red Bull, and various hackery diversions, and developers stay up all night long to deliver creative mashups that they demo before a panel of judges.

About 300 developers attended our inaugural NYC event (sporting a greater proportion of blazers and ties than we’re used to seeing), which kicked off Friday morning with a keynote by Clay Shirky, a New York University professor and social media guru (here’s a video interview we grabbed). After a day of workshops and training sessions, developers adjourned to a hacker lounge with a steampunk theme. Victorian bird cages dangled power cables above each hacker table. A bright red wall was hung with gilded portraits of various well-known innovators. A Victorian maiden was hacked with a monitor for a head, displaying the latest tweets with the #openhacknyc tag on her face. Chalk boards featured ornate steampunk-inspired drawings that would have impressed H.G. Wells. And, of course, there was the table of hacker snacks and a beanbag-filled corner dedicated to Guitar Hero.

Before the hacking began, we hosted a geek’s open mic event with Ignite NYC. For two hours, participants had five minutes on stage to talk through 20 slides that automatically rotated after 15 seconds. It was a bit like the everyman’s TED. We heard about Moby Dick written in Japanese Emoji, the violence of the media, how to save journalism, what “open” means, patents, surprisology, benefits of living in colonies at sea, the New York Times Index (yes, it’s still printed on paper), clothing made of scissors and agave leaves, and the tyranny of a flavored chewing-tobacco lover on YouTube. There was even a visit from the Spaceman from Outer Space (who apparently wasn’t a fan of Alien IV).

By Saturday afternoon, about 100 hackers persevered and submitted 40 hacks. Without further ado, our winners:

• Best Overall – InsiderTrade.org: You can sign up for instant alerts about insider trades for the various stocks you follow. It’s live – try it.
• Best Overall, Runner up – TVitter: If you’re a Mystery Science Theater 300 fan, you’ll love this one. The team hacked our Connected TV widget to produce an app that lets people watch TV together and throw out comments that others can see.
• Connected TV (1st place) – Recipe Finder: This app lets you find and display recipes and even includes a countdown timer so you don’t burn your cupcakes while you get engrossed in Glee.
• Connected TV 2nd prize – Fantasy Football Widget: Brings the #1 fantasy sports league to your TV.
• Connected TV 3rd prize – Couch Potato RSS: This app lets you follow your favorite RSS feeds while you’re surfing TV.
• Best UI – Inhabited Web 2.0: Brings a social filter to individual websites by letting you see where people are congregating on a web page – “perhaps next to a great deal, interesting news story, or funny video.”
• Best Mobile – Community Bulletin Boards: This app brings community bulletin boards to your iPhone so you can find, create and add to message boards based on location just like physical bulletin boards that one sometimes finds in parks, on streets, in shops etc.
• Accessibility – Audio Texter: An app that allows blind and visually-impaired people send and receive SMS messages.
• Best Food/Hardware Hack (tie) – The New York Toast: From Team MakerBot, we had a 3D printer that printed news, weather, and photos in peanut butter, jam, and frosting… on toast. News for breakfast.
• Best Food/Hardware Hack (tie) – Delicious Cake: Since Team MakerBot found cake mix in their grocery bag and an extra supply of wire and LEDs, they spawned another team that created a cake that showed sentiment (positive and negative) for del.icio.us URLs. It was not eaten. This team included Diana Eng, overall winner of our very first Open Hack.
• Hack for Good – Power Trends: A platform that helps consumers save on their energy bills and helps energy providers predict load but leveraging social media. It measures energy usage for participating towns, who compete for prizes for being below their power consumption baseline.

Here’s a quick video recap of the event:

For more of that just-like-being-there feeling, you can view our Flickr photoset, other photos from the event, and check out tweets here.

Up next? Taiwan. We’re coming to hack you. This weekend. Get ready.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Photos: 1. Hack maestros – Eric and Havi, 2. Winning hackers, 3. Best overall hack – insidertrading.org, 4. Judges, 5. YDN stickers, 6. Peanut butter printing, 7. Steampunked emcees, 8. Winning hackers, 9. Last minute hacking, 10. NYU’s Clay Shirky keynotes, 11. Hacking a nap, 12. Hacker heart, 13. Eli hacks the stickers, 14. Steampunked Twitter display, 15. Hacker lounge, 16. Creating the NY Toast

We kicked things off this morning with a keynote by New York University professor Clay Shirky, whose book “Here Comes Everybody” examines how Web 2.0 is revolutionizing the social order. He tackled the culture of online communities and what motivates people to participate in them. For example, why have more than 3,311 people built out incredible minutiae about Dr. Who on Wikipedia? Why does a guy build the Taj Mahal out of LEGOs and upload photos to a LEGO community site? What happens when a woman who normally blogs about fashion and her iPhone apps decides to post photos of a military coup?

