October 7, 2009 on 2:41 pm | In Avatars | 12 Comments
October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and Yahoo! has a lot going on across the network to support the effort.
For starters, you can change your Avatar to display a pink ribbon, the symbol of support for finding a cure for breast cancer. Just head over to the “Show your Support” section on the Avatars site and click on the third page of items.
We also started a campaign to get people to update their Yahoo! profile status message to show their support. When we launched it on October 1, we pledged to donate $50,000 to The National Breast Cancer Foundation once 50,000 Yahoo! users made their update. Good news! We reached that goal and as of this writing, we’re nearing the 80,000 mark.
Even though we’ve reached our goal, we hope you’ll still update your Profile status to support those affected by breast cancer.
Or click here to change your Yahoo! Messenger status to read “I support Breast Cancer Awareness Month”. Note that the link to change your status will only work if you have Yahoo! Messenger running. You could also change your Yahoo! Messenger skin to “twinkle pink”, just to show your desktop that you support the cause.
Need some retail therapy? Head over to Yahoo! Shopping and check out some items whose proceeds benefit breast cancer research.
While Yahoo! has always powered up the network to support Breast Cancer Awareness Month, this year is a little more significant as our own CEO, Carol Bartz, is a survivor.
Thanks for your support,
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
October 5, 2009 on 3:41 pm | In 10 version, News | 11 Comments
Hopefully you’ve had a chance to try out the new video call feature in Yahoo! Messenger 10 Beta.
Last Friday, the San Jose Mercury News ran a story on Global IP Solutions (GIPS), the company that provides the video and audio technology that powers this new feature. Some of the article is reprinted below; read the full article here.
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
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Video Chat Gets an Upgrade
By Mike Swift | San Jose Mercury News
SAN FRANCISCO — It’s a sparkling morning in the South of Market neighborhood, the city’s tech ghetto. But at Global IP Solutions, the light outside Niklas Enbom’s office is shading toward an evening blue.
Enbom is on a video chat to Global IP Solutions’ San Francisco headquarters from Sweden, where it is nine hours later and dusk is fast approaching. The company, which typically uses its acronym GIPS, provides the underlying video and audio technology for the newly released version of Yahoo Messenger video chat, the service the Swedish executive is using to connect from Stockholm. GIPS also provides the audio technology for Google’s competing service within Google Talk.
Enbom, GIPS’s vice president for software development, is saying that a $70 webcam connected to virtually any PC or Mac built in the last few years with a broadband Internet connection will produce a high-quality video chat experience, even to countries that lack the robust telecom infrastructure of the United States.
“A standard PC can do this in real time, with good quality,” Enbom says over the video link.
Even from Sweden, his lips move in almost perfect synchronization with his words, and the audio quality is comparable to a landline telephone connection. The video is good enough to notice that it’s around sunset in Stockholm, where a large portion of GIPS’s engineers are based.
In short, the technology is good enough that you start to forget about the technology, and concentrate on the conversation.
For decades, ever since Dick Tracy made calls through the video screen on his wristwatch, video chat has been a personal technology everybody could imagine using, but that — for an array of technology, standardization and sociological reasons — few have actually used. A survey this spring by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that only about 20 percent of adult U.S. Internet users have participated in a video chat… Read the full article
