At Yahoo!, we’re focused on creating deeply personal digital experiences and there’s no doubt that one of the biggest, if not the biggest, priorities for us is to bring those products and ideas to the mobile user, whether they’re using feature phones, smartphones or tablets.

We’ve got some amazing mobile experiences, from News, Sports and Finance, to Mail, Messenger and entirely new products like IntoNow and Livestand. Our commitment is to deliver these products in ways that help all of our users (and advertisers) enjoy engaging and seamless experiences across all the devices they use.

Our plan is to keep moving, to keep innovating, and to continuously measure and scrutinize what’s working and what isn’t – so we can make room for great new products. In that spirit, today we’re decommissioning several of our current mobile apps. We will be sending a notification later today that the following apps will no longer be supported:

• Yahoo! Meme (iPad and iPhone)
• Yahoo! Mim (iPad)
• Yahoo! Answers (Android)
• Yahoo! AppSpot (Android and iPhone)
• Yahoo! Deals (iPhone)
• Yahoo! Finance (BlackBerry)
• Yahoo! Movies (Android)
• Yahoo! News (Android)
• Yahoo! Shopping (iPhone)
• Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search (iPad and iPhone)

We’re moving forward with a “mobile first” mindset. You can expect to see more new Yahoo! mobile products in 2012, especially in areas ripe for innovation that build on Yahoo!’s strengths, such as companion experiences for TV like IntoNow, new ways to experience personalized media like Livestand, and some of our most popular and useful mobile apps like Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, Sportacular and Flickr, which are already being used by millions of people around the world. And we’ll be building these experiences with disruptive technology that’s going to change the mobile game well beyond Yahoo!.

For apps such as AppSpot and Sketch-a-Search, we decided to integrate the key features you know and love into the Yahoo! Search app. For example, we recently announced the app search feature in the Yahoo! Search app for iPhone. Stay tuned for more updates to the mobile search apps for both iPhone and Android.

With more than 700 million users around the world, we’ve got a huge and growing audience. We’re going to bring them the Yahoo! they love on every device in their life.

Stay tuned for a lot of action from Yahoo this year. 2012 has just begun and we’re just getting started.

– The Yahoo! Mobile Team

In only six short weeks since Livestand’s debut in the App Store (picked as one of Apple’s featured apps), we’ve added in more entertaining features and popular titles to give you an even more personalized digital newsstand. And we’re still not finished – we’ll continue to iterate the app as we hear back from users like you!

In that spirit, here’s a look at what is new in the app today. To download the updated app or try it out for the first time here, visit the App Store for Livestand.

• A new recipe finder in Shine from Yahoo! so you can browse recipes and create handy shopping lists. Cooking for a holiday celebration? This is a great time saver.
• Local deals from your favorite sites like Groupon, LivingSocial or Bloomspot are now seamlessly integrated into Yahoo! Today and Shine from Yahoo!.
• New Guest Mode to allow you to take a tour and experience Livestand without signing in.  It’s now a lot easier for your friends and family to take a peek at what Livestand would be for them. Just make sure to get your iPad back when they’re done!
• Twitter integration to share articles, videos and more with a few taps. Simply log into your Twitter account through “Settings” on your iPad and start socializing.
• New publications, including:
  • Shine from Yahoo!
  • Technology Review published by MIT
  • The Ticket from Yahoo! News (a new title focused entirely on the 2012 Elections)
  • Minyanville
  • Victorian Christmas
  • Big Think

We have big plans for Livestand in the coming year and will always be creating new ways to more relevant, more personal for you.  We’ll be adding new capabilities (many of which you’ve let us know you want), and of course, a lot more great content that you’ll want to jump into every chance you get. 2012 will be a busy year!

Have a healthy and happy holiday season,

The Livestand team

For those of us looking for a way to share what we’re watching with friends, IntoNow, acquired by Yahoo! last month, has a hot iOS app that makes it super simple to connect with friends while watching TV.

Recently, IntoNow was awarded the “Most Significant technology, platform or product” award by TV of Tomorrow, for inventing the most innovative and disruptive tech platform or product of the past year. IntoNow lets you tag your favorite shows in real-time to engage with friends and check out other TV recommendations.

