Our VP of Entertainment gives a sneak peek at the live premiere on Monday, March 12.

We’d be lying if we said our latest “Hunger Games” promotion isn’t kind of a big deal. The best-selling-book-turned-movie, which premieres today, is slated to be one of the biggest blockbusters of the year—and Yahoo! Movies is at the forefront, partnering with Lionsgate studio to provide exclusive experiences for fans. The excitement began the week of the Super Bowl with an exclusive debut of the “The Hunger Games” trailer, and at 5:30 p.m. (Pacific) today Yahoo! Movies will livestream the red carpet premiere in Los Angeles. Yahoo Sibyl Goldman, VP of Entertainment, called us from Santa Monica to give us a sneak peek at what we can expect from the big event. 

What made us choose “The Hunger Games?”
People are super excited about the movie. It’s seen as the next hot movie franchise, following in the recent footsteps of “Twilight,” which we also partnered on. It has such a wide fan base, from the young adults for whom the books were originally written to adults and everyone else. The film has a really broad appeal. It tackles a lot of the social and political issues, as the film is set in a grim future state, where kids fight for their lives. Fans are really connected to this story, and we’re just super excited about being part of this movie franchise from the start.

How would you compare this program to the one we did with the blockbuster “Twilight?”
It’s different. “Twilight” is a mature franchise, where there were fans who were camped out at the premier and already really plugged into things. This is the first movie in the “Hunger Games” franchise. It’s a fun place to because it’s about generating that excitement, as people get to know these characters and the actors behind them. So it’s different from “Twilight,” but equally as exciting for us. It’s also a great early kick-off to the summer movie season, which officially starts May 1. But “The Hunger Games” is already going to be one of the biggest movies of the year.

What kind of brand opportunities does this open for us?
There are two great things about this. First, we get to put the Yahoo! brand and Yahoo! fans as close as they can possibly get to the excitement of a huge movie franchise. So regardless of where you are, you can feel like you’re at the premiere— you can see the stars and get into the whole spirit of it. We break down the velvet rope so that fans can access what’s going on in real time.

And, we will have some of our talent hosting on the red carpet. So it gives us a chance to get our talent out and get them exposure and get this video experience out to fans everywhere.

We’ve noticed that Yahoo! is starting to do a lot of these live events. What is our goal in that?
As the premier digital media company, we know that it’s important for us to be bringing—exclusively and in real-time—content that our fans can’t get anywhere else. We do a great job with exclusives around things like movie trailers, but we’re also bringing live events to our fans—things they can’t get anywhere else like the comedy show with Bill Maher. Or like the Independent Spirit Awards, red carpet experiences that they can’t get anywhere else. Or like the Clinton Concert, music experiences they can’t get anywhere else. We are creating that access and creating that buzz. And for the fan bases that are, say, really into movies or entertainment we are providing the hottest thing out there right now. We are making sure that the people who love movies are getting a taste of the hottest things live and in real-time.

What kind of legacy are we starting to build with these live events?
I think we’re starting to build it now. We started it with the Clinton Foundation Concert in October—that was really getting it off and getting deeper into these live experiences. We did Clinton, then we did the “Twilight” premiere, then we did the Bill Maher live show, then we did the Independent Spirit Awards for the Oscars—so all together, that’s five with “Hunger Games.”

And the thing is, we always deliver a really high-quality experience. The Bill Maher event was so polished it could have been on any TV network. We bring the polish, and we bring the talent—both our own hosts and other top talent like Bill Maher and like the musicians on the Clinton concert.

The piece we’re still working on is establishing that we are the place to come for this content and creating a cadence where people know a big event is coming and say, “There is probably something really cool that I can see on Yahoo! that is something I can only get there.”

So, if you look ahead at our programming schedule, you can see that we are really committed to creating a steady, reliable cadence of tune-in events. That’s something people will see over the next couple of months.

