We’ve noticed that since Marissa Mayer came from Google to become the new CEO of Yahoo! (and a new mom!), the company’s undergone quite a few changes so Yahoo! can better compete with Google, Apple, and even Instagram. The most controversial changes Mayer has put in place is by far her ban on working from home, which used to be considered a huge benefit of working at Yahoo!. We think that Mayer’s most influential change is shifting Yahoo!’s focus toward technology, product development (particularly iOS apps), and partnering with some of the company’s potential competitors, such as Apple, in order to make the company more competitive with other industry leaders. Mayer recently decided to chop Yahoo!’s mobile apps from over 75 to about a dozen, so the company can offer consumers higher quality apps, while paying attention to the competition and finding Yahoo!’s niche. The new Yahoo! mobile app was just launched, which, in the words of Marissa Mayer, “delivers better mobile content discovery.” Yahoo! just bought Summly in March, a tech start-up from Britain that scans content to give an accurate but brief idea of what’s on a site. Using Summly’s technology (invented by a 17-year-old, who is now worth 30 million dollars by the way), Yahoo! was able to quickly benefit from its algorithms and machine learning to merge, as Mayer says, “great technology and beautiful design front and center.” Yahoo!’s new iOS app also includes the ability to learn what your interested in, so you’ll more likely come across the topics you enjoy, rather than those you don’t. The more you use the app, the more it understands your preferences, which you also have the option to select or remove yourself. Under Mayer’s leadership, there have also been positive responses to Yahoo!’s newly released weather app. The iOS app uses Flickr (owned by Yahoo!), which has recently added Instagram-like filters to better compete. Flickr has also been updated to allow users to download Flickr photos onto their phone, upload pictures to the app more quickly, and tag friends with an “@” sign. But another recent success is Yahoo!’s new iOS email app, honing in on the fact that Yahoo! is still a very popular email provider (the app has also been redesigned for the web, Android, and Windows 8). Mayer defends her new work from home ban, saying that these are the types of products created by the innovation and collaboration that becomes possible when people work together in the same space. Since Mayer’s start as CEO, revenue has gone down slightly, but earnings have increased 36 percent. Mayer recognizes that it will take awhile for Yahoo! to regain market share, but that they are officially “back in the game.” We think Mayer seems to know what she’s doing by simplifying Yahoo!’s strategy, and she’s definitely revamping Yahoo! to better compete with other internet and app industry leaders. The question seems to be whether or not Yahoo! can catch up with it’s competitors. We’ll keep an eye out on to see how she does.       Sources: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2417853,00.asp http://www.fiercedeveloper.com/story/what-yahoos-marissa-mayer-can-teach-developers-about-tough-choices/2013-02-19 http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/22/yahoo-app-summly/ http://venturebeat.com/2013/02/21/flickr-iphone-updated/http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/04/22/new-yahoo-ios-app-launches-integrates-summlys-technology

For years, Facebook has been researching ways to get their popular application into the hands of those in the developing world. Nearly a decade ago they released Facebook Zero, a text-only version of their mobile application. Then there was Facebook for Everyone, the app created out of their acquisition of Snaptu, a feature phone app for the developing world. Facebook however has continually run into problems with regard to the lacking availability of internet connections. The application used by over a billion people worldwide can be painfully slow on these networks, deeming the full version of Facebook almost entirely unusable. As a remedy, this month Facebook has launched Facebook Lite, an Android application that has stripped away many features to allow the mobile app to perform on these slower networks. “Roughly a year back, that’s when we realized that our current Facebook experiences needed a lot more work, specifically in emerging markets and more specifically where networks are bad,” said Facebook Lite’s product manager Vijay Shankar. In crafting the new application, Shankar and his team travelled to those areas where connecting to Facebook was slow, to determine how to best address the problem. After spending time in Africa, India and Indonesia, the team determined that the best way to reach those with slow connections and/or in developing countries was to strip the application down to less than 1MB to ensure installation is fast and quick to load information. As such here are some of the requirements they came to in their travels: Must be compatible with any Android smartphone, regardless of storage space, RAM, and CPU. Load quickly with 2G mobile connections, the speed close to 4 billion people on earth live with. Use as little data as possible, since they learned it’s not actually network access stopping most users from internet access - the cost of data plans is. Many of Facebook core capabilities remain, which include the News Feed, notifications, status updates and uploading photos. However users of Facebook may notice the lower resolution on thumbnail photos but may enjoy the accelerated speed of the trimmed down application.  