We grabbed a few minutes with Clay after his talk to expand on his themes. Here’s the interview:

Our hackers now have bellies full of hot dogs, nachos, beer, and ice cream bars (nourishing hacker food) and are bedding down for a night of coding. We’ll see the fruits of their labor tomorrow afternoon when they each have 90 seconds to dazzle the judges with their wares. They probably won’t get much sleep, but we hope there will be Obama sandwiches for all.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

The claims are false. Neither Yahoo! nor any Yahoo! representative has met with or communicated with Iranian officials regarding the matters referenced in the article, and Yahoo! has not disclosed user data to the Iranian government. ZDNet has since called the report unreliable, but we’re disappointed we weren’t given a chance to weigh in before the story was published.

You can read more about the situation on our Business & Human Rights Program blog.

UPDATE: ZDNet retracted its story this evening.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

For Yahoo! employees, this isn’t new. We’ve been bleeding purple since 1996 when we anointed it as our corporate color. Why purple? Lore has it that our notoriously frugal co-founder, David Filo, got a great deal on lavender paint for our decrepit offices. But ultimately, purple evokes everything that makes working here so unique. Now we want to share that energy with you. As we give our sites a new purple glow, it seems appropriate to reflect on how far our brand has come since our beginnings in 1994. Here’s a retrospective of the Yahoo! logo and its evolution over the past 15 years.

1994: No logo

In the beginning, Yahoo! didn’t have a logo. In fact, Yahoo! wasn’t even Yahoo!. Our cofounders, two Stanford University grad students procrastinating on their dissertations, created a directory of their favorite Web sites and called it “Jerry’s Guide to the Web.” It was simple, practical and easy to use. It wasn’t until later that year that Yahoo! became the official name of the company.

1995: The jumping "Y" guy

After Yahoo! went from a hobby to a start-up, we needed something to adorn our office door and company t-shirts. The jumping “Y” guy was born. Designed by David Shen, our 17th employee and the lone design guy in the office, the logo shows a person jumping for joy after finding what he needs on Yahoo!. The blue circle over which the “Y” guy is leaping represents the world. Today, the “Y” guy no longer graces our hallways and conference rooms, but if you’re lucky you might see him on a business card from an old-timer. Later that year, Shen partnered with ad agency Organic Online to design the logotype. Yahoo! needed a horizontal logo because it took up less space than the more vertical jumping “Y” guy. Shen and Organic made sure the letters rose towards the right “so that, upon reading the word, you would get a sense of rising energy with the exclamation point punctuating that energy at the end,” according to Shen. They eventually settled on Able font, which they modified and made purple.

1995: Going red on the Web

We decided the logo on our page needed some life, so in 1995 we decided on a logo that was bright red. This wasn’t just an aesthetic choice. We also chose it because red would more reliably display across different monitors and computers, which at that time was an issue for other colors. We also liked red for its boldness.

1996: New year, new logo

After much tweaking and refining, we launched the red Yahoo! logo across all of our sites on January 1, 1996.

1996: Purple on the inside

While red became the face of Yahoo! to our users, internally we were redesigning the logo. In 1996, we parted ways with the jumping “Y” guy and streamlined the logo to the now famous purple type-based version. Since then, we’ve been using the purple logo on everything from posters to cookies to the soles of flip flops that leave Yahoo! imprints in the sand.

1997-2004: The big bang theory

Yahoo!’s abbreviated logo, affectionately known as the “Y-Bang” (“bang” is typesetter’s slang for exclamation point), was originally developed in 1997 for a button on the Yahoo! Toolbar that links to the front page (the full Yahoo! emblem was too wide to fit). In 2004 we partnered with ad agency Ogilvy to redesign the Y-Bang and created a version with a white “Y” inside a purple oval and a purple exclamation point next to it. The purple Y-Bang is now the official abbreviated logo that you will see throughout our sites.