So, we should expect Yahoo! to do more live events like these?
You can definitely say there will continue to be music events, like the Clinton Concert. We are very close on additional music opportunities. I know that the plan for content is to do quarterly events like Bill Maher. So more comedy, more music, more red carpet. We’ll do more, and we’ll do them more regularly, to really drive that tune-in awareness and that tune-in habit for our audiences.

by Jessica Roland

Yahoo! Women in Tech gals were very pleased to be invited to Applied Materials' annual Women's Professional Development Network external event on the evening of March 1st. What a classy soiree! It was held at the beautiful San Jose Museum of Art, and the theme was, naturally, Network and Artwork! In addition to excellent food, drink and prizes, we were treated to talks by the museum's executive director, as well as the curator of the current exhibit: This Kind of Bird Flies Backward: Paintings by Joan Brown. After the introductory talks, we were able to wander the exhibits, admiring this beloved local artist's work. Joan Brown started painting in the '60s, and her abstract expressionist themes were proto-feminist, reflecting how she viewed herself and her role as a woman, a mother, a "cosmic nurse", a person seeking inner evolution. Here's a link to the exhibit website. Hurry and look, because the exhibit is almost over! This was a really excellent networking event. It was a pleasure to meet our Applied Materials sisters, their Community Outreach team, and their other guests. We're looking forward to continuing the connection!

Original post from the Yahoo! Women in Tech Blog here.

Thankfully, many of us who work at Yahoo! believe that we have the best job in the company. If I based my hubris on other people who tell me I have the best job at Yahoo!, I see experiential marketing rise above all others to the top of the heap.

I lead a small team that is responsible for complementing and amplifying marketing projects — for consumers and B2B audiences — by creating rich 1:1 experiences that provide a moment of pause, reflection, and engagement with our brand in ways that support our digital marketing efforts, but provide a differentiated offline approach. These experiences establish emotional bonds between our audience and Yahoo!’s products and services, and put a human “face” to our brand in a way that online marketing may not.
Some of the recent projects we have supported include 2010’s Ask America program and 2011’s launch of the latest Yahoo! Mail. We also get to think hard about brand marketing challenges like how to keep Yahoo!’s trademark “yodel” in the hearts and minds of consumers. On our plate for the coming year are efforts to engage voters across the country with Yahoo! News in the countdown to the presidential election, launching Tom Hanks’ “Electric City,” and global marketing support for the 2012 Olympics.
We hold our programs to an important set of guiding principles:
1.  Assure that every experience is built to drive traffic back to Yahoo! or change the perception of our brand2.  Create sharable experiences and provide the tools for users to share3.  Provide “hands-on” experiences4.  Engage our audiences with surprising, relevant, smile-inducing experiences
No surprise that the word experience appears in every principle, right? Not every program at Yahoo! is right for experiential efforts: we are not a scalable acquisition channel, and, in fact, creating offline manifestations of our online product experiences are not always effective in public settings. Instead, we look for opportunities to draw related connections between an offline experience and our online products and services.
Perfect case in point: the 2011 launch of the latest version of Yahoo! Mail. We were a small part of the overall launch marketing plan for the product, but we were an extremely visible component. Our objective was specifically not to provide users with a chance to try the new Mail. Instead, our role was to alleviate potential apprehension about the planned migration from older versions of Mail to the new version—and we wanted to drive positive buzz and word of mouth by creating a fun experience that would enhance consumers' personal connection to the product and leave them with the feeling that "Yahoo! is the best thing that happened to me today." In other words: kindness always wins, while talking about our spam protection on a street corner may not.
Our solution was two-pronged.  First, we dispatched 20 Yahoo! Mail Carriers (kitted out bike messengers) in Chicago and New York who were tasked with creating that random act of kindness. They handed unsuspecting users a large Yahoo! Mail “super envelope” that contained something for them — a Starbucks gift card, or a packet of wildflower seeds — and an additional duplicate gift for them to share with a friend. This interaction brought to life the Yahoo! Mail promise that the product facilitated connections with those people who matter most to you. Consumers loved the surprising gift from Yahoo! Mail, and they shared the gifts and their positive experience with their friends and family.
The second prong of our approach became a viral sensation — internally amongst fellow Yahoos who were busting a nut to launch the new Mail; and externally with consumers who got to interact with a 6-foot-tall talking purple mailbox.
Yes, you heard me. A talking mailbox, affectionately dubbed The Yahoo! Purple People Greeter, who stood on street corners in Brooklyn and Manhattan doling out bon mots, along with personally relevant gifts in a Yahoo! Mail super envelope: a pair of flip flops for someone on their way to buy shoes, a harmonica for a musician, a dog bone for a pet owner, and an iPad for a grad student. How did an inanimate purple box know enough to have such relevant gifts on hand, who to distribute them to, or just what to say to make people laugh, jump and even cry with joy? That’s a secret the experiential team will take to our grave. Or, you could just take us to lunch and we’ll probably give up the goods.
But most importantly, the experience worked. We made people’s days. We heard, and kept, some deep dark secrets. But most importantly, we turned our interactions with a relatively small number of individuals into compelling, hilarious, highly entertaining video content, which we then distributed on Yahoo! and via social channels.
After our rewarding experience in New York, we hit the road with our large purple friend. To Chicago where the mailbox sweltered and relied on the cold water of strangers, to Austin where he rocked out at Emo’s and tried (unsuccessfully) to crowd surf during a performance by Futurebirds, and ultimately to San Francisco where we arrived just in time to fuel Giants playoff fever with many sets of tickets to the World Series champs’ final games of the season.
Our social media channels loved the Purple Mailbox and we generated significant positive sentiment for Yahoo! Mail and our brand as a whole. We turned these impromptu consumer experiences into high-quality digital content that drove engagement with our brand both on- and off-network. And we gave employees an opportunity to laugh, cheer and smile during a transitional time for our company.
Our competitors don’t have a purple talking mailbox who makes people laugh. Nor do they regularly engage consumers in surprising, yet relevant offline locales. Yahoo! understands that marketing takes on many forms, and they all work together to drive success for our company and engagement with our users. Especially those that are six-feet-tall and purple. I love my job.
Andrew Strickman,Sr. Director, Experiential Marketing

