AllThingsD » YAP

Amazon Has Acquired Yap, the Closest Thing to a Siri Clone It Can Find

Tricia Duryee — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 22:34:27 +0000

There are a lot of similarities between Amazon and Apple. The secrecy, the dedication to the consumer, the focus on devices and digital media, and now this: Siri.

Amazon has not returned calls or emails seeking comment, but we have confirmed independently that Charlotte, N.C.-based Yap has been acquired by Amazon.

Reports of the acquisition surfaced earlier today after CLT, a Charlotte-based blog, connected a couple of obscure dots. First, it tracked down an SEC filing that shows that as of Sept. 8, Yap was acquired by Yarmuth Dion. Then, it discovered that Yarmouth Dion has the same mailing address as Amazon’s Seattle headquarters.

Media reports immediately jumped to the conclusion that Amazon was interested in the company’s speech recognition technology so it could compete with Siri, the voice-controlled assistant found on Apple’s newest iPhone.

And, from what we dug up, that sounds about right.

Most recently, Yap’s servers were being used by Sprint and others to convert voicemails to text. It was being shipped on a majority of Sprint’s Android handsets. Yap also had an iPhone app.

On Oct. 20, Yap voicemail was discontinued.

But the company, founded by brothers Igor and Victor Jablokov, started out in a different direction. Four years ago, the company was eager to build technology that allowed people to interact with Web services using speech recognition. The company, which raised about $10 million, presented at the TechCrunch40 event in 2007.

At the time, the idea was a little far-fetched.

Wireless networks weren’t very fast, not many people owned smartphones and distribution was tough because of the lack of app stores. With many of those problems resolved, we heard the 50-employee company was beginning to return to its roots. Now, it works for Amazon.

We can hear it now:

– “Yap, what are this season’s most popular boots?”

– “Yap, buy me the first Harry Potter novel.”

– “Yap, what’s the new hit song from Justin Bieber?”

Yahoo Renovates Its Home Page

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 23:52:02 +0000

Makeovers are always fun to watch. Someone swoops in on an unsuspecting fashion “don’t,” improves him or her with a new hairstyle, makeup and wardrobe, and presents the finished product to overjoyed friends and family.

Last week, Yahoo (YHOO) unveiled the results of its latest makeover: the revamped home page. Carol Bartz, the company’s relatively new CEO, has said that Yahoo’s home page needed just such a makeover. After not changing significantly since 2006, the home page fits the role of a fashion don’t. And consumers, like family and friend observing the aftermath of a makeover, will either be overjoyed or nonplussed by the finished product.

Yahoo’s cleaner, streamlined home page emphasizes its ability to view content from other Web sites.

I’ve been using this new home page for over a week now and I can report that Yahoo followed one of the most important makeover rules by doing more with less. Gone is the busy screen saturated with advertisements and clutter. The new home page is clean and easier to absorb.

Favorite ‘Apps’

Yahoo’s home-page makeover goes beyond surface improvements. Its most useful feature is a list called My Favorites, which contains a variety of Web sites from within and outside of Yahoo. When your cursor hovers over one of these entries, which Yahoo calls “apps,” a pane opens with a preview of content from that site. This turns your Yahoo home page into an aggregator of information, bringing glimpses of information to you in one place so you don’t have to waste time navigating to other sites.

But if a greater number of these apps were more robust, you would be able to do more right within the hover pane, like watch videos or play a game. Currently, the hover preview pane only lets you see content, update social-network statuses and enter search terms, the results of which are shown on a new Web page.

[ See post to watch video ]

This makeover comes at an interesting time in the world of online news aggregation. Competitors like Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) incorporate data from all over the Web into iGoogle.com and MSN.com, respectively. And the concept of the home page as a starting point isn’t as popular as it once was: Many people now start browsing the Web by first clicking on a link in an email or in one of many social-networking sites, like Twitter.

Traffic Driver

Of course, Yahoo plans to use this redesigned home page to drive traffic to the company’s own sites like Shine, Answers, Health and OMG (a celebrity gossip site). These Yahoo sites make up half of the 65 apps designed especially for My Favorites. Yahoo says that its apps for other sites, including WSJ.com, were made by Yahoo and the outside company running the Web site. An ad runs on the hover preview page of each app and the revenue for this ad goes to Yahoo, not the content provider.

Yahoo will use your list of My Favorites apps to learn about what sites you use so as to target ads at users. This proved true for most of the ads I saw on my home page, but strangely, the AllThingsD.com app displayed ads for Mars chocolate and Del Monte fruit snacks rather than technology products.

