CES 2014: Yahoo! unveils News Digest, food and tech websites

Yahoo! announced its arrival at the CES with a string of announcements on Day 2. Besides letting the world know that it had acquired Aviate, the dynamic Android launcher, Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s CEO unveiled a few new products – Yahoo! News Digest, Yahoo! Tech and Yahoo! Food.

The app does exactly what the name suggests – providing digests based around news. The iOS only app will work only with the iPhone and the iPod touch and provide the most important news to you twice a day. You will get an alert on your device once in the morning and then in the evening with the most happening stories.

The News Digest summarises

“Remember waking up to the local morning news? Coming home to the evening news? Reading a newspaper from front to back page? These formats have been daily habits since the invention of the television and the printing press. We wanted Yahoo! News Digest to revisit a content format that when read, led you to a sense of completion and conclusiveness, much like reading the newspaper did,” wrote Nick D’Aloisio, Product Manager, Mobile and Emerging Products for Yahoo!, in a blog post announcing the product.

Aloisio, who headed Summly which was acquired by Yahoo! helped build this product. Yahoo! finally put Summly to good use by introducing a product that will help its users catch up with the most important news, especially when they do not have the time to catch up with lengthy articles. “By giving powerful algorithmic summaries, we found that people were willing to consume more content when it was boiled down to the most important bits,” he wrote.

Yahoo! News Digest will select important articles by using multi-document summarisation to identify the key “bits and pieces information” which the company calls “Atoms”. These tidbits include articles, maps, infographics, Wikipedia extracts, videos, photos and more. Stories will contain different atomic units which convey different dimensions of the story from the who, what, when, how, and why of a topic. Yahoo! News Digest is already available for download for iOS devices from the App Store.

The food and tech websites

Besides the News Digest, Yahoo! has also launched the Yahoo! Food and Tech verticals at the CES. The digital magazine for Yahoo’s tech ambitions were launched by David Pogue, the site’s director who pointed out at the site’s no-display ad look. Yahoo! Food will let you look over food pictures, recipes, trends, cooking tools and techniques. Both these websites will use images from Flickr liberally to make the sites look good.