Yahoo! Screen hosted a live show with Bill Maher called Crazy Stupid Politics on February 23rd!  If you missed out, you can still watch it here.

We are pleased the White House is holding a privacy event today. It is encouraging to see such high level attention from the Administration as it helpfully looks to elevate the U.S. voice and perspective within the broader global discussion of privacy frameworks. It is critically important that modern privacy protection frameworks recognize that innovation in our global information economy will require thoughtful and responsible collection and use of data. It is also critical that self-regulatory structure play a large and growing role within these frameworks.

Let’s focus on self-regulation for a moment. Industry has made incredible strides in just a few years – implementing a code to give users contextual notice and controls over online behavioral advertising. This effort requires advertisers, publishers, ad networks and many other players to take responsibility and to accept a role in presenting consumers with an Ad Choices icon which, when clicked, tells them more about what is going on behind the scenes in ad delivery and gives them an opportunity to opt out of the use of their data for this kind of customized advertising. With a single click, the opt-out can apply to the vast majority of systems serving such ads today. No more need to opt out from every website individually or ad serving entity. This is a huge improvement for consumers uncomfortable with this practice. These icons are now nearly ubiquitous across the web, and certainly across Yahoo.com.
But industry players did not stop there. We have clearly and demonstrably answered the call from policymakers to bring more certainty to an understanding of the use of Do Not Track technology while providing consumers the services and innovation they expect and demand.
The Digital Advertising Alliance has introduced a new code on the collection and use of Multisite Data which addresses these issues. This code has strict prohibitions on the collection, use or transfer of such data to determine adverse terms or ineligibility for employment, credit, housing or insurance. It further touches on sensitive data including the personal information of children, health records, and financial account records. It acknowledges there are some operational or systems management purposes for which companies will always need to collect data like fraud prevention, billing, or consumer safety. Yahoo! is proud to have been a key advocate for many of the provisions of this new code. Once again, industry’s proactive efforts on privacy have raised the bar.
As industry moves forward to address new issues in the marketplace through codes of practice, consumers benefit from timely implementation of broad-based changes that can be readily enforced by the FTC. We are gratified to see Administration and FTC statements embracing these self-regulatory efforts as an important step in protecting consumers’ privacy online, which signals that we are on the right track. While there is a lot to be worked out and the devil is always in the details, we appreciate the work they’ve done and the recognition that self-regulation has been working.
We understand the online landscape is constantly evolving. As an innovator in the online space, Yahoo! will continue to be at the forefront of industry best practices and self-regulatory initiatives. It is the best and quickest way to introduce protections into the marketplace without sacrificing innovation and value creation for consumers. We commend the Administration for its understanding that such codes are a key ingredient in a successful privacy framework for the information age. Yahoo! will continue to be at the very front of efforts to give consumers the transparency and choices they want while continuing to create innovative, free products every day.
Leslie Dunlap,VP, Privacy, Policy and Trust at Yahoo!

Editors Note: Article originally posted on the Yodel Anecdotal blog.