Module Thinking

My Favorites is fixed on the far left of the Yahoo home page and a large search box sits prominently at the top of the home screen.

The top middle section of the screen shows a carousel of images and current news that Yahoo calls the Today Module; below this is the News Module, which houses tabs labeled News, World, Local, and Finance. The Local and Finance tabs can be customized by entering a ZIP Code and stock tickers, respectively. The Today and News Modules can switch positions if you click on a small arrow.

The revamped home page will serve as a starting point for the Yahoo Application Platform, or YAP. Sometime around late September, Yahoo will open its YAP (no pun intended) to software developers so they can make all kinds of apps with a variety of functions for the home page, not just apps that are tied to Web sites.

You can customize the home page for style or content changes if you sign on using a user ID and password. Changes should appear the next time you log in. But this didn’t work as well as it should. I set my page to display in a tangerine color, one of six colors offered for customizing the page, but the home page wasn’t tangerine-colored the next time I logged in.

Some Problems

I had trouble logging into my Gmail account using a special Gmail app, but this and the color problem were fixed by the time this column went to press.

Some apps didn’t work at all, like the Facebook app, which couldn’t connect to my Facebook account. Yahoo said the problem should be fixed this week.

The home page seemed to have a longer memory when it came to the list of My Favorites. I edited my list, adding more pre-made apps and creating some of my own using a built-in tool that lets you enter a Web site. Yahoo has preloaded icons for some popular Web sites such as cnn.com; otherwise, it will use a generic star.

Permanent Apps

Two apps are permanent fixtures at the top of the My Favorites list: One shows a list of all Yahoo sites and the other shows Yahoo Mail. Everything else can be deleted, added and moved around in the list. One of my favorite apps was for Epicurious.com, the food and recipe site. When I hovered over the Epicurious app, images of food with recipe names appeared in the hover preview pane. One click on an image sent me to the Web site for the full version of the recipe.

After adding many of my own apps to My Favorites, I wished Yahoo had a one-click tool for converting my browser bookmarks into apps. Yahoo says this is something it hopes to introduce in the future.

Mobile Rollout

This week, Yahoo started rolling out a mobile Web site made to run on the iPhone’s Safari browser that coordinates with the more robust version of the home page. I used this Yahoo home page on the iPhone and liked that it immediately pulled up the My Favorites list I had carefully constructed on my computer. Similar offerings will soon be available for other mobile devices.

The new Yahoo home page is a refreshing way of bringing content to you rather than you chasing around the Web looking for it. The My Favorites apps need a little more power to be truly useful and to encourage people to use the Yahoo home page every day, but Yahoo hopes to solve some of that problem in a couple of months when it opens the site to developers.

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Guitar Hero: World Store

John Paczkowski — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 13:19:14 +0000

With analysts predicting Activision Blizzard (ATVID) will generate $1.38 billion in profits during its first financial year, Bobby Kotick, CEO of the new company, can perhaps be forgiven his grandiose proclamations. After all, there’s little doubt that the pure-play online and console game publisher will be the world’s most profitable. That said, it’s hard to believe that Activision Blizzard can launch a “successful competitor” to Apple’s iTunes music service through its Guitar Hero franchise, as Kotick claims. “When you think about the potential for what we will be able to do together, there have not been many viable alternatives to iTunes,” Kotick said, adding that it would be relatively easy to leverage the company’s new relationship with Universal Music Group (V) to develop an online music store tethered to Guitar Hero. “If you’re downloading a song to play on your Guitar Hero, there’s no reason why you can’t download the performance also,” he explained. “When you look at Universal Music Group as having such a big slate of artists and a large catalog and such a well-balanced presence over all the major territories in the world, there are plenty of opportunities.”

Opportunities, yes. Like debuting Metallica’s next album, “Death Magnetic” as a “Guitar Hero III” download. But opportunities large enough to unseat an entrenched rival like iTunes? A rival that has sold more than 4 billion songs and accounts for approximately 70 percent of digital music sold worldwide? A rival that in the next five years, may well account for a staggering 28 percent of all music sold worldwide?

Next up at TechCrunch40: Mobile and Communications

John Paczkowski — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 20:19:57 +0000

Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski is blogging from TechCrunch40 in San Francisco. Technical difficulties at the conference site prevent him from live-blogging, so he is summarizing with the following report on the second session.

