Sunnyvale, California — Struggling to overcome another setback, internet pioneer Yahoo, currently without a chief executive, up for sale and the subject of intense speculation the world over, has gathered the impetus to make magazine publishing simpler with the launch of its own personalized digital newsstand product this autumn, which it describes as a “game changer”.
According to reports on Monday, Yahoo first announced the application earlier this year, the newsstand and personalization platform will be dubbed as “Livestand” and include an array of content from the likes of Forbes and more specialist titles, including one specialist surf title.
The soon to be launched Livestand is an HTML5-based system which allows magazine publishers to create publications more quickly, and more cost efficiently, which aims to offer a better customer experience for users while being platform-agnostic to Google’s Android mobile OS as well as Apple’s iPad, which runs on iOS.
Moreover, this new digital reader may induce greater confidence in the company as the recent firing of Carol Bartz, its former chief executive, coupled with the fact that the company is currently up for sale, have been interpreted as signs that the company ‘lacks vision’.
Arif Durrani at MediaWeek had an opportunity to converse with Yahoo Chief Product Officer Blake Irving, who said that Livestand will be out this Autumn.
Yahoo Chief Product Officer, Blake Irving, who has been with the organization for past 16 months, said Livestand should be thought of “as a tablet version of Yahoo.”
Here are some quotes from Irving Durrani shares:
“Think of it as a tablet version of Yahoo. In addition it is a magazine stand, where you can get different types of content, and it is also HTML 5 based.”
“What we are trying to do is create a container that says we have a visual experience that allows us to take graphics, videos and text into a consumption that allows us to display it in the same way across IoS or [An] Driod. That is what every publisher on the planet’s trying to do.”
“With Livestand, You do not have to publish more than once… If you are either Google or Apple, you want guys writing to your platform. But if I’m a publisher, I do not want to have to write to those things two times.”
According to Durrani, he had no time to discuss about boardroom wrangles, future mergers or plans, for him it was very much business as normal, only faster, faster, faster.
“The company believes in what we are doing with the product,” he says. “We want to accelerate it and get to growth quicker. What we have been building, at the fundamental technological layers, is the right stuff to do.”
In fact, the ease of advertising within Livestand may help the company rebuild its former status as an advertising goldmine, especially in conjunction with the recent advertising deal between Yahoo! AOL and Microsoft.
Irving says Livestand will arrive in the US launch “in the autumn”, and when pushed he adds, “it will be pretty quick, it is happening now”. A few partnerships with UK publishers and elsewhere in western Europe are set to follow in 2012, although Irving is reserved to speculate on even what quarter they are aiming for.
A number of publishing launch partners are also said to be in place, including “a couple of big guys and not big guys”.
However, the personalized tablet publishing market is getting ever more crowded; not only will Yahoo have to beat off competition from Zite, Flipboard, Pulse, News.me and Trove, just to name a few, as well as newspapers’ own apps. Besodes. Just last week, one of the hot topics was that Google is working on a Flipboard competitor, which is reportedly called Propeller, and AOL launched one in Editions last month.
Lastly, one can only presume that as tablets continue to grow in popularity, we can look forward to see more and more of these types of apps to emerge. Considering the never-ending problem of too much info available and not enough time to read it, companies and developers will continue to try and crack the nut to solve it.