All TV is better with IntoNow from Yahoo!. Almost three million people are regularly using IntoNow as their second screen experience of choice when watching TV, whether it’s sports, their favorite reality shows, dramas or comedies. But if there’s one type of television experience that’s really transformed with a second screen app, it’s big live events, like the Super Bowl, Grammy’s or this weekend’s Oscar’s broadcast.
That’s why we’ve cooked up some special experiences on IntoNow for this weekend’s big show. And the festivities, like the event itself, start long before the opening credits. You’ll be able to:

• Rate the looks of everyone as they head down the red carpet with a thumbs up or thumbs down;
• Get information about nominees and synchronized polls about nominees/categories;
• Pick the winners in each category as the nominees are introduced and compare your picks against friends and the Academy;
• And as always on IntoNow, connect with friends in real-time conversations – why gossip after the fact when you can do it live!

Here's what it will look like on Sunday:
So if you don’t have IntoNow yet, you can download the app for free here for iOS (iPad and iPhone) and here if you have an Android phone.
Careers will be made on Sunday night. Enjoy the show.

Imagine being able to help someone follow their passion and bring their dreams to life. It feels great in your imagination, doesn't it?

It does in reality, too. I can tell you this firsthand, because it's what Yahoo! Small Business gets to do every day for our customers.
As I write this, we're in the midst of one of the busiest and most exciting times of the year for many of these folks: the holiday shopping season. Whether you’re a Merchant Solutions customer selling online using our store platform, or you’re a Web Hosting customer with a bricks-and-mortar retail business using your online presence to expand your customer reach, this time of year is crucial.
We know this, and delivering products, resources, and experiences designed to help our customers grow their businesses and be successful during the holidays and throughout the year is what we do year-round. For me, one of the best parts of this is knowing who will use what we deliver. In many cases, I mean faces and names, and not just business names. Something that makes Yahoo! Small Business unique is the face-time we get with our customers—not only at industry conferences like Internet Retailer, but also at our very own Yahoo! Merchant Summit.
Talking to our customers is my favorite part of the Summit. Some have businesses that have been life-changing not only for them, but also for their customers. Here's just one example: After her son was diagnosed with autism, one of our customers turned her experience finding ways to help him communicate into what she calls the best job she's ever had. She created National Autism Resources, a site where parents and teachers can find easy-to-understand information along with affordable autism teaching materials and products that can help children on the autism spectrum. If you’d like to hear more of her story, you can watch this video. We get a lot of direct feedback from our customers at the Summit and through other channels about what they need to thrive and how we can delight them, and we incorporate what we learn into the products we launch. I’m lucky enough to be part of all the action, and am excited to tell you about a few of the products and features that Yahoo! has launched for our small business customers in recent months:

• For our Merchant Solutions customers, we launched a customer registration system that uses social login, where customers can sign in using their credentials from Yahoo!, Google, and AOL (we plan to add Facebook and PayPal to this list in the first part of 2012). Our system also allows customers to save their credit and debit card information. This is designed to make checkout faster and easier for shoppers, which can help to increase sales. The ability for shoppers to save card information is also a feature that most hosted competitors don't offer.
• Also for Merchant Solutions, we launched a new ecommerce site search that lets us leverage our Yahoo! Search technology. The new site search provides a better, more engaging search experience, allowing shoppers to add items to their carts from the search results page, refine search results with filters, search only specific product categories, and more.
• For our Web Hosting customers, we added a number of great new template designs to Yahoo! Site Solution, which makes it easy to design a professional-looking web site with little or no web design experience. We've also launched widgets that help customers customize their pages by inserting badges, banners, and HTML for custom widgets.
  

The dreams we help our customers achieve is what inspires me every day. It’s truly rewarding to hear our customers’ stories and to be able to deliver products that set them up for success, so they can continue to make their dreams real.

Jennifer FarwellSr. Manager, Product ContentYahoo! Small Business

Editors Note: Article was originally posted January 10th on our Yodel Anecdotal Blog.

An in-depth look at The Signal, the Yahoo! News prediction blog.

Editor’s note: Yahoos are known for producing great work in a pinch. But do you ever wonder what it takes to make the impossible possible? In our new behind-the-scenes series, we take a look at the people and teams for whom no obstacle is too big. This time we’re taking a look at The Signal, a Yahoo! News predictions blog featuring real-time forecasts and sentiment on politics, economics, and more. Yahoo! Economist David Rothschild and Yahoo! Principal Research Scientist David Pennock keep readers up-to-date on the very latest in the 2012 race to the White House.  
We interviewed David Rothschild to learn more about the work he and David Pennock do for The Signal. This Friday, February 17, follow @YahooInc on Twitter for a special interview with @pennockd and @DavMicRot at 1:30 p.m. (Pacific).
Q: The Signal has been referred to as the “mother of all political prediction engines.” What does your team do that’s different from the standard polls we hear about?