2009: Painting the world purple

Yahoo! is launching a new homepage with our new purple logo. We are also extending the logo to every page on our network, all of our company communications and all of our partnerships. Standardizing around the purple logo will create a consistent experience for Yahoo! users, advertisers and employees, and it will strengthen our brand going into the next decade. Go purple!

Glenn Tokunaga
Art Director and Senior Brand Specialist

Here’s the result:

BTW: The music track, “Hot To Trot,” is from his “Spectacle” EP and is available on iTunes.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

• 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

In 1992, I was diagnosed with breast cancer – days after I started as CEO at my last gig at Autodesk.

I feel lucky to be here sharing this with you today.

But many women are not so fortunate. The effects this disease has on those diagnosed are devastating. It’s a horrible, gut-wrenching experience, physically and emotionally. And we’re still losing the battle. Breast cancer affects 1.3 million women every year – far too many mothers, grandmothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, friends and co-workers.

That’s why this month, Yahoo! is getting involved. Some companies let you send in yogurt tops for donations or ask you to contribute at the cash register (all worthy efforts), but we wanted to do something only Yahoo! can. So we’re teaming up with the National Breast Cancer Foundation (NBCF). For each person who updates their pink ribbon status on Yahoo! Shine and Yahoo! Mail this month, we’ll donate $1 to the NBCF (up to $50,000).

The donations will go toward free mammograms for uninsured women, in the hopes that they can benefit from early diagnosis and treatment as I did. It’s a simple way to raise awareness and empower our community of users to make a positive impact in the fight against breast cancer.

I’ve updated my status… have you?

Carol Bartz
CEO

Photo from scrapbooklady

To bring this promise to life, we shot a series of videos, lush vignettes set in multiple countries around the world, intended to represent the beauty, vitality, and diversity of you.  We used the best of that video library to create the 60-second anthem you see below:

There were some great creative minds and stories behind the video footage.  Our advertising agency Ogilvy assembled a star-studded production team that designed, shot and edited the videos in about a month.  The team included director Samuel Bayer, who directed Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Justin Timberlake’s “What Goes Around Comes Around”; costume designer Colleen Atwood, who won Academy Awards for her work in “Chicago” and “Memoirs of a Geisha”; Longinus Fernandes, the choreographer from “Slumdog Millionaire;” and Patrick Lumb, production designer for “Valkyrie.”  The result of their work is a tapestry of scenes that reflect the core brand attributes of Yahoo! — human, fun and inventive — expressed by people like you.  Every shot, every expression has a story to tell.

We shot in five cities around the world– Los Angeles, Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, London and Hong Kong.   We braved the summer heat in the Mojave desert.  We got caught in a monsoon in Mumbai with only Pokemon (!!) slickers to keep us dry.  We fished for a soccer ball in the Arabian Sea using a bucket.  There was plenty of action behind the scenes.  Here are some fun tidbits about a few of the key shots:

• Dancers in feathers: The dancers’ feathered skirts and headdresses were all hand-made by Colleen Atwood and her team. In the last scene, the lead dancer floating to the camera is suspended by cables.  And guess how many total dancers there are… only four.
• Rose petals in the desert: We’re an environmentally conscious company. We actually swept up every rose petal during our time in the Mojave and brought them back to our studios in LA (okay, permits required us to do so as well).
• Man jumping across frame: This scene is meant to evoke how using Yahoo! propels people to go further and to achieve more. We got the effect by having a gymnast jump from a trampoline across a picture frame suspended 25 feet. He nailed it on the first take.
• Ice cream cone kid: Spencer is our star 4-year old who you’ll see not only in this commercial, but also in various ads on the Web and in print. If you’re an Oprah viewer, look for Spencer at the end of her show.
• Soccer players: Soccer is the best way to illustrate the global nature of sports and to show Yahoo! as the place where sports fans share their passions. We shot these scenes in Los Angeles, Mumbai, London and Rio de Janeiro. The take in Mumbai was an ordeal. Besides the torrential downpour, our only soccer ball ended up in the Arabian Sea after the first take.
• Celebrity paparazzi: Millions of people visit Yahoo! for entertainment, celebrity gossip, and news.  A small crowd of people showed up in Los Angeles the day we were shooting to try to catch a glimpse of our “stars.”
• Video game character: This scene represents the online games available on Yahoo! Games. The “purple gobbler” character was created for us from scratch.
• Keystone cops: This is a tongue-in-cheek nod to Yahoo! Finance, one of our most popular sites. We shot this in the studio and employed techniques used during the days of silent pictures (the guy with the money bags is running on a treadmill).  Take a close look at the tires on the police car.
• Club scene: Shot in Filmistan Studios in Mumbai, the dance sequence was arranged by Longinus Fernandes, who also choreographed the final dance sequence in “Slumdog Millionaire.”  The “club smoke” you see is actually dust and dirt from the floor of the sound stage.
• Walking exclamation point: We climbed up to a rooftop in lower Mumbai to get this shot.
• Light artist: This scene features an LA artist “painting” the air with an LED flashlight. In post production, the effects company, Method, tracked the point of light he emitted and mapped lighting effects to the path. It emphasizes Yahoo! as a source of creativity. This effect harkens back to a similar photo taken of Pablo Picasso in his studio (link).
• The yodel: One of the highlights of our brand campaign is the re-launch of our signature yodel. Listen carefully at the end of the commercial. You’ll notice there isn’t one voice yodeling, but many. We recorded literally hundreds of different people yodeling and then blended them together to create a chorus. We wanted the new yodel to sound full and global, and to evoke a cheer from all the people around the world who visit Yahoo!.

