Yahoo! launches Livestand app for iPad

Scott Ard

Yahoo!

, one of the world’s most visited homepages, shakes up the tablet market today with the release of Livestand, a personalized magazine app for the iPad. Livestand delivers the best content  from Yahoo’s writers, editors, and video producers, as well as its partners.

Livestand, now available in the iTunes store, is a free iPad app that joins dozens of others, such as Flipboard, created for specific publications or for aggregating content from numerous sources. Among Livestand’s more notable features is the inclusion of Yahoo’s proprietary technology for tailoring content to an individual.

This technology, called CORE (content optimization relevance engine), is used on the Yahoo.com homepage, constantly running to deliver a personalized experience based on the user’s habits. If you play fantasy football, you’ll see more NFL stories. Into cooking? You’ll get more cooking videos. The result: CORE enables  Yahoo! to deliver 13 million custom versions of the homepage each day.

"Tablets are profoundly changing how we interact with media and Livestand captures that shift in a deeply personal and imaginative new experience," said Blake Irving, EVP and chief product officer at Yahoo!. “No one does personalization better than Yahoo!. The technology behind Livestand, combined with its stunning design and fantastic variety of content, redefines what digital media can be."

Personalization allows Livestand users to peruse a continuously updated list of publications with content that matches their tastes, a customized 24-hour news ticker, and a new “Yahoo! Today” module that contains frequently sought information such as local weather forecasts, stock prices, sports scores, and TV listings.  

At launch, Livestand will have original Yahoo! content from its market-leading finance, news, sports, and entertainment Web properties. Also available will be dozens of popular publications including Forbes, Parenting, and ABC News.

Livestand is currently only available in the United States and for the iPad, but it will soon be released internationally and on additional mobile devices.

Check out a short video tour of Livestand below and then head over to iTunes for your copy.