A: Standard polls provide very useful raw data points for predicting elections, but are not themselves predictions. Polls ask people how they would vote if an election were held that day. But, we actually know a lot about how the world will change between the poll and Election Day. First, there are known biases between polls and outcomes such as the anti-incumbency bias; polls for incumbents are systemically lower than how incumbents perform on Election Day. When we utilize just polls to create a prediction that is just one of a few biases we can address. Second, we know things like how much money the candidates have left; a candidate with access to a lot more money should be expected to shift voters his/her way before Election Day. We know about scandals and unique policy positions that may not have trickled down to the average voter yet.

Our models incorporate this extra information by utilizing—along with polls—prediction markets, fundamental models, and Yahoo! Games/polls. Think of a prediction market as a stock exchange where people trade candidates instead of companies. Prediction markets incorporate polling data, but also disaggregate data about the candidates and the campaign; further, it does it in real-time. Fundamental models use information such as past election results, economic indicators, ideological indicators and biographical information about the candidates. They are remarkably accurate at predicting elections, even though we create the forecast with data that is available several months prior to the election. Yahoo! Games/polls are new interactive games that will harness the information of Yahoo! users to further refine our predictions.

Combined, our predictions stand out for several reasons. First, they are the most accurate prediction available, with the wealth of information we utilize. Second, they are going to be updating in real-time. Third, they are versatile covering many topics and displaying many different applicable predictions on the same events. Finally, they are going to be displayed in an easy to understand way with data visualizations.

Q: How long has it taken you to perfect The Signal? In other words, how long has it been from concept to now?

A: I pitched The Signal to Yahoo! News during my first week at Yahoo! this summer. David Pennock and I began writing articles on the data about three months after I arrived at Yahoo! and we launched The Signal about five months after I arrived at Yahoo!. We have been refining and adding to it ever since then

Yet, in actuality, The Signal is an outgrowth of the work that David Pennock and I have been doing for years. The models and theories that form the basis of the project have been our life’s work.

Q: Now that football season is over, do you think people will be addicted to Fantasy Politics just like they have been to Fantasy Football?

A: Yes. The game we are developing from the Predictalot platform is going to have some really exciting hooks. There will be two distinct levels one for casual users and one for hard core users. Both will allow people to gain some ownership in the election which we hope to lead to even more engagement in the campaigns. First, since our games are all tied to real-time action, users will be able to see their portfolios move in real-time, during debates, after major gaffes and scandals, and during Election Day. Second, there will be interesting contrasts that users will be able to debate about, like “Will Obama win Florida?” or “Will Obama win Florida and Ohio?” or “Will Obama win Florida if the unemployment rate is above 8 percent?” Third, our unique scoring structure will make it easy to play both head-to-head with your buddies, in small groups, or against a universal scoreboard. Whatever is most exciting to the user.

Since you mentioned Fantasy Sports, we are very excited that we have been able to converse regularly with the folks at Fantasy Sports while we build our Fantasy Politics game. What an amazing asset it is for us to get advice from the leaders in the industry. We’re working to see how we can integrate some of their expertise in our work moving forward.

Q: Who do you think will win the Republican nomination, and further, who will be our next president?

A: As of February 7 at 3:47 PM ET Mitt Romney is 72.8 percent likely to be the Republican nominee and Barack Obama is 61.5 percent likely to win reelection. Further, you did not ask, but I think the Philadelphia Phillies are 15.5 percent likely to win the World Series, with the New York Yankees close behind at 12.8 percent.

Q: What other events does the Yahoo! Predict team work on that Yahoos may not know about?

A: We are starting on the major political elections but we will be expanding rapidly into other events. We have already spoken about sports in several columns (and the previous question). We are adding economic indicators and financial indicators soon. And, to answer the most pertinent question, The Artist is 83.5 percent likely to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, which I really enjoyed, so I recommend you see it before the awards show!

Q: What inspires you to do your best work? Or, more generally, what inspires the team?

A: We have two intertwined goals: become a meaningful property for Yahoo! and utilize Yahoo! Signal for research.

