Articles about Yahoo

In the past making money from a mobile app has usually involved signing up to an advertisement network and allowing the app to display banner ads.

The problem with this is that it doesn't make for a particularly good user experience and may actually turn people off using the app. For some time now the buzz around the industry has been about 'native' ads within apps. But exactly what is a native ad and what are the benefits? We spoke to Yannis Dosios, VP of Yahoo Publisher Services to find out.

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Yahoo is making a first step in the messaging world, with the launch of LiveText for iOS and Android. The app will be available in North America and Europe, following a brief test in Hong Kong and Taiwan last month.

The messaging app is similar to Snapchat, with an image or video and superimposed text. When video streaming is unavailable, LiveText will offer a text only option. Interestingly, the video will be silent, meaning no audio playback between the two recipients.

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Customer identity management firm Gigya has released its Q2 "landscape of customer identity" figures, showing how consumers are using third party identity providers such as Facebook and Google+ to log into other websites.

Facebook continued its dominance, now controlling two-thirds of all social logins, followed by Google+ (20 percent), Twitter (six percent) and Yahoo (four percent).

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Security problems aside, Java has been a thorn in people's sides for other reasons. When installed or updated, the app breezes you right past the part where it installs the Ask Toolbar. Sure it does put it on the screen, but it's set to opt in and many people are too busy clicking OK to notice. So when Ask's inclusion was canceled it seemed like good news.

Not really. Instead, Oracle has opted to move on and will now start changing the default search for its customers. If you aren't careful, then you can expect to find Yahoo as your new default. Are you excited yet?

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Yahoo today announced that it is fine-tuning its focus moving forward, and this means that some products and services are being dropped. In its Q2 2015 progress report, the company explains that it looking to dedicate its energy and resources to "search, communications and digital content".

One of the most surprising casualties is Yahoo Maps -- the site will close at the end of June. Despite the closure, maps will still be supported by other Yahoo products such as Flickr, but it illustrates Google's dominance in this arena. Other victims of the cull include Yahoo Pipes, Yahoo Mail on old versions of iOS, as well as Yahoo Music and Yahoo TV in some regions.

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Football season is coming, despite that it isn't even officially summer yet. The draft is behind us and OTAs are underway. Training camp is just around the corner in July. But one thing has lacked with the National Football League, and that's live streaming games. Thanks to a deal with DirecTV, the league has been locked up while other sports like MLB have thrived in this market. Things are changing though, but the wheels turn slowly.

The NFL has inked a deal with Yahoo -- yes, the also-ran search competitor -- to live stream a game for free, It's a start and we'll see where things go from here. In the meantime write down the date October 25th. That's the day the Buffalo Bills take on the Jacksonville Jaguars. Sound like a boring game? It isn't, because it will test this new plan.

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It has been a while since Flickr (remember that site?) received an update, but today this changes. Flickr 4.0 is rolling out, and it's a massive update. Headlined by Flickr Camera Roll and Uploadr, the update can be enjoyed not only by Android and iOS users, but also those who stick to the website.

There's a tool that makes it easier to get photos up online but, more importantly, tools that make it easier to browse and edit them. Flickr Camera Roll is mouse and touch-friendly browser, there's a greater focus on sharing, and there's a dusting of magic. Magic View is Flickr's new killer feature that can automatically organize your photo collection for you.

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Smartphone security takes a number of forms; you might access your phone with a PIN, your fingerprint, or via facial recognition. But if Yahoo's plans gather momentum, you could be using your ear to unlock your phone in the not-too-distant future. The idea builds on the idea of the unique fingerprint we all have, taking advantage of the capacitive touchscreens that are now a standard feature of phones.

There's no need for special sensors as the way different parts of your ears touch the screen when held in the 'talk' position can be used to uniquely identify you. It's all part of Yahoo's Bodyprint program, which is also looking at how the way you hold your phone could be used as an unlock tool.

