Yahoo joins digital newsstand market with Livestand

New York: The latest to join the digital newsstand bandwagon is Yahoo. The company forays into the digital publishing business with its service called Livestand for tablet PCs and smartphones. The content for the platform will be pooled in from Yahoo's online publications and sites and from external publishers. The application will at first be available in iPad and tablets running on Android platform during the first half of the year. Expect the smartphone version later in the year. With Livestand, Yahoo will be in direct competition with News Corp's The Daily that has been launched in collaboration with Apple as an iPad only newspaper. Yahoo has designed Livestand exclusively for portable devices and hence the content will be optimized to fit in the screens and UIs of these devices. Users can customize their news from the various feeds that the company will offer. The source for the content will be drawn from Yahoo's sports, finance and celebrity gossip news. Publishers will get revenue from two channels: advertising and subscriptions. Yahoo! is hoping that newspapers suffering from declining real-world circulation will use Livestand to ramp-up digital distribution and online advertising opportunities. Yahoo! said that while personalization is key to Livestand, it is being "savvy and super-sensitive" about letting people control their privacy. Yahoo! chief executive Carol Bartz has been recreating the Sunnyvale, California-based company after being eclipsed by Google in the Internet search market. Bartz has said that the goal is to be a digital media company that personalizes online content to each visitor. Yahoo! made a deal to have Microsoft's Bing handle search queries at its websites, leaving Yahoo! to concentrate on tailoring content to the interests of its more than half billion users around the world. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100421111353.htm&  lt;/span>