First, Yahoo! Signal is an amazing way to showcase the work many talented people in Yahoo! Labs and Yahoo! News who are interested in bringing objective data analysis to our 700 million users. We have some of the top machine learning computer science PhDs in the world working on new backend algorithms for our Fantasy Politics. We have leading data mining computer scientists PhDs working on new ways to utilize social data. We have sociologist PhDs thinking about what goes viral and marketing, psychologist, and computer scientist PhDs thinking about design and how people understand probability. We have economist PhDs working on prediction models. The list goes on, but it is tied together with excellent Yahoo! News editors who help us communicate cutting edge research to the general Yahoo! audience.

And, it’s working! Our traffic over the first few months has been strong. Our real-time interest index, sentiment index, and predictions are just coming online now. We expect that that will not only drive readers, but engaged readers, who will come back often during major events. 

Second, Yahoo! Signal is a functioning laboratory for Yahoo! Labs. It allows us to run field experiments on cutting edge polls and prediction games. These allow our users to not only engage themselves, but actually advance our academic work in these fields. Further, we are always looking for new tools to engage our users, new ways to get them to understand and test Yahoo!’s cutting edge work.

by Jessica Roland

Yahoos were out in force at the Feb 13 TechWomen briefing, held at Microsoft's Mountain View facility, after a similar session earlier in the day in San Francisco. TechWomen is a program sponsored by the US Department of State, in conjunction with the Institute for International Education and the Anita Borg Institute. Its purpose is to bring talented technical women from the Middle East and North Africa regions to the US for a life-changing professional and cultural mentoring experience.

The goal of the TechWomen briefing was to inform potential Silicon Valley mentors about the benefits of the experience and how to apply. The briefing event began with a stellar line-up of officials from the Department of State and IIE, and a personal video plea for involvement from Hillary Clinton. The main event was a panel discussion led by Sheila Casey of the State Department, with former mentor panelists from NetApp, Juniper Networks, startup Survivify, and our own Yahoo Fabiola Addamo, who was a cultural mentor last year. As Fabi says: "From my own experience as an immigrant, coming to this country with a bagful of dreams, I wanted to share (with mentees) that here it is possible to create your career."
There are 1500 potential mentees currently completing applications for the program, in 8 MENA countries. They will go through a rigorous selection process with expert panels and their local US embassies, getting checked on their educational and professional background, their communication skills (via essays) and whether they are "giving back" to their communities and cultures. 84 women out of the 1500 will be selected, and then paired with local mentors for a transformational 5-week program of professional projects and cultural immersion, starting September 10. The mentees have generally moved heaven and earth, in cultures where women's paths may be limited, to be able to take time from their jobs, their startups, their theses, their spouses and children to be part of this experience. They are carefully matched with the most compatible mentors in order to create the most fruitful and productive mentor-mentee learning partnerships.

Yahoo had 5 mentor participants in 2011, and one mentee, Rayya Abu Ghosh, a Yahoo! employee in Jordan. Rayya says: " TechWomen gave me great exposure to people, references and tools to use in my career. TechWomen was explosively filled with inspiration and positive energy that spread from the mentors and organizers to the mentees and right back!... (It's a) great cultural exchange... where Arab women meet American women from different cultural backgrounds and share each others' personal beliefs and traditions".

What do the mentors get out of the program? That was an easy question for the panelists, who universally spoke of the mentee's contagious energy and desire to learn, their camaraderie, their amazement at our freedoms and variety of lifestyles. Because they are paired with these high-profile mentees, the mentors also benefitted from exceptional networking opportunities both within and outside their companies. On a larger scale, our country benefits from the people-to-people relationships created by the program, which helps inspire the mentees to be professional pioneers in their home countries and trailblaze a brighter future for women everywhere.

If you are interested in becoming a mentor, please visit the TechWomen website to learn more.

Editors note: Blog post originally posted in the WIT blog here.

Quoted from the SF Chronicle article:

Two years ago, Blake Irving had more time to spend mornings surfing on the Malibu coast. That was before Yahoo's then-Chief Executive Officer Carol Bartz lured him back into the corporate world, as chief product officer of the Sunnyvale company.

Now the industry veteran stands at the center of the efforts to turn around the struggling Internet pioneer.

For months, the public chatter surrounding Yahoo has focused on executive turnover and exploration of its "strategic options." Those themes continued last week with the departure of four more board members - following Bartz and co-founder Jerry Yang out the door - and the emergence of details about how the company might unload its lucrative stakes in Alibaba Group and Yahoo Japan.

