Sunnyvale, California — Tempted by tablet craze, Yahoo on Thursday announced the launch of a digital newsstand dubbed as “Livestand” that will turn tablet computers into personalized magazines rich with stories, images and video suited to individual tastes, for Yahoo-owned content and, in the future, possibly external content as well, initially available on Apple iPad and Android tablets.
The company said “Livestand” will be released in the first half of 2011, initially on tablets, and then to mobile phones and browsers, will present personalized content results from various publishers, starting with Yahoo’s content portfolio of Sports, News, Finance, Flickr, omg!, and the Yahoo Contributor Network, chief product officer Blake Irving said.
Yahoo said LiveStand will be available to users as an iPad and Android tablet application with a mobile phone and browser version to follow.
Demonstrated in a magazine-style format, content will be personalized based on a variety of factors and user’s exclusive interests, location, and time of day, Yahoo said. The platform expects to attract publishers with an uncomplicated, one-size-fits-all approach to producing content. Livestand has been designed for portable devices, so that articles, photos, videos, graphics and ads are optimized for the screens and interfaces of mobile phones and tablet PCs, the company said.
“The magazine knows what type of story you are reading; it privately knows where you are and where you been,” Irving said while briefing reporters on Yahoo!’s plans.
“What we are building is really device and operating system agnostic,” he said. “Tablets allow beautiful execution, and we will bring it into smaller forms down to mobile phones and then port it to PCs (personal computers) and TV.”
“With Livestand, we are using ad formats that evoke the emotion of TV advertising with a highly-visual magazine-like experience,” Irving, said in a blog post. “And they are combined with the effectiveness of an Internet ad that is data-rich, actionable, even location aware. It is all personalized and in context — just like our content.” To receive an early invite, go to Yahoo’s Livestand homepage and click to “Like” it on Facebook.
Furthermore, the platform will have embedded social media capabilities that publishers can take advantage of to engage readers and foster interaction among them, Yahoo said.
“Livestand delivers the best of magazines and the best of the Web,” said Irv Henderson, vice president of product management for Yahoo Mobile and Connected Devices, during a press conference.
“Adoption of tablets and mobile phones is exploding, and digital media is not keeping up. Consumers cannot find the publications they buy off the newsstand, and publishers and advertisers cannot reach the audiences they want to serve,” said Irving.
“The more you use this, the better it is at telling what you are interested in.” “It is a digital platform and we are its first customers,” Henderson said.
News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch last week unfurled “The Daily” a digital newspaper created specifically for Apple’s iPad, in the latest move in his drive to get consumers to pay for news online.
Although Yahoo officials only demonstrated Livestand featuring content from Yahoo properties during the press conference, they said the company is already working with an initial set of external publishers, whom they declined to name.
Livestand will let publishers generate revenue both from advertising and from subscriptions.
“At Yahoo, we see tablets as a catalyst that will allow advertising dollars to shift from TV and print to digital,” Irving said.