Yahoo is spiffing up and expanding its e-mail service in an attempt to regain some of the ground lost to a Google alternative that lured away millions of users.
The changes unveiled on Tuesday are meant to make Yahoo’s e-mail faster and easier to use on the Web. To cater to the growing audience checking their e-mail on smartphones and tablet computers, Yahoo also introduced mobile apps for the iPhone, iPad and devices powered by Microsoft Corp’s recently released Windows 8 system.
The company, which is based in Sunnyvale, California, also updated its e-mail app designed for Google Inc’s Android operating system.
The e-mail overhaul is part of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s crusade to give people more reasons to visit the company’s online services and stick around longer. In doing so, Mayer hopes to sell more advertising and accelerate Yahoo’s revenue growth after years of financial malaise. The stagnation has kept the company’s stock price below US$20 for more than four years. Yahoo shares were hovering near US$30 before the company squandered an opportunity to sell itself to Microsoft for US$33 per share in May 2008.
Yahoo’s stock rose US$0.09 to close at US$19.52 on Tuesday. The stock has surged 25 percent since Yahoo hired Mayer from Google nearly five months ago.
During her 13 years as a top Google executive, Mayer played a key role in building the company’s Gmail. The service was a novelty when it began in 2004 and with Mayer’s help it transformed into a trend-setting service that surpassed the early leads of rival offerings from Yahoo and Microsoft.
Through October, Gmail had more than 295 million active users to eclipse Microsoft’s Hotmail, at nearly 284 million users, and Yahoo e-mail at 282 million, according to the most recent data from the research firm comScore. At the same time last year, Hotmail led the pack with 335 million users, followed by Yahoo at 303 million and Gmail at more than 245 million.
With more people gravitating to Gmail, Microsoft also recently redesigned Hotmail and rebranded the service as Outlook.com — a reference to the communications channel built into the software maker’s widely used Office suite of programs.
In a sign that Google is not taking its lead for granted, the company is in the process of phasing in changes to Gmail that will give it a slightly different look and add more features.
All the retooling underscores the ongoing importance of traditional e-mail, even as people increasingly rely on text messages sent on cellphones and thoughts shared on Facebook and Twitter. Despite its shrinking market share, Yahoo says it still processes about 30 billion e-mails each day and estimates that its users collectively check their inboxes about 190 million times per day.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained