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Yahoo welcomes the rise of eSports with its own hub
Yahoo clearly wants a piece of the growing eSports pie. Despite having to shutter almost all its verticals recently, the company has launched a new hub for competitive video gaming under the Yahoo Sports banner. In its announcement post, Yahoo Sports Media Vice President Bob Condor said that "with a global audience reach of more than 226 million," the company has "identified an incredible opportunity" in competitive gaming. Yahoo Esports is meant to be a comprehensive guide that regularly publishes match scores, stats and schedules. The team behind it will concentrate on producing video content, though, including live tournament coverage hosted by various gaming personalities like Andrea Rene.
Yahoo kills most of its digital magazines
Yahoo put a lot of effort into becoming a legit media company these past few years. It didn't only launch several digital magazines that publish content for its front page, it also hired big-time journos, such as NYT's David Pogue. Despite all these, even its media business isn't safe from its ongoing layoffs and quest for transformation. Yahoo media division's global editor-in-chief Martha Nelson has announced on Tumblr that most of its digital magazines, particularly Yahoo Food, Health, Parenting, Makers, Travel, Autos and Real Estate, are shutting down.
Indonesia blocks Tumblr because it hosts pornography
Indonesia has banned Tumblr, the internet's GIF factory and pizza pleasure palace, because the site hosts pornographic content, the BBC reports. Indonesia's Information Ministry apparently didn't consult Tumblr or its parent company, Yahoo, before blocking the site. "We must ban the site first and tell them later," Information Ministry e-business director Azhar Hasyim told the BBC.
'Gmailify' gives you Gmail service without the Gmail address
Last March, Google began allowing its users to link their Gmail account with their Yahoo! and Outlook accounts so that all of their emails could be accessed from a single screen. The company announced today that it is expanding the feature, called Gmailify. Now, those outside addresses will function a lot more like their native gmail account. They'll now be protected by Google's spam filters, organized like the native inbox and even get Google Now cards. Basically, Google has made it so that these accounts look and act more like Gmail -- aside from the domain name -- when accessed through the Android app. Users just need to manually enable the new feature by linking their outside account to Gmail.
Tumblr isn't doing as well as Yahoo expected
Yahoo had high hopes for Tumblr when it bought the blogging platform for $1.1 billion in 2013, but it hasn't lived up to its expectations. The troubled company has lowered its valuation to $760 million, down $230 million from its previous $990 million value (Yahoo only snapped up Tumblr for over a billion due to its liabilities). Marissa Mayer and her colleagues expected the startup to boost its userbase to a billion. While that did eventually happen over a year after the acquisition, the number was called into question, as the company used a new methodology to measure its audience across devices.
Yahoo is laying off 1,700 people and closing five offices
Yahoo can't seem to figure out how to turn itself around. Today it announced a new "aggressive strategic plan" to pare itself down to focus on its strength in its Q4 earnings report. That plan involves laying off 15 percent of its workforce and closing five international offices.
Yahoo unifies its homepage and news app with more content
Yahoo's bringing a major overhaul to its homepage and apps for iOS and Android. Today, the internet giant announced it's making notable content and design changes to these platforms, in an effort to make the experience consistent across the board. One of the main tweaks is how it delivers articles to users: If you have an account, the news feed will now tailor itself for you, with topics you're interested in. So the more time you spend on the homepage or app, the more they learn about your preferences.
Yahoo Mail app lets you customize your inbox swipes
Yahoo debuted a new Mail app back in the fall, and today the mobile software is getting a few new features. First, both the Android and iOS versions will allow you to customize your swipes. This means that when you're looking at your inbox, you can opt to swipe right to archive or swipe left to mark as spam. Other actions include starring a message and marking it as read. When using a long press to select multiple messages, you can now star a group of emails or mark them as spam from the so-called multi-select toolbar in the app.
Yahoo releases massive 13.5TB web-browsing data set to researchers
Yahoo's business may be struggling, but millions of people still visit its site to read the news every day. That gives the company unique insights into browsing and reading habits, and today the company has released a huge swath of that data. The "Yahoo News Feed dataset" incorporates anonymous browsing habits of 20 million users between February and May of 2015 across a variety of Yahoo properties, including its home page, main news site, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Movies and Yahoo Real Estate.
US leaders meet with tech CEOs to fight terrorism online
The US is determined to knock terrorists offline whenever it can, and it's about to go to great lengths to make sure that happens. Business Insider, the Guardian and the Wall Street Journal understand that some of the country's highest-ranking officials are meeting with the CEOs of internet giants like Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter and Yahoo to ask for stronger efforts to fight online terrorist activity. And we do mean high-ranking -- the directors of the FBI, National Intelligence and the NSA will be involved, as will the Attorney General and the White House's chief of staff.
