Latest news with #JimLanzone
Yahoo
28-07-2025
- Yahoo
Snapchat can automatically let a trusted friend know you got home safe
Snapchat can now let your friends know if you're back home from an outing safe and sound without you having to send a message. The app has launched a new feature called Home Safe, which sends one-time alerts to contacts of your choice. You can only send these alerts to people you already share your location with, and since that off by default, you'd have to activate it on Snap Maps for all your friends or for specific ones. Your friends will only get the notification once, and it will shut off afterward. Home Safe sounds especially useful if you and your friends typically check in on each other after meeting up, if you want to let your parents know you'd gotten back home after going out or if you're a woman who's asked a friend to make sure you got back safe after a first date. To switch the feature on, tap your Bitmoji on the Snap Map and then "My Home" to set your home location. After that, whenever you want to send someone a notification, just open your conversation with then, tap on the Map icon and then tap the "Home Safe" button. The app has had location sharing for a while now, but it has built up the safety feature over the years. It added live location sharing that allows you to share your exact whereabouts to friends in 2022. And last year, it introduced new location tracking abilities to its Family Center, allowing parents to get notifications if their child leaves school or home. Jim Lanzone, the CEO of Engadget's parent company Yahoo, joined the board of directors at Snap on September 12, 2024. No one outside of Engadget's editorial team has any say in our coverage of the company.
Engadget
24-07-2025
- Engadget
Snapchat can automatically let a trusted friend know you got home safe
Snapchat can now let your friends know if you're back home from an outing safe and sound without you having to send a message. The app has launched a new feature called Home Safe, which sends one-time alerts to contacts of your choice. You can only send these alerts to people you already share your location with, and since that off by default, you'd have to activate it on Snap Maps for all your friends or for specific ones. Your friends will only get the notification once, and it will shut off afterward. Home Safe sounds especially useful if you and your friends typically check in on each other after meeting up, if you want to let your parents know you'd gotten back home after going out or if you're a woman who's asked a friend to make sure you got back safe after a first date. To switch the feature on, tap your Bitmoji on the Snap Map and then "My Home" to set your home location. After that, whenever you want to send someone a notification, just open your conversation with then, tap on the Map icon and then tap the "Home Safe" button. The app has had location sharing for a while now, but it has built up the safety feature over the years. It added live location sharing that allows you to share your exact whereabouts to friends in 2022. And last year, it introduced new location tracking abilities to its Family Center, allowing parents to get notifications if their child leaves school or home. Jim Lanzone, the CEO of Engadget's parent company Yahoo, joined the board of directors at Snap on September 12, 2024. No one outside of Engadget's editorial team has any say in our coverage of the company.
Fast Company
01-07-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone talks AI, reinvention, and reclaiming relevance
Yahoo is at a critical inflection point. Despite having a large user base—across Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, and Yahoo News—the media company hasn't reclaimed the buzz of its early days. CEO Jim Lanzone candidly discusses the fear of being 'left behind' and how he's pushing the brand to shed its old skin. He explains the wide-ranging implications as AI remakes search engines into answer engines and shares insights about the line between fantasy sports and gambling. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today's top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. I wanted to ask you, you talk about it like Yahoo is sort of in a turnaround or a restart. But I mean, Yahoo News is the number-one news site on the internet, right? Yahoo Finance is the number one. Your fantasy sports platform is huge. You've got a big ad tech business, which I'm sure you talk about here. Second-largest email platform. You've got search, not Google-size search, but still substantial . . . All that sounds pretty robust. Yeah. Amazing ingredients with which to do a turnaround. So the way I would think about it is that absolutely the brands are still extremely relevant and they've had very loyal user bases. As a business, I think a lot of people know, but some maybe don't, that we were spun out of Verizon. Over the years, Yahoo was a stand-alone public company. It was acquired by Verizon in the mid-2010s. They also acquired AOL, which we also own and is one of our brands. And we were acquired for about $5 billion. So if you think about the other brands in and around our rankings in the traffic rankings, they're all trillion dollar brands. And so we had something to work with in terms of the size and loyalty of some of the audiences. But in some cases, email's one of them. We had a big announcement last week. The core product hadn't been improved in over 10 years. And so in the last nine months, every product that we operate has been relaunched with brand-new versions. And so taking advantage of the size of that audience to rebuild the business to be super valuable is the more turnaround side of it. And when you look at something that is robust, like the fantasy sports, as the NFL season comes, which will be