Yahoo’s Attempt to Claw back its Market Share

Yahoo Aviate:

Yahoo acquired Aviate which was a startup back in time in order to make a successful entry into the world of Android and more importantly launcher replacements. Aviate’s USP has always been able to show context and location aware apps as well as data to the user. However, where it fails is in its very USP. Till date, Aviate has not been able to detect the location on its own and does not provide a method to teach it either. I am sure, if Aviate manages to learn the User Location and become a little more aware, it would definitely come to be known as one of the best launchers. Key features of Aviate have been listed below.

Key Features

• SIMPLE: Yahoo Aviate simplifies everything about your Android phone: it clears the clutter by automatically categorizing your apps and making them easy to find.
• INTELLIGENT: Yahoo Aviate also makes your phone smarter by anticipating the apps and information you need throughout your day.
• New features:
  • People: Yahoo Aviate automatically suggests you set “Favorites” for your most popular contacts. Now, with a simple swipe up from the home screen, you can call, text, or email your favorite people.
  • Calendar: Yahoo Aviate also incorporates some of the most intelligent machine learning and predictive technologies from the Incredible Labs team to anticipate the information you want.
    • If the next meeting on your calendar is a conference call, a single tap will dial you in and even enter your conference code.
    • Running late to a meeting? Email all the attendees with one tap to let them know.
    • On your way to work? Aviate will estimate commute time, taking traffic into consideration. Heading out to dinner with friends? Aviate makes it simple to call an Uber to get there.
  • More Daily Habits:
    • One-swipe access to daily habits like your alarm clock, weather, a daily news summary, and a curated Flickr image of the day that you can set as your background.
    • Instead of just giving you a snapshot of the day’s weather, Aviate will alert you if today is cooler or warmer than yesterday, or if it’s more likely to rain or snow.
    • Track your sleep feature

To quote Yahoo Aviate, “Yahoo Aviate isn’t just an app; it’s the home base for your entire mobile experience. It’s the last thing you touch at night and the first thing you touch when you wake up in the morning. It’s a brand new experience, so give Yahoo Aviate at least a week to see if it can change the way you interact with your phone”
Check out Tumblr Post Link for more details – http://yahooaviate.tumblr.com/

You can download Aviate here

Flickr 3.0 for iOS and Android

Flickr again a startup in the early 2000’s started as an online community with limited space for 200 photos per user. Anything more meant that the user had to purchase a Flickr Pro account. Flickr has come a long way from there. It is no longer as restrictive as the Flickr of the yore nor is it limited to just the web. It has made remarkable strides in terms of evolving and reinventing itself. It is now no more restricted to the web only and is now available as a very mature app on the iOS and Android platforms. This app is just the app you should be looking for if you take several pics and share them often but are restricted by the amount of space that Dropbox, Box and OneDrive offer to you. Flickr offers you 1TB of cloud storage with cross sync across devices as well as a lot more. Yes, it cannot replace the aforesaid apps in terms of file sharing but then when it comes to photographs, it not only travels the whole 9 yards but many many more after that. Key features of the new iOS and Android apps have been listed below:

Stunning photos made easy

At the heart of Flickr apps is a powerful mobile camera that makes it easy to take and share amazing photos in high resolution. On iPhone and iPod touch, fourteen live filters let you see how the photo will look even before you take it and refine your pictures in real-time with a suite of sophisticated editing tools. Whether its filters, vignettes, auto-enhance or more professional tools like color balance, levels and exposure – Flickr’s camera gives you full control over your photos all the time.
New to the Flickr apps, you can record up to 30 seconds of stunning HD video using the same live filters available with photos. Customize your video by adding different segments of footage and if you record a segment that you don’t like, simply remove it with one tap.

All your pictures in one place

On Flickr, everyone gets 1,000 gigabytes of storage free, enough space for more than 500,000 photos and pretty much all the space you’ll ever need. Our new Auto Sync feature lets you seamlessly upload all your original quality photos from your phone automatically to your account, so that Flickr can be your camera roll in the cloud.
Flickr has also introduced a new way to rediscover and explore your images. Even if you have thousands of photos, the intelligent search engine will help you find what you’re looking for fast. Flickr’s understanding of your photo’s metadata – date and time (ex: “January 2014”), place (ex: “San Francisco”), and even scenes and objects (ex: “car,” “sunset,” “beach,” “portrait”) helps organize your images so you don’t have to.

