Yahoo Livestand revealed

This week at Yahoo's annual Product Runway event, they offered up several announcements, one of which was a new digital newsstand for tablets and smartphones called Livestand. This product will come in the form of an application that will work on several device platforms and will bring content from publishers together with Yahoo's news sites in a magazine format. It's made with HTML5, and will include over 100 titles right out of the box, this very nearly having a chance at not reminding us that the big news with Yahoo still remains their recent dealings with being sold to a larger company.

Inside Livestand, users will be able to search titles and articles from titles such as Forbes, Parenting, Bike, Powder, Surfer, and ABC News. The app contains the ability to watch video and the first version of the app will be released in the first half of 2012 on Android devices. Blake Irving, Yahoo executive vice president and chief product officer, had the following to say about the app:

"It's beautiful. It's fast. You will forget that it's HTML5. We did an ass-kicking job to get this into shape with quality, [and] we feel quite good about that." – Irving

In addition to this app, Yahoo introduced new features for its Yahoo News web-based service that'll aid in users in discovering and navigating through their Yahoo friends Web movements. Of course these features might not seem all that unfamiliar to your Facebook and Google+ users, they including such gems as a Conversations feature that'll let users have a group chat using e-mail or Facebook and a new Notifications feature that'll pop up in a similar manner to what Google is using for their own social network.

Additional announcements included an iPad version of Yahoo's IntoNow app, a new Android app by the name of Yahoo Weather, and only one mention of the business end of Yahoo, again from Irving:

"We all know what we're doing...There's very little confusion. Sure, the other noise that's out there, you're talking about it at parties. But we have dreams about what this company can be." – Irving

Reassuring!

[via ZDNet]