And just last week IntoNow introduced their latest release (IntoNow v 1.2) to the iTunes app store.

Welcome to the Yahoo! family IntoNow – we can’t wait to see what else is up your sleeves!

As we head to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week, we will have much more to say about Livestand. We hope to see you there and until then, stay tuned to hear more about Livestand.

Cheers,

Irv Henderson, VP of Product Management, Yahoo! Mobile

That’s why today we’re excited to make the new Yahoo! Local available in limited beta. With rich, hyper-local content, Yahoo! Local offers a uniquely personalized experience via the mobile web on iPhone and Android, enabling you to discover the best local news, deals, and events in your neck of the woods, all in one place. Some of our top features include:

• Local News and Information – delivering relevant hyper-local neighborhood and city content created by the community, local publishers, and Yahoo! editors as well as content from the best local blogs and newspapers
• Saving Money in Your Area – we’re integrating our recently launched Local Offers program to deliver the best locally relevant offers from nearby spas, restaurants and retailers so you save cash while you support local businesses
• Powerful Technology – our geo-informatics and content enrichment platforms identify and geo-tag every news story that appears on every page down to the neighborhood level

We’re beta testing the product in more than 30 neighborhoods and cities in the U.S., including San Francisco, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Brooklyn, NY as well as Birmingham, Ferndale, and Royal Oak in Michigan. You can access it by directing your mobile browser to: http://beta.local.yahoo.com.

Check out our Yodel Blog for more details on the new Yahoo! Local and stay tuned as we expand to more neighborhoods and cities around the country to bring your community onto your phone.

Irv Henderson

Just last Friday, our team faced the restaurant picking problem for the nth time – ten minutes before piling into our cars, we started wondering where to go. A frenetic debate ensued in the parking lot, fancying a new place, a new cuisine, or a hot restaurant that no one could remember the name of.

In this kind of situation, there simply isn’t enough time to fire up a laptop or troll through 100’s of user reviews, or to check if a reservation is required. Thankfully, I had our beta version of Sketch-a-Search on my iPhone, and ended up picking the Faultline Brewing Company – a fine place for a large team lunch. We were able to do this by sketching along Lawrence Expressway area, and filtering by cuisine, Zagat ratings, and user reviews.

Our Yahoo! Mobile Search team is looking to solve uniquely on-the-go information discovery problems for you – just like this one.

With our new Sketch-a-Search, we first improved the quality of our data to ensure we’re including the freshest local information possible. We also partnered with Zagat, a leading provider of consumer survey-based information with thousands of restaurant reviews worldwide, so that you can quickly discover the top restaurants in your area. Search results can now be filtered to show only ZAGAT-RATED restaurants, and the reviews from Zagat users are shown alongside reviews from our huge community on Yahoo!. Once you pick a restaurant, you can make a reservation right through the app using OpenTable.

When you have a bit more time to pick your restaurant, try our new iPad Sketch-A-Search app. It is optimized to take advantage of the iPad’s larger screen size and landscape mode. The app is also available on the PC as a Quick App in Yahoo! Search – try a restaurant search (e.g. “faultline brewing”) at Yahoo.com to check it out.

You can download both apps today – bon appétit!

Author: Anil Panguluri, Director Yahoo! Search Products

When you’re on the go, Yahoo!’s brand-new mobile World Cup site keeps you connected to all of the action. We’re providing you with one of the most comprehensive World Cup mobile experiences — including up-to-the-minute scores, schedules, standings, news, player profiles, and more. The mobile site launches today in 40 markets covering 13 languages, and is optimized for more than 4,500 different types of mobile devices.

Visit m.yahoo.com/worldcup from your phone for one of the most comprehensive mobile sites for the World Cup.

We’re also optimizing Yahoo! Search for mobile for the World Cup, making it even easier to find the information you’re looking for. If you conduct a mobile search through Yahoo!, http://m.yahoo.com you’ll be able to see quick results for matchups, standings, and countries as well as the latest scores, news, and analysis. As soon as the games go live in early June, we’ll introduce a World Cup module on the mobile homepage, providing at-a-glance scores and matchups.