Yahoo faces class action lawsuit over text spamming
Yahoo probably isn't the first company you'd think of as a text spammer, but the courts might soon beg to differ. A judge has ruled that the internet pioneer has to face a class action lawsuit for sending Sprint customers automatic "welcome" messages when someone else pinged them on Yahoo Messenger in 2013. These were effectively small, unwanted sales pitches for Yahoo's services, according to the lawsuit -- and it doesn't help that they sometimes followed spam from another party.
Yahoo shuts down its Screen video streaming hub
Yahoo's woes continue as the company shut down Screen, its video service/hub. If you'll recall Screen played a part in reviving Community after NBC cancelled the show and hosted the first NFL livestream of a regular season game. The site's library also included Saturday Night Live clips and a smattering of original content. Those videos aren't going anywhere, though, as Variety reports that the company plans to put them alongside other content with the same topic in its "digital magazines." For example, the Live Nation music channel is headed to the Yahoo Music portion of the site.
Yahoo alerts victims of state-sponsored cyberattacks
Yahoo is the latest tech company pledging to warn users if it appears they've been targeted in state-sponsored cyberattacks, Chief Information Security Officer Bob Lord announced today. Google, Facebook and Twitter rolled out similar alert systems earlier this year. Yahoo doesn't disclose how it determines if an attack is state-sponsored, but promises that it will only send alerts to users when it has "a high degree of confidence."
Yahoo's new app is your guide to streaming
We've all been there. You decided on a movie or TV show and fired up Netflix only to find it wasn't available on the service. Next, you tried Hulu. Nope. Then it's on to Amazon, where you had to rent the movie because it wasn't in Prime's free library. Bummer. Rather than waste time hunting for what you're after, Yahoo's Video Guide app searches across a host of streaming services, in addition to iTunes and Google Play, to find the content you're after.
Share your iPhone 6s' Live Photos on Tumblr
Tumblr is a bit more animated now thanks to Live Photo sharing from the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. The GIF-dominated social network's app on iOS bumped to version 5.0 and with that milestone brings support for the more prominent features on Cupertino's latest handsets. In addition to easy sharing for your animated selfies, Tumblr's making use of 3D Touch to view them. If you have a 6s or 6s Plus, 9to5Mac notes that when you're scrolling through the dashboard and see the Live Photo icon over an image, simply deep-press on your device and it'll play the motion and audio captured with the photo.
Yahoo wants to manage your Gmail account too
When Yahoo announced two months ago that it would add third-party email support to its newly launched Mail app, only Hotmail, Outlook and AOL accounts were supported. Now, however, Gmail -- arguably its biggest rival -- has joined the party too. Thanks to Yahoo Mail's new smarts, the app won't just fetch the most recent 200 messages when you add it -- it's actually able to access your entire Gmail archive; attachments included. And since you'll have your Gmail working with the Yahoo Mail app, you'll be able to search across all your contacts and accounts in one unified interface. Other features of the new Yahoo Mail can also now work with your Gmail account -- they include a smarter contacts manager that'll automatically add email recipients based on your history, plus the new password-free Yahoo Account Key sign-in method. Gmail support in Yahoo Mail is available today in both iOS and Android apps plus, of course, the Yahoo Mail website itself.
Yahoo reverses its Alibaba spinoff to save on taxes
After a week of debating options that included a possible sale, Yahoo has made a decision about its future... and it's probably not what you expected. The web pioneer is conducting a "reverse spin off" where everything but its Alibaba stake is moving to another company. Supposedly, this lets Yahoo go ahead with its original plan to spin off the Alibaba stake (and thus make investors happy) without the risk of a ton of US taxes. It also provides "more transparency" into how much Yahoo is worth, if you ask company chief Marissa Mayer.
Yahoo reportedly gets serious about selling its core business
Yahoo appears to have more than just a casual interest in selling itself off. Both CNBC and the New York Times claim that the web giant has ruled out spinning out its remaining stake in Alibaba and is instead thinking seriously about a sale, whether it's the company's stake in Yahoo Japan or the entire core business. It will reportedly take "a year or more" to assess everything, but you may not have to wait that long to get some official news -- Yahoo could announce something as early as Wednesday.
Yahoo attempts to take on Facebook with reimagined Messenger
Remember Yahoo Messenger? It used to be the instant messaging client of choice for many people (like myself) but even though it never really went away, it eventually fell by the wayside as social media and newer apps like Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp took over. Well, it's trying to make a comeback. Yahoo announced today that it's revealing an entirely new Messenger platform -- on mobile, web and within Yahoo Mail -- that has been rebuilt from the ground up to be faster, smarter and better than ever before.
WSJ: Yahoo may sell itself off
Yahoo's attempt at turning around its fortunes hasn't gone that well: on top of sagging profits and departing execs, it's still heavily dependent on both its Japanese business as well as its stake in Chinese internet giant Alibaba. And now, it sounds like the company might want to hand over the reins to someone else. Sources for the Wall Street Journal understand that Yahoo is holding a "marathon" number of board meetings where the possibility of selling the company's core business is on the table. It's not certain how serious the web pioneer might be, but private equity firms are reportedly taking a peek.