But the real war in the technology space begins and ends with products. Without new ways of drawing users and advertisers, the rest won't add up to much.

That's where Irving comes in. He helped Microsoft build its vast online operations as vice president of the software giant's Windows Live Platform group, before becoming a business professor at Pepperdine University in Malibu.

In an interview with The Chronicle, he laid out his vision for creating "deeply personal digital experiences" that deliver on five points: personal relevance through science and data; premium user experiences; a mobile-first mind-set; social features that better resemble how we interact in the real world; and an "ecosystem" that allows other companies to work within Yahoo's tools...

To read the entire article click here.
To hear what Blake has to say about Livestand and Living Ads click here.

Visualizing How Yahoo! Serves Up 13,000,000 Unique Story Combinations, Every Single Day
Ever wondered how Yahoo! decides which stories to put on its front page each day? Or why your Red Sox team scores or daily omg! fix usually appears up front?
That’s because the Yahoo! page you see each time you visit yahoo.com is likely different than the person sitting next to you. In fact, more than 13,000,000 personalized story combinations are delivered every day on the Today Module (the little box at the top of our homepage displaying featured stories), and it happens within milliseconds of you visiting our site. The minute you log into your Yahoo! account, personalization goes a whole level deeper.
We just unveiled an innovative way to visualize the magic that makes it all work, and what it means for you.
Go ahead and click here to check it out. The tool is populated in near real-time, so you can discover what the most popular story is, right now. For instance, you might be interested to learn that today more than 12 million people have seen an article on the $26 billion mortgage foreclosure deal reached between the U.S. government and leading banks. Or that 92 million people saw a video on a test driver’s close call with a deer while filming a commercial.

Yahoo! creates uniquely meaningful experiences for every single person, at this scale. How? It’s simple, really. We do it with deep science and great engineering.
The Magic Behind It: C.O.R.E.
Initially developed within Yahoo! Labs, the award winning science and research group within Yahoo!, C.O.R.E. (Content Optimization and Relevance Engine) is an innovative suite of technologies that allows us to feature the stories most likely to be interesting to you.
Today, C.O.R.E. powers content on many Yahoo! properties, including Yahoo! News and the Today Module. There, editors write and gather the most important and engaging stories of the day, and C.O.R.E. determines how stories should be ordered, dependent on each user. Similarly, C.O.R.E. figures out which story categories (i.e. technology, health, finance, or entertainment) should be displayed prominently on the page to help deepen engagement for each viewer.
What’s unique here is not just the innovative C.O.R.E. algorithms that crunch this amount of data all day, every day - but that it’s also the perfect marriage of deep science and a world-class editorial team.
Editors use C.O.R.E. and their editorial judgment to ensure that important stories are front and center. For example, Yahoo! editors made sure that the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death was on everyone’s page the moment the news broke. An algorithm couldn’t have done that.
So how does C.O.R.E actually work?
C.O.R.E. measures how often users click on stories overall and within different segments of the population. In just a few visits to yahoo.com, you’ll start to see tailored content appear just for you. And the more time you spend, the better it gets.
Since C.O.R.E. was implemented in 2008, people click on the Today Module four times more often than they used to – in fact, more than 1 billion times per month! To put that in context, every eight minutes C.O.R.E. registers more clicks on the Yahoo! homepage than there are words in the entire English language.
Rather than list out the millions of possible combinations, we created an interactive visualization that allows you to experiment with C.O.R.E. You can explore the day’s most popular stories or put yourself in someone else’s shoes and see Yahoo! through their eyes.
Go behind the scenes and drill into the data that powers the personal content experiences of 700 million users here: http://visualize.yahoo.com/core
Steven Lyons,Sr. Product Manager, C.O.R.E.

Calling all internationally-minded Tech gals! You can be a life-changing mentor in the US State Department’s TechWomen program.  Please join Yahoo! and other global tech firms at the information session on Monday February 13. Details here: http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/wit/posts/2012/02/global-gals-techwomen-needs-you/. RSVP by Feb 9!

by fabiolaa

Few women know their true worth. Their potential for power, their upstanding place in society. But for a few days, in Egypt-- a place of current revolution -- women decided to speak up. Ebele Okobi opened up the Yahoo! Business & Human Rights Summit on Women and Social /Digital Media in Cairo with a powerful statement – “A determined woman is a force of nature.” These simple, yet eloquent words touched me deeply. It is funny how emotion and fact can move women to action. That is just the sort of character trait that I found in the women I met in Cairo. The summit displayed a carousel of progressive voices. Women from across the globe (Egypt, Middle East, North Africa, the U.S., Europe) gathered and spoke about human rights/social justice activism, blogging, journalism, entrepreneurship, safety online, and shared views on how to use technology and media platforms to support virtual communication without borders. The speakers had different backgrounds and stories, but the audience could clearly map a common denominator, that is the questions raised out loud to make everyone think critically.

