Yahoo recently acquired mobile startup Summly, and the company is already putting it to good use. CEO Marissa Mayer announced a new Yahoo iPhone app today, which takes advantage of Summly’s capabilities.
“Consuming news and information on the go has become the norm — whether waiting for a morning coffee or commuting home from work, content discovery is an insatiable daily habit,” writes Mayer on the Yahoo Yodel blog. “Our mobile phones have opened up a window to the world, with the latest news, sports updates, and entertainment coverage right there in our pockets. Because consuming content is such a core part of our everyday lives, today we’re launching our new Yahoo! mobile app for iPhone. Beautifully designed with smaller screens in mind, the new Yahoo! is all about delivering the best of the web — right on your phone.”
“The new Yahoo! mobile app is also smarter, using Summly’s natural-language algorithms and machine learning to deliver quick story summaries,” she adds. “We acquired Summly less than a month ago, and we’re thrilled to introduce this game-changing technology in our first mobile application. And, with the immersive imagery of our virtually endless newsfeed, the new Yahoo! app has both great technology and beautiful design front and center. Because searching for great content is also core to the Yahoo! experience, we’ve also improved the search experience with better video and image search.”
The app also comes with a great deal of personalization. You can select the types of stories you’re interested in, and within each article, you can select more topics you want and less of what you don’t.
The app is available in the App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch in the U.S.
No word on other potential mobile apps utilizing the same technology.
Last week, Yahoo launched new mobile apps for Weather and Mail. The Weather app, which utilizes Yahoo’s Flickr property, is just for iPhone while the Mail app is for iPad and Android tablets.
Yahoo is said to have been in talks with Apple on deeper iOS integration.