There are many, many other amazing scenes that you will see in the weeks and months ahead.  Our plan is to leverage this library of video footage in online formats, in additional television commercials, on mobile phones, and even in digital billboards.  It began airing yesterday in the US, and you’ll see it in the UK and India starting October 5, and in other markets in 2010, including Brazil, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Korea, and Taiwan.

We hope you enjoy Anthem, and, more importantly, we hope you see YOU in it.

Nick Chavez
Vice President, Integrated Marketing

Have a look:

The spot debuted online on Yahoo! (you.yahoo.com) as well as on sites like Yahoo! Video, YouTube, Facebook, and Hulu.com. It will also begin airing on all the major U.S. TV networks and top cable channels, including AMC, ESPN, USA, Comedy Central and Bravo. You’ll see it in the UK and India starting October 5, and in other markets in 2010, including Brazil, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Korea, and Taiwan.

Whaddaya think?

Stay tuned for behind-the-scenes insights into Anthem’s production…

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

What is Open Hack Day? It’s what happens when clever web developers, a wireless connection, a host of web services, and massive quantities of caffeine, pizza and donuts come together for an all-night code-a-thon. After 24 hours, creative coders show off their mashup wares and clever apps, American Idol-style, before a panel of distinguished judges, who bestow awards, praise, and lots of geek cred.

Ever since the first Open Hack Day back in 2006, we’ve made it a priority to be as open and accessible to developers as possible. Yahoo!’s audience is global – and so is the base of developers who value our open tools,technologies and vast user base. We’ve hosted Open Hack Days in the U.K., India, Brazil, and Taiwan; next month, we’ll meet with developers, designers, and entrepreneurs from New York’s vibrant Web technology and digital media scene.

We’ll kick off the weekend with a Friday morning keynote from Internet guru and NYU professor Clay Shirky. That’s followed by a full day of tech talks, panel conversations, and hands-on workshops that cover the latest Yahoo! developer tools and services. Yahoo!’s open platforms let developers build things that anyone can use on and off Yahoo!: Flickr toys, Connected TV Widgets, and open apps that you can install for Yahoo! Mail, My Yahoo!, and more. On Friday evening, we’ll kick off the hack contest and hold our breath to see what’s built by Saturday afternoon. And in-between, we’ll host a special Open Hack edition of Ignite NYC — a geek’s open mic.

What will take this year’s prize? A moblogging purse, a phenomenal way to share and organize your photos in Yahoo! Mail, an iPhone orchestra, or something we haven’t even thought of yet?

To get a better sense of the Open Hack Day showdown, check out Ricky Montalvo’s “Hackumentary,” a short film documentary shot during last year’s event in Sunnyvale. Here’s the trailer:

Hack Day – a hackumentary short film from ricky montalvo on Vimeo.

Head over to http://www.icanhaz.com/yahoohacknyc to register, check out the wiki, or follow us (@ydn) on Twitter for updates. Let the countdown to Open Hack Day 2009 begin!