your next big burst, right? We actually have a lot planned for it this year. I was curious, how much of the goal is to use this opportunity to introduce those users to other things you have, versus give them new things around what they already are coming for? I mean, what you'll find is that our individual brands have in some ways different audiences. People who really use Yahoo Finance as their way to make more money and save more money and attract stocks and all that is pretty independent of people who love fantasy or love checking sports scores with Yahoo Sports. I definitely think the secret sauce of Yahoo, especially for advertisers, since we're here, is that, collectively, it's hundreds of millions of people who have a first-party relationship with us, which makes our ad targeting extremely effective. So one Yahoo overall is something that actually is true about the actual business. Getting people to use Yahoo as one point for everything is something that will happen over time, but we're not going top-down in how we go about it. But it sounds like you don't necessarily, at least right now, need to convert people into being like, 'I'm a Yahoo, and I do everything in the Yahoo world.' I think that was the '90s Yahoo, and I think the internet kind of moved past that. That said, we did relaunch the Yahoo homepage in February after months of testing different variations of it because the user base gets pretty locked in with how they do things, and you can really mess it up in the link chain if you change something. So we found one that really worked, and the most interesting thing about it was we went back to adding more portal-like features. Over the years, it'd become kind of just a newsfeed, and we added things back that were more utility-based around weather and other things and found that people love that. So actually, the Yahoo homepage that is more of a place to get things done is probably more the direction we'll head with it than just straight news. Not everything about the way the internet was framed in the beginning was wrong. Right? It's interesting because having competed against the people at Yahoo for the first 20-plus years of my career and taking that eye towards it, working here, you do kind of get an appreciation for how . . . If you go back and look at the 2007 version of the homepage or 2003, there was some magic to that and how it all worked, especially with the way the internet has gone with a lot of slop and misinformation, disinformation, clickbait, and people trying to get you to do things. The fact that it kind of had everything in one place, I don't know, it was maybe taken for granted a little bit. So we actually have taken some inspiration from that. Obviously we try to modernize it. But yeah, we've taken some inspiration from it. So with the generative AI wave, media is changing like crazy. As search engines like Google become more of an answer engine as opposed to a search engine, sites like a lot of yours may see some of their referral traffic decline. At the same time, you have a search business yourselves. And if you follow where that is going to become more of an answer engine, you may encourage the development in that direction in people's habits, which could undercut the other part of your business. I'm just curious how you think about those pieces fitting together. Yeah. And I spent the first 10 years of my career in search, and a lot of what we did back in the day was absolutely moving things towards an answer engine. And so I would say that's not really new. What people know as Google OneBox, a lot of the search engines in the early 2000s were doing, already brought answers like the weather or music lyrics or multimedia or translations directly into the page. So this has always been the case. Now, there are certain kinds of queries called navigational queries. Those are trying to get you directly to a website. I do find it interesting that a lot of the generative . . . A lot of the large language models, they're getting a lot of their traffic and sending it to places that are more canonical. So for ChatGPT, 50% of their citations are Wikipedia. For Perplexity, almost 50% are Reddit. And so those are more evergreen, deeper, almost more educational responses. A lot of Yahoo's content is real-time, stock prices, sports scores. So for us personally, we operate in a kind of a different space. But you don't expect that referral traffic to decline? So a couple things. So one is I actually strongly believe that the role of search is not to take traffic from the open web, but to send traffic. And in our case, Yahoo's been doing that for over two decades. We have relationships with all of our publishers where we share revenue, we send traffic downstream. And so I actually think that's part of what Yahoo's always done really well is help create a healthy ecosystem. That was also part of the bargain of the open web for search, that you would make yourself available to the engine that would then send you traffic downstream. Having that traffic get cut off and just subsuming that data to then keep it for yourself was not part of that grand bargain. I think we're in the early days of figuring out how that's going to go. What I actually think will happen in search over time, because I think we're still in the primordial phase here of what AI versions of search will look like, is that the page will respond to your query and to what the search engine knows about you personally to have a different version of the search results page depending on the query type and depending on you. And so you're never going to get the same kind of response to each one of these. I personally really believe that it should ultimately wind up sending traffic downstream to the sources, and little citation links probably are not going to do that.
