Yahoo updated its iOS app today to include its recently purchased Summly technology. Now, you’ll be served much more enticing story summaries with beautiful images before you dive into your content.
The company purchased Summly at the end of March, with the obvious intent of using its technology in Yahoo’s mobile apps. The technology looks at a piece of content and automatically summarizes it in a digestible blurb. In the Yahoo’s case, these blurbs are displayed to mobile users with a beautiful picture relevant to the story to help people decide if they want to commit to reading an article (that’s how distracted we are today).
Yahoo also wants to know more about what you’re interested in. The app is built to learn about you as you browse and select topics of interest. For example, once you’re in a story about space, you’ll be shown different topics having to do with that industry. You can select or remove those topics based on your interest, and Yahoo will eventually learn to serve you more relevant content.
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It also improved search so you can find any content that isn’t already on your radar, including video and image search.
Last week, Yahoo released a new weather app to an approving audience. Many said the app was finally a beautiful mobile product to come out of the once-falling media giant. The new app uses Flickr, the major photo websites owned by Yahoo, to spruce up the weather stats. You can, as VentureBeat’s Jolie O’Dell points out, look at weather around the world with the Flickr integration.
At the same time, Yahoo also released a new mail app for iPad, reiterating a point that Yahoo is trying to drive home: we want to make Yahoo on mobile awesome.
Mayer spoke last week at conference for human resources individuals explaining that her work from home policy is an attempt to get more products like this out of her employees. While she understands that productivity will likely suffer, innovation and collaboration are more likely to happen when folks are in the same room. She used the weather app as an example of what can happen when people come into the office.
The app is available to download from the Apple App Store now.
Yahoo app image via Yahoo
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