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Yodel Anecdotal

Product Pulse - October 10, 2008October 10

Cholesterol be damned. It’s World Egg Day. An occasion for celebrating the greatest of all comfort food. Because with times like these, we could all use a bit more of that. Here’s what we hatched this week:

• Snazzy schedule: Just like any tween, Yahoo! Calendar was worried about how it looked. So at age ten, it got a serious makeover, ushering this web calendar into a great new age of drag and drop, iCalendar integration, IM/SMS/email reminders, and Flickr loveliness. And coming soon are Outlook and iPhone synching and event discovery with Upcoming and other Yahoo! properties. Our little calendar — all grown up.
• Handsfree search: If you’ve got a certain BlackBerry or Nokia phone, it’s time to clear your throat. Voice-enabled mobile search is now available on multiple BlackBerry and Nokia devices. If you have one of a number of Nokia Series 60 phones (like the N95), you’ll find voice recognition in the home-screen shortcut of OneSearch 2.0 (get it here: m.yahoo.com/shortcut). And if you use Yahoo! Go 3.0 (get it here: http://get.go.yahoo.com/) and have select BlackBerry, Nokia Series 40, and Nokia Series 60 models, you’ll be able to find stock quotes, sports score, and just about anything else

Introducing Yahoo! Web AnalyticsOctober 8

Have you ever bailed on an online checkout because something in the user experience bugged you? Or were pleasantly surprised that the sponsored listings were more relevant than the regular results of your web search? This week, we are rolling out a new service that creates a helpful feedback loop for e-merchants, website owners, advertisers, and developers based on how well they did with you in critical moments like these.

Born out of our acquisition of IndexTools in May, Yahoo! Web Analytics (beta) provides powerful data and insights reporting that help website owners evaluate their marketing performance and tweak their website designs. They’ll get custom real-time reports and graphs that help them slice and dice metrics like sales, page views, and sources of traffic and ultimately identify ways to amp up their visitor satisfaction.

We’re rolling the service out in phases for the remainder of 2008 and into next year. The first big deployment is Yahoo! Small Business, whose 13,000 hosted e-commerce customers can get set up just in time for the holiday shopping season at the click of a button. We have already started to roll Yahoo! Web Analytics out to advert

Time for a calendar revivalOctober 8

Online calendars have been around for more than a decade, and they’re tightly integrated with the leading Web mail services used by more than 680 million people per month (as of August, comScore). So it’s surprising to see how few people are actually using their Web calendars. Even the world’s most popular online calendar, Yahoo! Calendar, sees only a mere 8 million users per month.

So why, you may ask, is Yahoo! launching a new Yahoo! Calendar after ten years and why will it be better than your paper calendar or (gasp!) your desktop calendar? Because we think the time is right for these Web-based scheduling applications to finally take off. Here’s why:

• Open standards like iCalendar and CalDAV make all online calendars work together so people can share their schedules without the hiccups of the past.
• Broadband and mobile device ubiquity means you’re always connected, even if you don’t like to admit it. You need your busy life to be in order and for your calendar to be accessible wherever you go.
• Web 2.0 technologies have made it possible to incorporate very cool visual effects and practical f

Sending cyberbullying to detentionOctober 6

We’ve been educating children about online predators for years, but it turns out our kids are more endangered by classmates than by strangers these days.

Social networking, mobile phones and new communications tools are taking old-fashioned bullying to a new level. Gossip, embarrassing stories and photos spread quickly on the Internet and follow children at school and at home.

That’s why we hosted over 200 teachers, principals and administrators from across California on campus last Friday — to talk about the complex challenges for kids, parents and school leaders around cyber-citizenship. Co-hosted by the California Technology Assistance Project (CTAP) Region V, the CyberCitizenship Summit connected educators and national child safety advocates around how to implement policies to prevent cyberbullying.

These educators arrived bright and early to hear from Chris Lehmann, an innovative principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. The high school encourages use of Web 2.0 tools and actually brings the morays of social networking into the curriculum. He cited how the students discussed caustic comment threads generated b

Product Pulse - October 3, 2008October 3

Bless the pocket protector — it’s National Techies Day! A time to thank your favorite geeks for everything they do for you — whether it’s ridding your laptop of foul vectors, building super cool products you couldn’t live without, or helping you find the “any” key. You’d be staring at the blue screen of death without them. Here’s what our beloved nerds contributed to the world this week:

• Searching for a president: With just 32 days to go until the next POTUS is decided, there’s no time to mess around. That’s why Yahoo! Search has launched a series of elections shortcuts. Want the latest on a particular candidate? Type in “Obama” or “McCain” and you’ll find links to the latest news, videos, photos, discussions, and poll results. Or type in “presidential election” for general updates as well as a link to register to vote. Curious about the contest from a state’s perspective? Type in “Iowa presidential election” and get the latest headlines and polling info for that state. More here.
• Mad dash to the finish line: Speaking of election polls and whatnot, Yahoo! News just updated its political dashboard. Just in time for the election’s home stretch, you can now see how the average poll numbers have trended over time, on a national and state-by-st