Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

Yahoo Announces a Bunch of Stuff It Already Announced (Except Local Deals, Which Everyone Else Has Already Announced)

Today at the Web 2.0 Summit conference in San Francisco, Yahoo announced a bunch of new features, most of which the Silicon Valley Internet giant had already unveiled.

(Yes, this is the riveting life of BoomTown.)

Delivered by Chief Product Officer Blake Irving and other execs, the presentation included Sketch-a-Search, quick apps in search and Search Assist, as well as integration of Zynga social games and Twitter into the site and more about its Yahoo Contributor Network.

But there was news: A local offers program, similar to offerings recently made by Facebook and others.

There are 20 partners in this iteration, including Groupon, which Yahoo has tried to buy outright for many billions of dollars.

It seems to have saved some dough with this deal, which is being tested nationwide.

Yahoo’s approach to the discounted daily local deal boom is integration, of course, as well as aggregation, which is its best quality.

Of course, like all the updates, what Yahoo was announcing was essentially table stakes to keep up with what has been going on across the Internet at companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook.

In fact, one question at the press event this morning focused on the incremental nature of Yahoo’s changes in comparison to others, and whether it can innovate as quickly.

Irving, who is certainly a lively character and knows about those issues from his many years at Microsoft, said he is trying to force a culture where Yahoos can “quickly iterate [products] and “it is safe to innovate fast.”

Let’s hope!

Until then, here are the official press releases on the updates, as well as local offers.


Yahoo_Web 2 0 Announcement_FINAL


Yahoo_ Local Offers Release

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