Call India for 4.9¢/min. during Diwali

Call India for 4.9¢/min. during Diwali

Diwali, also known as the “Festival of Lights”, is a very significant Indian festival that symbolizes the victory of good over evil.



In honor of this popular festival, Yahoo! Messenger calling rates to India during the two days (36 hours) of Diwali will be reduced to 4.9¢ a minute. Check out the promotion page for complete details. This reduced calling rate to India is available from November 8 at 10:30am PST (Nov. 9, 12am IST) until November 9, 10:29am PST (Nov. 10, 11:59pm IST).

To get this great rate, sign up for a Phone Out account on Yahoo! Voice. Then just make your calls to India using Yahoo! Messenger during the promotion. If you already have a Phone Out account, you will automatically receive the 4.9¢ per minute rate on calls to India during the promotion.



IM the Diwali promotion to a friend



From the looks of some Diwali pictures I found on Flickr, this festival is warm and colorful. Lamps (called “diyas”) are lit in all households, brilliant fireworks light up the sky, gifts are exchanged and people feast on a variety of delicious Indian sweets and snacks made specifically for this occasion. To learn about all things Diwali, head over to diwalifestival.org.

Want to add a little bit of Diwali to your IM conversations? Click on one of the images below to make it your display image (you need to be signed into Messenger):



And the best news? Even after Diwali ends, you can still save with our low rate of just 7.9¢ a minute on calls to India.

Happy Diwali!

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

Source: Yahoo! FanClub

Download Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 released

Internet service and search engine firm Yahoo! on Tuesday launched the latest version of its Yahoo Messenger, the Vietnam Bridge said. Six new language forms of the Yahoo Messenger 9 Beta was also launched bringing to 25 the messaging software's total number of international versions.

Download Yahoo! Messenger 9.0

Download Yahoo! Messenger 9.0

The Yahoo Messenger 9 works on both Windows Vista and Windows XP operating systems. It sports a new look and has many new features that Sabrina Ellis, vice president of Yahoo Messenger, describes as friendship-enhancing.

Users can choose from new skins and emoticons to design the messenger. It is compatible with YouTube and Flicker allowing people to invite friends to watch videos or see photos in real time.

The "friends list" allows users to quickly establish an instant messaging, voice or SMS link with another user.

The beta version can handle file transfers of up to one gigabyte, call forwarding and voicemail to mobile phones and landline. The file transfer is secured by Norton Antivirus.

The messenger can be set to support native languages from the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, India (in Hindi) and Vietnam.

Source: Yahoo! FanClub

Yang: Being Yahoo CEO is a 'lonely job'

Being chief executive of Yahoo is "a lonely job," says Jerry Yang, who co-founded the company in 1994 and was promoted to the top job in June in a management shakeup.

"It is a lonely job in the sense that you have to make some of the tough calls," he said in a "fireside chat" session at a conference here. "It feels like I've been in training for the past 13 years." The conference was put on by the Right Media Exchange, the advertising marketplace of Right Media. Yahoo acquired the company earlier this year.

In the wake of Google's dominance in the search and online advertising markets, Yang and other executives have done "some soul searching."

"Earlier this year it felt like it was, in my own words, either now or never," he said. "I feel some urgency for what Yahoo has to do and we have some challenges...It feels like forever but it's also gone by very fast."

Fostering Yahoo's start-up and customer-centric culture is critical for the company's future, according to Yang. "When things are going great you want to feel like you belong to something, and when things are not going great the (company) identity can help you get through it." The company has "morphed" multiple times over the years, according to Yang. "We're in that transformation again where there's a change in the way advertising is sold" as well as with the way media is created by Internet users, he said. "We are embracing the change."

Yahoo is differentiating itself in the new online advertising world by enabling an open environment in which everyone can operate and by partnering with companies to expand the ability of advertisers to reach potential customers, Yang said.

Social media is growing in importance and Yahoo has Yahoo Answers and Flickr, two of the largest social environments on the Web, he said.