Share and connect with the Flickr community

Sharing photos on Flickr is also easier than ever. Using batch organization and our enhanced sharing features, share any of your photos from Flickr directly to Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook. On Flickr, discover photos from your friends and people you don’t even know yet. With the new Flickr apps Yahoo hopes you’ll take a moment wherever you are to be inspired and inspire others. See photos from the photographers you follow and find what your friends are sharing right on Flickr. Join the conversation or start one of your own by marking a photo favorite and leaving comments!
Flickr has always been about celebrating beautiful photography. Browse top trending photos within the Explore feature and discover new photographers to follow and places to go right from your phone.
Yahoo is also helping you discover more about the photo itself with an enhanced information screen. Find out where the photo was taken and which camera and lens were used to create each shot. You’ll uncover the story behind the photo and gain valuable insights to elevate your own skills!

Some quick facts on Flickr

• Flickr has more than 92 million unique users
• Over 10 billion photos uploaded to Flickr
• Since introducing auto-uploader on the iPhone in Oct 2013, over 40% of photos uploaded to Flickr are from auto-upload
• Since the Q2 ’14 iOS app launch, global mobile uploads on Flickr have gone up by 50 percent.
• Flickr’s new photo page puts the photo front and center. With increased performance, you can now view 18 photos in the time it used to take to view 1 photo
• Over the last year, daily photo uploads have steadily increased more than 3x and we are having the highest level of engagement of our users.

Check out our Flickr page on Tumblr for more details- http://flickr.tumblr.com/

Yahoo News Digest

App delivers an easy – to – navigate summary of the top International news stories twice a day
The International edition of Yahoo News Digest for both iOS and Android users is now available in India. With this app, users can stay on top of all the need-to-know International news, twice a day, on their mobile phones.
Yahoo launched the iPhone version in the United States and United Kingdom earlier this year and received an overwhelming response. 40% of those who downloaded the app keep coming back to it on a daily basis. Encouraged by the response, they are now bringing the experience to more people around the world.
Remember waking up to the local morning news? Coming home to the evening news? Reading a newspaper from front to back page? These formats have been daily habits since the invention of the television and the printing press. Yahoo News Digest wants you to revisit a content format that when read, leads you to a sense of completion and conclusiveness, much like reading the newspaper did.
With Summly, Yahoo learned that people don’t necessarily have the time to read a lengthy article, especially when they have limited screen real-estate while they’re on the go. By giving powerful algorithmic summaries they found that people were willing to consume more content when it was boiled down to the most important bits.
Yahoo News Digest makes your news reading experience simplified, effortless, comprehensive, and complete. Every morning and night, the app delivers a summarized version of the top International news, in an easy-to-navigate design.
With this, Yahoo has taken summarization to the next level with News Digest, by algorithmically and editorially selecting the important articles and using multi-document summarization to identify the key “bits and pieces of information”. These bits and pieces have been named “Atoms.” These Atoms assembled from around the web include articles, maps, infographics, Wikipedia extracts, videos, photos and more.
The app covers stories from news categories like – News, Technology, Sports, Business, World etc. Users can scan the summary, as well as read “atoms,” which conveys different dimensions of the story from the who, what, when, how, and why of a topic.
The Android version of the Yahoo News Digest was built specifically with a new home screen widget that will display the most recent unread digest for easy viewing. Unlike other home screen widgets, the Yahoo News Digest widget keeps track of the digests you’ve read.

Yahoo Mail App

Your Mail, News and Info – at one glance.
Yahoo recently announced the launch of the new Yahoo Mail app for both iOS and Android users in India so that not just email, but all the information that’s most important to you every day is right at your fingertips.
The multi-talented app surfaces the information you search for every day – your email, news, weather and more – all in one place. The app is designed with a focus on simplicity: it’s the familiar Yahoo Mail experience, plus one-tap access to personalized, real-time information.
When you first open the Yahoo Mail app, you’ll see your Yahoo Mail inbox. You’ll also see a new panel with icons for Mail, News and Today on your screen. This is where all your news, information, and communications come together in one integrated experience.
The new Yahoo Mail on Android comes with a couple of unique features. Simply swipe left or right or tap the relevant icon in the upper right-hand corner of your screen to quickly and seamlessly move between your inbox, news stream, and Today.
As part of this update, Yahoo is also introducing a new experience when you search for people in your inbox. When you start typing a name, Yahoo Mail offers smart search suggestions – including both people and messages – to help you narrow down your search. The app filters your search results by messages, files or photos, and you can easily scroll through them to find what you’re looking for.
When you’re finished reading and replying to your email, a quick tap on the News icon will show you what’s happening in the world around. From latest political developments, to business and economy to celebrity gossip – you will find all the news in the visually rich news stream.
In the Today icon you’ll find a snapshot of the information you care about most every day — from your local weather to a news digest and images from Flickr.
To enjoy this seamless, integrated and personalized experience in the new Yahoo Mail app you can download the app from App Store and Google Play.