Chris Yeh
Head of the Yahoo! Developer Network

Here’s a video that captures just some of their stories:

Some notes on these great characters, by order of appearance:

• Sonia uses the homepage to manage her life… and admits to listening to Launchcast radio on Yahoo! Music when she’s in the shower.
• Dennis first used Yahoo! Search in grade school to look up the pink Power Ranger (he had a big crush).
• Bob lives on Yahoo! Finance and swears it helped him save his retirement funds.
• Evelyn relied on Yahoo! to stay connected to the world when she was in the Air Force, stationed in the desolate Australian outback.
• Bodhi is a California grad student from India who uses Yahoo! Messenger video chat to connect with her parents in India every night.
• Ted and Vicky used Yahoo! Messenger to court each other – much of it long distance. They also ditched their cable when discovering they could meet all their entertainment needs on Yahoo!.
• Erin is a fine art photographer who’s created a huge following on Flickr for her beautiful Polaroid photography (and scored press coverage and several commissions and exhibitions).
• Brandon is addicted to film and relies on Yahoo! Movies on his iPhone for ratings and reviews (and incidentally is one of the youngest patent holders in the US).
• Valerie used a Freecycle group on Yahoo! Groups to outfit her classroom with free stuff (including a clawfoot bathtub the kids read in).
• Larry admits to spending about two hours a day managing his teams on Yahoo! Fantasy Sports.
• Emily loves looking things up on Yahoo! Search, like where dimples come from and why the starling is the most hated bird in the world.
• Thomas gets sucked into Yahoo! News daily, digging that one minute he can read about the elections in Afghanistan and then stumble on something about the depletion of ants in the Amazon rainforest.

Connecting with real people, real users, to hear what they love, hate and need about using our products is what we’re all about. As our new brand campaign stipulates, Yahoo! is about you. All you.

Stay tuned for standalone video profiles of these great voices and more.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

The core of our message will focus on YOU. It will celebrate all of your individual wants, needs, interests, and passions. That’s because Yahoo! really is all about you — we’re constantly evolving to give you more of what you want and less of what you don’t. We want you to make the Web your own and are designing products to put you in the driver’s seat of your Internet experience. Our new brand positioning reflects that.

Our campaign will kick off in the U.S. on Monday, September 28, expand to the U.K. and India on October 5, and reach other markets in 2010, including Brazil, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Korea, and Taiwan. We’re quite serious about our vision to be the center of people’s online lives. You’ll find us what might seem like everywhere online, on network and cable TV, on the radio, in print, and outdoor.

Why now? We are relentlessly focused on making the Web more personally relevant for you. We’ve backed that up with major product enhancements during the past few months. We recently updated Mail and Messenger with new tools and features. In the week ahead, our new homepage — the epitome of openness and personalization — will be broadly available in a number of global markets. And, today, we’re debuting the new Yahoo! Search experience. Of course, there’s plenty more to come, and although we’re still one of the most recognizable brands in the world, now’s the time to start retelling our great story and revitalizing our bond with people.

I should also note that people like you helped shape the message of this new campaign. We conducted a massive research effort that involved focus groups with thousands of people in seven countries. It helped us confirm that a brand refresh was in order, that people crave an answer to “What is Yahoo! all about?”, and that, although we’ve drifted apart a bit, people around the world still want to love Yahoo!.

This is much more than an advertising campaign. It’s our promise to you that your life online will become more personal and more meaningful with Yahoo!. We believe we offer the only Web experience that converges your personal world and the world at large to create integrated, personally relevant experiences. And it sets the direction for how we will deliver awesome new experiences and continue to push the frontiers of science and technology to invent Web products and services that will dazzle you for years to come.

You’ll hear lots more about the campaign in the coming weeks. Be sure to check back on Monday when we pull back the curtain. We look forward to hearing what you think. We want you to get more out of the Web, so you can get more out of life.

Elisa Steele
EVP & Chief Marketing Officer

But today, at a press conference in New York, after verifying the results with their top technical brass, Netflix officially declared Yehuda and his team the grand prize champions. To achieve this honor, they bested 41,305 teams from 186 countries.

To reiterate, this was no easy feat. Every person in the world has a different taste in movies. Yehuda, for example, loves the Godfather, but is not much of a James Bond fan (whether it’s Connery, Moore, Daulton, Brosnan, Craig, or the other guy). And it’s not just Yehuda — everyone has personal tastes that don’t perfectly correspond to box office results, DVD sales, or Academy Awards. As a result, figuring out what movies should be recommended to you is an intense scientific problem.