"I don't think Yahoo can be Facebook tomorrow; I don't think we want to be Facebook," he added. Meanwhile, Yahoo is serving ads on Bebo, the U.K.'s largest social network, after failing to snag deals with Facebook and MySpace in the U.S.

While Google leads the market in monetizing search advertising, Yahoo leads in display advertising. But display advertising should be more relevant than it is today to be more effective, Yang said. "There hasn't been a lot of innovation around display relevancy."

He didn't discuss the defection rate of executives and managers of late, but did credit exiting Chief Marketing Officer Cammie Dunaway with helping to create the Yahoo brand.

"I'm in the position of pinching myself everyday to say I started the company, but we lucked into creating the Yahoo name. Today I'm still not sure why we added the exclamation point," he said.

Now, the company needs to freshen up the Yahoo brand, he added. "We have a lot of work to do there."

Source: Yahoo! FanClub

Single Ajax Interface For Yahoo Mail & IM Coming

This morning Yahoo will announce that they will integrate an Ajax version of Yahoo Instant Messaging directly into the new Yahoo Mail beta. Unlike Google’s integration of Google Talk with Gmail earlier this year, Yahoo is combining the products into a single interface. Yahoo says the new features will launch in the next two months.

I saw a beta of the product earlier today at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. When addressing a new email, a pop-up window appears to select an address book suggestion, along with the option to send an instant message if the person is currently online. If the user selects an instant message instead of an email, a slightly different interface appears that allows the two users to send instant messages to each other. If one user drops out of the conversation, the other user has the option to auto-paste the conversation into an email and finish the conversation. See the screen shot below for a visual of how the product will appear. This is all done in the browser with Ajax.

Users will quickly get used to flipping quickly between email and IM depending on “presence” - whether or not the person they are communicating with is online. IM conversations will eventually be archived and stored in the same manner as emails, allowing users to drag old conversations into folders in the sidebar.

An additional notation is also being made in the sidebar to let email users know which of their stored contacts are online currently. Multiple current IM conversations are organized by horizontal tabs.



Yahoo Mail continues to surge in worldwide and U.S. usage v. Gmail - Yahoo claims that Yahoo Mail gained more new U.S. users that in the first nine months of 2006 than total U.S. Gmail users to date. Comscore backs this claim up, reporting 250 million worldwise users of Yahoo Mail to Google’s 51 million (September 2006).

The number of IM users worldwide is still very small compared to web-based email users - 80 million IM users v. nearly 500 million web mail users. Yahoo hopes to introduce IM to the large percentage of Yahoo webmail users who’ve never tried IM.

We continue to prefer Yahoo Mail over Gmail because Yahoo Mail allows POP access to third party email services, whereas Gmail only allows access to Google’s own email.

Source: Yahoo! FanClub

Yahoo! remains hit with Japanese users

Yahoo! sites continued to dominate the online market in Japan last month, according to new research.



Figures released by digital measuring firm comScore for September indicate that the search engine provider remained ahead of rivals Google and Microsoft, whose sites proved second and third most popular respectively.

Yahoo! sites had 40.7 million visitors during the month, a slight fall of one per cent on August, while Google's sites saw 32 million user visits, a noticeable rise on the previous month of four per cent.

Meanwhile, Microsoft, enjoying a one per cent rise in popularity, had a total of 30 million visitors over the period.

Managing director of comScore Japan Maru Sato stated: "After experiencing a slight decline last month, Google regained its upward trend."

Last month, comScore figures revealed that, during August, the California-based internet giant experienced a fall in popularity of one per cent.

The overall results will be welcomed by Yahoo!, who have been struggling in some areas of late, recently posting a slight fall in third-quarter profits of $8 million compared with the same period last year.

As part of a multi-year plan, it has "made key strategic decisions to invest in and grow [its] large communities of users, advertisers and publishers", according to co-founder and chief executive of the company Jerry Yang.

Source: Yahoo! FanClub