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Google’s dominance of the web is best illustrated by Mobilegeddon. The search giant has made changes to its algorithm, prioritizing sites that are "mobile friendly" and demoting those that aren’t. Google says that mobile-friendliness is just one of 200 signals that it uses to determine the ranking of results and that sites which don’t have mobile versions won’t disappear as a result of this change. That said, the truth is if Google says you need a mobile site -- that it approves of -- then you need a mobile site.

But while Google is forcing sites to offer mobile friendly versions or suffer the consequences, it’s Apple’s browser that the majority of people are using to access the web while on the go.

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Yahoo's search deal with Microsoft just gets worse by the day. Six years ago, when announced, I called the agreement "Christmas in July" for Google. My prediction then: The combined entity would cannibalize from Y while taking little from G. Bing would be the big beneficiary, and its painful gains have been punishing.

March 2015 U.S. search share figures are out from comScore, raising a milestone that is no cause for celebration. Bing reached 20.1 percent, or about where Yahoo was in the months before announcing its deal with Microsoft, which essentially came to power Y searches. Yahoo is 12.7 percent. Combined they're at 32.8 percent, which is up from 28.6 percent five years earlier. The dent to Google is minimal, with share falling to 64.4 percent last month from 65.1 percent in March 2010. Aggregated gains came from other providers, such as AOL. not from the market leader. In fact, if not for Mozilla swapping G for Y as Firefox's default search engine, there would be no meaningful gains from Google whatsoever.

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The idea of forgetting the password for your email account might seem odd, but it happens. You might be one of those people who signed up for a Yahoo email address years ago, moved on to something better, and now only check in every few months to see if you've missed anything.

To combat the problem of forgotten passwords, Yahoo is introducing a new feature called On-demand passwords. There's no need to battle through the process of answering security questions to reset your password when you forget it; now you can create a temporary password that gets sent to your phone.

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Earlier I posted that Yahoo had lost market share in February, despite now being the default search engine in Firefox for US users. But boy do I feel churlish now as it turns out today is Yahoo’s birthday, and I’m sure with a bit of thought I could have come up with a better gift.

Yahoo is officially 20 years old, and while the company has certainly seen better days, it’s also survived through some turbulent times. In 2008 Microsoft tried to buy it for about $47.5bn, but Yahoo wanted to get more money, a move which backfired badly. Instead of a sale, the company ended up agreeing to outsource search to Bing, a move at the time my colleague Joe Wilcox described, rightly, as a "strange one". Microsoft, he said was "Dumb", and Yahoo was "Dumber".

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Three months ago Mozilla made the surprising decision to make Yahoo the default search provider in the US version of Firefox, replacing Google, its long standing search partner. The switch had immediate benefits for Yahoo which saw sizable usage gains in the US, going from 8.6 percent share in November 2014 to 10.4 percent in December.

However, anyone who thought this would be the start of a search renaissance for Yahoo is going to be disappointed to hear that in February Marissa Mayer’s firm went into reverse and lost share.

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While much is made about Gmail from Google and Outlook.com and Hotmail from Microsoft (now pretty much combined), Yahoo Mail quietly flies along getting little attention, but huge numbers of customers. Many people likely have accounts without even knowing it -- if you register for a Yahoo service you get an email address, and the company has several popular arms, such as Flickr. Now it is looking to improve its email offering.

First off, there is now an easier folder search. Customers can select any of their folders from a list and then type a word or phrase to zero in on the targeted email. A dropdown menu on the right allows for the folder selection.

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In the world of searches, there's one name that rules supreme -- Google. But new figures show that while the search giant is still the most popular way to track down content online, it is starting to lose ground to Microsoft and Yahoo. The latest statistics from comScore are in broad agreement with those published by StatCounter a couple of weeks ago.

Both sets of numbers agree that Microsoft and Yahoo are eating into Google's lead when we look at US searches conducted in December and compare them to November. While Big G will not be happy to see that its grip on the search crown is loosening slightly, the company has little to fear just yet.

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