Daily Mail
13-06-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
Free email pioneer Yahoo has clever play to retake crown from Gmail
Yahoo Mail is getting a glow-up — and it's all about helping younger users blitz through their inboxes faster than ever. Although no longer the account du jour, Yahoo — the pioneer of free mass-market email — is putting itself at the forefront of implementing AI features to lure in younger users. Yahoo has launched 'Catch Up' designed to help users speed-read and sort their emails with minimal effort. Yahoo says it's part of the biggest upgrade to its email system in a decade, as it aims to win over a new generation of users who believe in working smarter, not harder Gen Z and millennials are one of Yahoo's fastest-growing demographics and already make up half of its Mail users. The new gamified tool will allow users to see a preview and summary before being given the option to 'delete' or 'keep in inbox'. Although Yahoo was first in the game, Gmail soon began poaching its users with a more user-friendly interface. The company lost even more customers after a massive data breach in 2013 exposed around 3 billion of its users information. 'People have been writing off or predicting the death of email for years,' Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone told Bloomberg. 'But it has an incredibly consistent role in people's lives, both at home and work.' Lanzone, who was brought in to restructure the company in 2021, believed AI will be 'incredibly important to almost every product that we operate.' 'We just want AI working quietly in the background to simplify tasks across all the products that we operate from search to mail to finance to news,' he said. 'We don't want to ask people to have to engage or take an extra step or learn a new behavior.' Lanzone told the publication that Yahoo is also 'vintage', something that will help it stand the test of time. 'We're just getting started because we believe there's a lot of innovation that can be done. 'There is so much more on our roadmap,' he added. Dario Amodei, CEO of leading AI company Anthropic, has warned of mass unemployment The relentless march of AI continues to thrill investors and unnerve others. Dario Amodei, CEO of leading AI company Anthropic recently warned the technology could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years. The billionaire said AI could also soon raise unemployment to 10 to 20 percent. He said the government and AI companies should stop 'sugar-coating' the job apocalypse on the horizon. Meanwhile, the FBI is warning Gmail users about a dangerous ransomware scheme that could hold your private data hostage. Medusa ransomware group has already victimized over 300 targets using phishing scams to exploit unprotected software in the users' digital devices.
Yahoo
05-06-2025
- Yahoo
Snapchat finally has a watchOS app after a decade
There's finally a Snapchat app for watchOS, bringing the social media platform to Apple's line of wearables. This has been a long time coming, given that the first Apple Watch graced our wrists over a decade ago. The app lets users preview incoming messages and reply by using the keyboard, scribbling with a finger, voice dictation or sending out an emoji. Apple Watch wearers could already preview a Snapchat message by enabling them on an iPhone, but there wasn't a way to respond until now. Snapchat says the app will be useful when doing things like alerting friends when arriving at a restaurant or when sending out a quick reply during a run. A company representative told us that it's good for people who want to "keep active conversations going while they're on the go." They also indicated that previewing a message on an Apple Watch will not mark it as "read" on the mobile or web app, as it only shows the first 100 characters. The app cannot be used to view images or videos, but the company plans to "evolve the experience over time." Despite coming ten years after the Apple Watch first launched, Snapchat has still outpaced many of its rivals. There isn't a dedicated Facebook app for the wearable, or a WhatsApp release. Facebook Messenger did have an app once upon a time, but it was pulled. Snapchat's watchOS app comes just ahead of this year's WWDC event. Rumors indicate that Apple is planning on some major announcements throughout the event, including a complete redesign of its various operating systems and new Apple Intelligence features that I'm sure everyone will just love. Jim Lanzone, the CEO of Engadget's parent company Yahoo, joined the board of directors at Snap on September 12, 2024. No one outside of Engadget's editorial team has any say in our coverage of the company.