For additional information on the 2010 World Cup, visit: http://g.sports.yahoo.com/soccer/world-cup/ and http://mobile.yahoo.com/world-cup to learn more about the mobile site.

Juan Gomez De La Vega
Yahoo! Mobile

Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search

What do you do when you’re looking for a restaurant in a certain area or section of town, and you don’t know the name of the neighborhood, or even its ZIP code? Now with the Sketch-a-Search app, you can draw a circle around the general area on the map — around the San Francisco waterfront, let’s say — and voilà, restaurants appear. If you click on the restaurant results, you can read reviews, browse photos, check prices, and lots more. You can also refine your sketch search by types of cuisine, ambiance, or ratings to find a place that best matches what you are looking for. Today, you can find restaurants across the United States; we plan to launch additional local categories on an ongoing basis and extend to international markets in the near future.

Yahoo! Search app for iPhone

OK, so Sketch-a-Search is pretty cool, but what if you need to know who the founder of LEGO is, or showtimes for the movie “Avatar”? We’ve got that covered: Today, we’ve also launched the Yahoo! Search app for iPhone, a fast and beautiful experience that integrates voice search, embedded maps, and information from Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Movies, Yahoo! News, and other sources that appears directly in the results.

Since mobile searchers tend to ping-pong back and forth between map applications and search, we’ve integrated maps into the app to simplify the experience. The app also allows you to customize the local maps experience: Want to see more map and fewer local results? More results and less map? It’s totally up to you. Until now, neither the search engine nor the map gave consumers exactly the experience they’re looking for. Our new app is pretty nifty — give it a try and you will know what we mean.

Finally, we’ve made it easier to search for what’s nearby with location-based, local results. For example, if you’re searching for plumbers here in Sunnyvale, California, the app will detect that you’re likely looking for plumbers in this area and will provide you with results in a combined map-list view. As you scroll down the list of plumbers and their reviews, the app repositions the map with the currently selected item. You can also use the map to browse the associated ratings and reviews.

Both Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search and Yahoo! Search for iPhone can be downloaded for free beginning today. The Yahoo! Search for iPhone app is available in 22 countries across North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia, and will continue to roll out to additional locations.

We hope you find these Yahoo! Search apps as fun and useful as we do. Drop us a line and tell us what you think.

Ariel Seidman
Director of Mobile Search products

We at Yahoo! are equally excited to extend the coverage of the Formula 1 season to mobile phones with the launch of our new mobile site dedicated to the races. See schedules, results, news, rankings, driver and team profiles, and more. We’ve also integrated Formula 1 into our Yahoo! Search for mobile, conveniently allowing you to get race-related information—from results of the Bahrain Grand Prix, to Force India’s standings on the team’s table. Take Yahoo!’s Formula 1 mobile site for a spin by entering http: //m.yahoo.com/w/yformula1 on your phone’s browser.
The new Formula 1 mobile site is available in five different languages for 16 different countries, including the U.S., Canada (in both English and French), Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, the Philippines, India, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, and Spain.

We hope you’ll enjoy the Formula 1 mobile site experience—be sure to leave us some feedback.

Konstantinos Papamiltiadis
EU product lead, mobile products

We’ve covered everything you could search for, from the most general “Olympics” search term to more specific information, like participating countries, athletes, and even particular sports. We’ll give you medal counts, upcoming events, the latest news, images, and more.

To give you a sneak peak of what everyone’s been searching for, speedskater Apolo Ohno had a meteoric rise in Search: about 2,000% more searches than in previous weeks. Shaun White also spiked heavily, with 283% more searches on Mobile. But it was Lindsey Vonn who already had people’s attention: Searches wentup 71% during the Olympics opening weekend, and she was generally twice as popular as her fellow spiking U.S. athletes.

Mobile users also wanted to know where they could get those Canadian mittens, as well as hats, beanies, jackets, and Team USA apparel.

You can try Yahoo! Search on mobile by doing a search from m.yahoo.com on your phone’s browser or by  using our emulator. And of course you can also use the Yahoo! Search on the PC to help you follow the Olympics.

Olivier Gillin

Yahoo! mobile search product manager