In fact, it is such an impressive piece of research that Yehuda’s paper detailing one of his main contributions to the prize-winning team won the best paper award at KDD-09 (otherwise know as 15th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining).

It’s too complicated a paper to summarize here with any justice, but let me give you the gist: Yehuda figured out that the way people rate movies on Netflix changes over time and, in some cases, from day to day. In other words, not only do my tastes “mature” and shift, but so do my moods. For example, on a Monday, perhaps out of frustration with having to be back in the office, maybe I’m a little harsh on the movie I watched Sunday night, which I give a 1-star rating in spite of it not being that terrible. On the other hand, that film I saw with my kids when we were on vacation – the one that had them laughing all night — gets a warm-hearted 5 stars when it wasn’t exactly an aesthetic masterpiece. Yehuda laid down the research to mathematically model this phenomenon and it’s a major reason why his team cracked the code to get over 10-percent.

Ultimately, this exactly why we founded Yahoo! Labs — to encourage Yahoos to think outside of our own sandbox and contribute to industry-wide technical and scientific challenges that will some day make your online life easier. Sometimes that means just making sure there’s less spam in your email inbox and — in this case — making sure that your Netflix queue is filled with movies you’re really going to like.

• New York Times – Netflix Awards $1 Million Prize and Starts a New Contest
• Forbes – The Netflix R&D Game
• Fortune – Box office boffo for brainiacs: The Netflix Prize

Prabhakar Raghavan
Head of Yahoo! Labs

This week, Manhattan will be abuzz with thousands of brand stewards and creative types, coming together to pay tribute to the best in advertising and share visions about what the future brings. And Yahoo! will be there in force – helping marketers understand how to make the most of the online medium.

In honor of the occasion, CEO Carol Bartz and a bevy of senior Yahoo! executives rang the opening bell at NASDAQ this morning. Here’s video to prove it:

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

Today we’re taking a huge step in bringing more of Yahoo!’s most popular properties and services to mobile devices around the world. You can now have Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Fantasy Football and Flickr, with much of the same interactivity as on the PC, on your iPhone or iPod touch (via the App Store) and select BlackBerry models (Bold, Tour, and 8900 series). It’s all part of our effort to help you stay connected.

The new Yahoo! Finance app, available on the iPhone or iPod touch and compatible BlackBerry models, helps you stay on top of the market, your portfolio, and the latest news, research, and analysis with powerful interactivity. The app lets you:

• Follow the broad market indices or a specific company
• Access the top financial news stories
• Follow your personalized portfolio from Yahoo! Finance
• Drill down into specific company information (news, chart, financial metrics)
• Get currency conversions on the go
• Watch streaming video from Tech Ticker

The new app is available in English for the U.S. and Canada and we expect to support more languages and countries in the near future, so stay tuned!

The new Fantasy Football app, available on the iPhone or iPod touch and compatible BlackBerry models, ensures that when you’re away from your computer or TV, you’ll still be in the know when your team puts points on the board. You’ll have up-to-the-minute access to rosters, players, live scores via Stat Tracker, and the latest expert analysis and news. The new app lets you:

• Edit your bench (add and drop) directly from your phone
• View matchups, standings, player and team stats, etc.
• Get live scoring just like on the PC
• Get news and expert advice just like you’re used to on the PC

This app is available in English for the U.S. and Canada – those football-loving nations.

Flickr fans will be amazed by the functionality in their new Flickr iPhone/iPod touch app – starting with the Ken Burns-effect on famed Flickr images when you first launch it. In addition to being able to share and discover photos and videos, you can also take advantage of location-based information when uploading new stuff. The new app lets you:

• Easily upload and tag photos and video while on the go
• Automatically geo-tag before you upload (opt-in required)
• Add and view photos and videos by tags & sets
• Share photos with friends via email
• Search photos and videos from the Flickr community all over the world by subject, people, or places
• See your contacts’ recent photos and activity
• Make comments and mark photos as favorites

The new Flickr app is available in English, French and traditional Chinese for the U.S., Canada, UK, France, Hong Kong, and Singapore – with more to come.

And don’t despair if you don’t have an iPhone/iPod touch or one of the compatible BlackBerry devices. You can always access these three popular services from the mobile web – just head to Flickr (http://m.flickr.com), Yahoo! Finance (http://m.yahoo.com/finance), and Fantasy Sports (http://m.yahoo.com/fantasy). And be sure to visit the new Yahoo! Mobile Homepage (http://m.yahoo.com) and personalize it with your favorite content and services from across the Internet.

