CEO Marissa Mayer launches new products, showcases a media company emerging from years of rudderless leadership.
CES 2014: 8 Technologies To Watch
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Yahoo is reborn. At CES 2014, CEO Marissa Mayer announced acquisitions and initiatives designed to further the turnaround she began after being appointed to guide the corporate in July 2012.
Mayer had a lot of star power to draw attention to her initiatives. She was joined by journalists Katie Couric and David Pogue; both recently left jobs in traditional media to assist Mayer remake Yahoo as an online and mobile media company. Singer John Legend and cast members from “Saturday Night Live” also appeared.
Mayer made it clear that Yahoo is targeted on mobile as a minimum up to the net, its traditional strength. She announced the purchase of Aviate, an organization that makes a homescreen launcher app for Android devices. Just as Yahoo curates online page, Aviate curates apps — evidently smartphones now have such a lot of apps that Yahoo believes it may add value through presentation and organization.
No financial terms were disclosed, but investors seem to have already made up their minds about Mayer’s ability to revitalize Yahoo: Its stock now sells for approximately $40 per share, up from $15 per share when Mayer took over.
[However, this: Yahoo Ads Hack Spreads Malware.]
Mayer also announced the debut of Yahoo News Digest, a news summary app in keeping with Summly, a content summarization app that Yahoo acquired last year.
The app, available for iPhone and iPod Touch, breaks content in “Atoms” and combines them, in order that a text summary of a piece of writing could possibly be accompanied by a map, infographic, or information extracted from another source. It presents its news summaries, created algorithmically and editorially, twice daily. While Yahoo News Digest won’t do much for literacy, its mobile-friendly news morsels might be appreciated by those whose appetite for info is sated with a headline.
Yahoo also launched Yahoo Tech and Yahoo Food, websites modeled after image-heavy magazines, let alone visually oriented websites just like the Verge and Pinterest.
Mike Kerns, senior VP of homepages and verticals at Yahoo, described the internet publications in a blog post as an effort to “marry the elegant design and ambitious imagery of traditional magazines with immersive bite-sized stories, engaging videos, and stunning photos curated from Flickr and around the web.”
The two websites lack traditional banner ads. Instead, they contain what Kerns called “native advertising — that’s, articles, videos, and tips which can be just as engaging because the stories around them.” They’re, he said, clearly marked as “sponsored stories,” a term Facebook pioneered as a euphemism for “ads.”
The two sites are designed in order that users never should leave them. Clicking on a narrative tile expands the item, which collapses when another tile is clicked. Kerns made a virtue out of this nonstandard navigation paradigm by noting that users shouldn’t have to address browser tabs, multiple windows, or the “back” button.
Yahoo also revamped its advertising offerings. Yahoo Advertising now includes Tumblr Sponsored Posts, a targeted ad offering called Yahoo Audience Ads, two new ad buying platform offerings — Yahoo Ad Manager and Ad Manager Plus, and Yahoo Ad Exchange, a worldwide ad market for publishers.
Finally, the corporate introduced Yahoo Smart TV, a revision of the Yahoo Connected TV platform. The service is on the market on certain Samsung and Vizio TVs.
Thomas Claburn is editor-at-large for InformationWeek. He have been writing about business and technology since 1996, for publications resembling New Architect, PC Computing, InformationWeek, Salon, Wired, and Ziff Davis Smart Business. Before that, he worked in film and tv. He’s the writer of a science fiction novel, Reflecting Fires, and his mobile game Blocfall Free is accessible for iOS, Android, and Kindle Fire.
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