Jason Calacanis is back onstage, describing the voting process employed by a panel of judges (which will be done with poker chips).
Cubic Telecom takes the stage. Discussing trials and tribulations of traveling internationally with cellphone, including roaming charges. Up comes a slide of CEO’s phone bill from two weeks in France: $14,000. Next is a screen of cubic’s MaxRoam service, which is launching today. Allows you to make every international call made on your mobile a local call. (First demo failure. No signal.) The company notes, nevertheless, that you can put as many numbers on the phone as you like.
Yap is next. Company rep says “We speech-enable your mobile Web. … the product literally speaks for itself.” (Hardy, har, har.) Voice texting. Advertising. Keywords pull up text ads. Example: “We should get coffee” pulls up a location-specific Starbucks ad. (Presenter complaining about lack of connectivity in conference room.) Tech meltdown on stage, GSM trouble, audio trouble as well. Presenter desperately trying to demo some sort of Yap-twitter application. But: “server not found.” Moving on to the next demo …
Ceedo is next. This is a lightweight virtualization platform, now introducing a new product: Ceedo mobile, a “self-contained device.” The application allows a user to put PC applications on a phone’s flash memory. The user can then connect phone to any PC and use it to launch a localized version of that user’s original PC. These standard PC applications are stored on phone and launched virtually. The demonstration begins with a launch of Picasa from phone. Picasa brings up users’ pictures and Picasa editing tools, etc. Then, pulls up blogger, exports Picasa photos to blogger application and creates blog post. If I understand it correctly, Ceedo acts as an interface between phone user and Web. Why anyone needs such an interface is beyond me. (Presumably, that’s why there’s no mention of business model.)
Yap is back onstage after the earlier tech meltdown. In a nutshell, we’re told, Yap is “making text messaging while driving safer” with speech-to-text-messaging application for mobile devices. Well, this is odd. … Yap, apparently in a nod to Britney Spears, is lip-syncing the presentation. The whole thing was prerecorded. Presenters are ad-libbing, uncomfortably, over the audio track.
LoudTalks, the next presenter takes the stage. (Hails from Russia, and with no company logo on the screen behind presenter, I have no idea what company he represents.) Ah, here it is: LoudTalks. Internet walkie-talkie. (Hmmm. Looks like we’re about to see another demo drown onstage. Volume control issues. Demoed conversation is unintelligible; perhaps a better name for the company would be “SoftTalks.”) The Internet’s walkie-talkie is apparently having talkie issues. (Speaking of Internet walkie-talkies, isn’t that what most audio chat applications are these days?) Calacanis to the rescue! He takes the stage, somehow resolves the volume issue. (Q: “How’s the weather in St. Petersburg?” A: (from LoudTalks rep in Russia) “Very cold.”
TruTap now on. “Our inspiration as a company is to bring the social life of young people to one, free, universal, mobile service.” Begin demoing UI: Web 2.0 design cliche. Application offers blogging, IM, messaging, contacts, social networks, broadcast messaging (one-to-many, a la Twitter) all in a single interface. User can log onto a variety of IM clients and social networks simultaneously. The beta version is available on AT&T. (My god … Trutap developers take stage and perform Boys-II-Men-style jingle. What a multitalented bunch (and apparently quite at home with public humiliation.)
Judges panel. Judges take stage after Calacanis remarks on the kindness and restraint they’ve shown in their assessments so far. Implores them to be more critical. Pull no punches. That shouldn’t be difficult, given the quality of the presentations we’ve seen so far. That said, many of the judges seem to have a penchant for speaking too far from the mike, so it’s impossible to tell if any of them are following through. Guess we’ll have to watch presenter expressions to see if there are any hurt feelings.
The surprisingly audible Marc Andreessen asks the same distribution question he asked of the last group of presenters.
Inaudible Om Malik question met with unintelligible answer from Ceedo guy.
Calacanis asks Wired’s Chris Anderson if he’s seen a company yet that he’d profile in Wired. Judging from Anderson’s evasive redirection of a reply, the answer seems to be no.
Engadget’s Ryan Block notes that Yap’s application is dependent on connection to the cloud. essentially useless without it and at this point in time at least, there are lots of folks who aren’t connected to the cloud. Yap rep ducks question with the standard “That’s something we’re already aware of and working on a solution to address.”
Calacanis asking Om which company wll be here five years from now as
an independent company, Andreessen which is most likely to get angel funding. Andreessen says he’d use Ceedo, but isn’t sure about business model, noting that presenters have a tough road ahead of them if they don’t have distribution from major carriers. Om says TruTap is most likely to be bought, and Cubic most likely to be around five years from now. Quite the endorsements, given palpable lack of excitement with which he delivers them.