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How Engadget's parent company is making sites like ours easier to use
Today, May 17th, is Global Accessibility Awareness Day, but in fact, this entire month has been an eventful one for people with disabilities. Two weeks ago, Google and Microsoft pledged to commit $20 and $25 million to the cause, respectively, to accessibility tech. Today, Microsoft revealed the Xbox Adaptive Controller while Apple unveiled a coding curriculum that can also be used by students who are deaf and/or blind. Meanwhile, Oath, Engadget's parent company, which also owns Yahoo, rang in the day by holding an open house at its accessibility lab, where, among other things, it works to make sites like ours easier for everyone to use. And that includes sites and services outside Oath too: The accessibility-tech community is a small one, with researchers at Oath, Apple, Microsoft, Google and other tech companies regularly collaborating with one another. (Microsoft Chief Accessibility Officer Jennie-Lay Flurrie made the same point in an interview with Engadget two weeks ago.) What Oath is working on might show up in another company's products, and vice versa.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg owes lawmakers answers to these questions
By JP Mangalindan and Aarthi Swaminathan For Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, this week was a trial by fire. Over the course of two days (April 10-11), senators on the Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees, as well as representatives from the US House Energy and Commerce Committees, grilled Facebook's 33-year-old CEO on a number of matters, including the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal, the company's role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and its position on government regulation regarding user privacy. And while Zuckerberg's testimony was widely viewed as a successful defense of the company he started in 2004 -- Facebook's stock was up 4.5% at market close the first day of hearings — there were many questions Zuckerberg left unanswered. Here's a breakdown of the questions he could not address.
Pandora's CEO is doubling down on podcasts
By JP Mangalindan Pandora CEO Roger Lynch wants to offer listeners an easier way to discover new podcasts as the company adds more podcasts to its service and beefs up advertising. Indeed, podcasts will become a more significant aspect in the months and years ahead for Pandora, which has over 75 million monthly active users -- 5.5 million of which use Pandora's paid features and services. The key to growing those users, according to Lynch, who joined the company in September, is offering a more comprehensive catalog of content. "In the car, 80 percent of listening is music, while 20 percent is other stuff," Lynch explains to Yahoo Finance. "As a service, if you don't have that 20 percent, it doesn't mean you capture the 80 percent, because then people will just stay on their FM Radios. But if you can create audio content for people that gets packaged with the music content in a way that doesn't give them a reason to go back to that FM dial, then you capture much more than just the spoken word."
Yahoo Finance for iOS gets major overhaul
Yahoo has finally gotten around to updating its long-neglected Yahoo Finance app. The delay has puzzled many, especially since Finance is one of the most well-respected and well-known properties in Yahoo's portfolio. But whatever the reason for the wait, it appears it's been worth it. Remember all the praise Yahoo got for its Weather app? The new Finance app deserves the same recognition. It has received a complete visual makeover worthy of iOS 7 with beautiful new stock charts and portfolio lists. It also adds the ability to deliver push notifications for breaking news and adds interactive real-time charts with new gestures including panning, pinch-to-zoom and more. Here's the full release notes: What's New in Version 2.0 Introducing the brand-new Yahoo Finance. • Follow stocks to personalize your news. • Receive push notifications for breaking stories. • Interactive charts with panning and pinch-to-zoom, real-time data and more! Yahoo Finance is a free download.
Marissa Mayer planning to reveal her plans for Yahoo's turnaround tomorrow
The first "all hands" meeting of a CEO is always a time for high drama, so we're expecting big things tomorrow. New boss Marissa Mayer is telling employees about her plans to turn around the faded internet giant on Tuesday, with the same slides she used in closed-door board meetings in an act of "radical transparency." Yahoo's fortunes have been on the slide for a while, after Scott Thompson's scandal-ridden departure, patent clashes, security breaches and the sale of its Alibaba stake in order to spend $3.65 billion on quelling a shareholder revolution. A report from AllThingsD says that Mayer's likely to introduce progress and goal tracking as a measure of performance. The new system will run from the company as a whole right down to individual employees, something that she picked up from her tenure at Mountain View. The same report has revealed that Mayer's pushing to improve the consumer experience in its Homepage, Mail and Flickr offerings (amongst others) at the expense of advertising -- a move that'll win her plenty of fans used to the minimalist Google homepage.