• What is a woman? What is your own definition?
• Should we move away from the false fear driven equation women=loss of honor in society?
• What about transforming fears into a renewed energy for women empowerment and adopting a changed perspective in everyday life?
• What about women who bring honor to society and win a Nobel peace prize?
• What about women who understand who they are and are driven by motivation and strong will?

The summit moved from panel to panel and I kept hearing the same message over and over, “Women need organizational structure” and the question, “What triggers a paradigm shift in many women’s lives?”
Here is my summary in 3 steps:

1. Understanding who you are and what inspires you.
2. Aligning with other like- minded women.3. Connecting without borders and standing for each other according to your own comfort level (front line or behind the scene).
There was no shame during the summit, women felt free to express themselves: public female figures (and not) shared their dreams and spoke out loud their revolutionary minds. Can just having a voice beat fear? Yes! Fearful people usually hide behind other‘s widely accepted ideas. I listened to Manal Al-Sharif, a professional Saudi woman, who is leading the campaign to support women’s drivers and it just hit me, how is it possible that some women in 2012 have limited freedom of movement? I said to myself stop arguing with reality and accept it; it is what it is and only action can make a change. Manal acted and she was jailed for 9 days. She gained my respect for acting upon her belief. She helped me believe that Facebook campaigns, youtube videos, social and media platforms are the foundations we can use to support the global virtual alignment between women involved in social justice and human rights causes.
The Internet is virtual power. The Egyptians are a great example of how to use the internet to gather like-minded people and ideas, and make a real impact on issues that oppress their people. Women are powerful because we are a main voice of society. Ideas and modern minds will continue to expand as long as we keep sharing our realities, even if we risk punishment and peril. Experience sharing is infectious because it creates a sense of belonging in other women’s minds around the globe – if facts and emotion combine, we cannot shake the pain of truth. I am convinced that creating awareness and sharing stories must be a duty for all women without regard for geographical borders.

I participated myself as speaker in the last panel “What’s next” and I conveyed 3 important messages:

• Who I am.
• Why I was in Cairo.
• My dream for the future.

I ask you: what is really next? 
I have decided: 
Next is to continue a respectful conversation with an audience made of men and women; Next is creating new mentorship programs while growing existing ones (see Techwomen); Next is breaking away from the concept of communication based on physical vicinity; Next is spreading art among youth as powerful communication tool; Next is Yahoo! leading discussions and creating action items from this Cairo summit.
I believe that the internet, women, and curiosity are key ingredients to an explosive but peaceful change in society!

Editors Note: Click here for the original post on the WIT blog.

There's a lot Yahoo! is bringing you for the Super Bowl!

Check out what's up over at the Yodel Anecdotal Blog...

"In addition to our award-winning sports reporting, Yahoo! is going to be all over Super Bowl XLVI with insider access to one of the hottest events of the year. Here’s a look at everything we’ve got going on before, during, and after the game:

Bud Light Hotel Super Bowl concert broadcast live on Yahoo!: The night before the Super Bowl, Bud Light will host a special concert featuring 50 Cent, Lil Jon, and Pitbull that will be broadcast live only on omg! From Yahoo!. The concert can be seen on both omg! From Yahoo! and Yahoo! Screen, beginning at 10 pm EST on Saturday, February 4th.
Daily coverage: omg! From Yahoo! and Yahoo! Sports will feature daily coverage from the Bud Light Hotel, including “blue-carpet” celebrity interviews, celebrity predictions, an omg! photo gallery collection, and coverage of all the weekend’s parties..."  for full article click here.

Also, IntoNow is featuring some amazing content before and during the game!

You'll be able to rate the commercials during the game AND a chance to win Pepsi MAX for life!  Find out how here, but hurry, you need to download the app and be ready to go by the NFL Honors award show, which is being hosted by Alec Baldwin and will air on Saturday, February 4 at 9:00 PM EST on NBC.

What are you waiting for, it's almost game day!