This is because a primary way Facebook has cut down on the data usage is by never preloading full-resolution images. For example, the pictures or link preview thumbnails that appear in the News Feed look a little blurry at first. If the user taps on the image then it will load in full-resolution, but the goal for Facebook was to reduce big data pulls unless the user opts-in for them. Another example is if you try to upload a photo, Facebook Lite compresses the image and sends it in the background, which also conveniently cuts out the time users spend staring anxiously at the phone screen. The release of Facebook Lite seems to be met with joy in the targeted countries. When testing the application in January, Facebook released the app in Bangladesh, Nepal and Nigeria. They received over 50,000 reviews from the test launch with an average star rating of 4.3, most of which were users asking when the app would be released in their country. Since the official launch on June 4, the app has over 60,000 reviews and hang on to the 4.3 average star rating. What do you think of Facebook’s solution to reach these untapped markets? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Startup companies are an exciting sector of business, and watching them grow is as interesting as being a team member making it happen. For example, the hit HBO series Silicon Valley has viewers like us well entertained by the shenanigans these entrepreneurs get into. By observing humorously how important the group’s creative solutions move their business forward, other startups can learn from the clever ways these characters get around tricky situations. Though Silicon Valley is a work of fiction, the scenarios these tech geeks face are quite common in startup culture, especially in technology. Forming a leadership team, honing the idea, getting funding, you name it; getting a startup off the ground and into a profit earning place is not a task for the faint hearted. As such, many startups get buried in the ever-growing startup graveyard, yet others become household names and keep the startup dream alive for everyone. Here’s a few startups with stories that caught our attention. Some have launched into celebrity success, others are young and growing, but all share the similarity of an interesting idea. AirBnB In 2007, a couple of dudes in San Francisco couldn’t pay their rent. The dudes, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, looked around their apartment and decided to rent out their air mattresses, which they did to three people for $80 each. Thinking they might be on to something, the dudes invited their engineer friend Nathan Blecharczyk to build a site, AirBnB, and launched the project at SXSW. Unfortunately, the idea gathered little attention and the team was back to square one trying to figure out how to pay rent. The 2008 presidential election was around the corner, so they had an idea that could raise money for the fledgling business as well as make ends meet. They decided to make presidential themed cereals, Obama O’s and Cap’n McCains, which they sold at campaign parties at $40 a box. They ended up raising 30,000 from the clever cereal effort, and invested the cash back into the idea they were determined to work. Revamping their design and positioning, AirBnB finally did gain traction, and is now valued at over $10 billion dollars. ReviewBuzz Beginning from the closet of his home in Vista, CA, Mike Montano started and launched a successful home services company that grew to a multimillion dollar business. Yet around 2010, online reviews started to become a noticeable factor in the SEO game, and a big reason internet shoppers would choose one company over another. Montano knew customers weren’t just looking for any ole plumber to walk into their house, they were searching for a service professional they could actually trust. He realized online reviews were a way of proving his guys were worthy of trust, and started to encourage his team to ask for reviews. From there, he began to showcase those reviews as social proof for customers looking for help - and realized he was onto a solid idea. With that idea Montano started ReviewBuzz in 2012, a tech company that helps service companies get more 5-star reviews organically. The core of the business is to make it easy for service professionals to request reviews, and for customers to write reviews online. Only 3-years old, ReviewBuzz has grown beyond home service businesses and has helped companies across a range of industries earn more than 150,000 5-star reviews on sites like Yelp, Google, Facebook and more. Organically! Dropbox The file sharing world in 2008 had certainly progressed beyond the floppy disk, yet was dependent on saving to flash-drives or emailing files. Two MIT computer science grads, Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, left the giant MIT network of computers they were used to, and went out into the mainstream norm of how most users stored on computers. Already growing tired of this system, one day while on a public bus Houston realized that he forgot his USB-drive. That moment was the last straw, and he started creating what would later be a cloud-based file sharing system, Dropbox. Steve Jobs of Apple learned about the product, which piqued his interest to such a degree he offered for Dropbox to join Apple. Houston denied the offer, determined to build the business on his own. And build the business he did, as the company is now estimated to be worth over ten billion dollars and employs over 700 people. HandUp One cold San Francisco night in the winter of 2012, Rose Broome was walking down the street and noticed a homeless woman. The woman was sleeping on the street, shivering in the dark. The image haunted Broome as she wondered why, given all of the advancement in technology, this woman was still in a position of living without a home. Broome wanted to find a new way to give to the homeless as a result. Broome partnered with her friend Zac Witte and created HandUp, a startup company that utilizes crowdsourcing for the purposes of helping homeless people get off the streets and into a better position in life. The app allows people in need to team up with local nonprofits to post their story, photos and videos to request donations that will help them get to a place that will help them off the streets. HandUp has been able to raise money from people like Eric Reis, Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff, and companies like Google, Twitter, and - tying it all together - Dropbox. These stories are just a few, and proof that any range of creative ideas can result in startup success. Have a story you’d like to share? Post in the comments below.