Keep an eye out for additional mobile offerings across a lot more devices as we continue to bring the best of Yahoo! to mobile users around the world.

David Ko
SVP, Yahoo! Mobile

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

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

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

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

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

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Today is Carol’s birthday!  As you know, she’s been working overtime since she arrived at Yahoo! in January. However, we heard that when she does get some time away from work, she likes to get her hands dirty in her garden.  So, in celebration of Carol’s green thumb and purple spirit, the Yahoo! Green Team got together and planted an herb garden right here at Yahoo!’s headquarters in Sunnyvale   This is the start of Yahoo!’s first ever Purple Garden, and we’re dedicating the garden to Carol.

To get ready for this birthday dedication, a dozen or so Yahoo! gardeners gathered on a Tuesday morning several few weeks ago, ready for some gardening action. They dug into planter boxes and planted basil, thyme, oregano, cilantro, mint, parsley, dill, and purple sage.  The garden boxes were distributed around our main courtyard to soak up the sun.  Today, after a few weeks of growing, the plants were ready for their presentation to Carol!

The Purple Garden is more than just lovely landscaping.  Our café’s Catering Director (also an avid gardener) helped us to select herbs which would not only grow well in the Silicon Valley climate but also be most popular in Yahoo!’s cafés.   That’s right – the herbs in these garden boxes will be used right in our very own URL’s Café.   We’re very excited about this opportunity, especially since our café is installing a food waste dehydrator, which converts food waste back into a nitrogen-rich soil fertilizer.  We’ll be using that very fertilizer to provide nutrients back to the Purple Garden plants, giving us a small taste of the human food web right here at work.  And Yahoos can take extra nutrition home with them when they snap off a sprig of thyme or mint for use in their own home-cooked meals.

Growing an herb garden at the office is a great way to remind ourselves that the combination of good planning, hard work, and attentive dedication can reap great rewards.  Fresh, flavorful, and delicious rewards, in this case!  Happy Birthday, Carol!

Danielle Bricker

Yahoo! Green Team

This deal is part of Yahoo!’s broader strategy to grow our international business, particularly in emerging markets. In many countries, vast populations — and advertisers — are just starting to come online. The potential is tremendous. Yahoo! has a large and growing audience in these markets today, and our acquisition of Maktoob represents the kind of investment we’re making to cater to the needs of these promising regions.

We plan to join forces with the Maktoob team, the strongest in the region, to create locally relevant content, services, and programming. That’s no easy task when you consider the differences between countries like UAE, Jordan, Kuwait, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But we’re committed to literally translating our winning formula for this growing market in many ways, including through locally-based editorial teams.

Initially, we’ll plan to introduce Arabic versions of Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, Search, and our homepage and then eventually local versions of properties like News, Sports, and Finance. We’ll also focus on creating content and services tailored to the region. No other global company has made this kind of investment in local relevance for the Arab world.

Arabs are vastly underserved by today’s Internet offerings. The World Bank estimates that there are 320 million Arabic speakers around the globe, yet less than one per cent of online content is written in their language (despite a vibrant Arabic blogosphere). We have a big opportunity to meet this growing demand, and we think Yahoo!, building on Maktoob’s local expertise, brings the scale and heft to draw many more people online in the region –- and we plan to give them compelling reasons to log on.

We also recognize the Middle East is deeply complex, a complexity mirrored in the online world, and that it will present certain challenges. As an Internet pioneer in the emerging markets, we’ve learned important lessons and we’re committed to responsible global engagement. This means being sensitive to local laws, customs, and norms while also protecting and promoting the rights of our users. We believe our engagement in the Middle East can be a positive force for people by increasing access to information, supporting a thriving marketplace for the exchange of ideas, and bridging local, regional, and international communities.

It’s easy to forget the fastest growing Internet audiences are in the emerging markets. That’s not lost on us. We’re passionate about growing our presence in places like Southeast Asia, India, Latin America, and Africa. And we can’t wait to yodel in the Middle East.

In an effort to keep things brief here on Yodel, we have provided a link to the press release and we have also created an informational site that should answer many of your questions.

Keith Nilsson
Senior Vice President, Emerging Markets

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