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By Sandy Gould, SVP Talent

Diverse ideas and perspectives drive innovation, and at Yahoo we celebrate and welcome all employees and users regardless of race, ethnic background and sexual orientation. We believe that Difference plus imagination equals Innovation! That is the essence of our Talent strategy and what makes our culture great. That’s why we’re proud to announce that for the ninth year in a row, Yahoo has scored 100% on the Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index, making Yahoo a ‘Best Place to Work’ for LGBT employees!

Yahoo’s benefits for LGBT employees are leading in the industry, including enhanced transgender benefits. Our transgender benefits to now cover reconstructive procedures including: facial feminization, voice therapy, electrolysis, hair transplantation, breast augmentation and prostheses - we provide up to $100,000 of coverage for these procedures. We also provide a travel reimbursement for the employee and a loved one to travel for the procedures.

Yahoo is proud to support all of our colleagues who are part of or allies of the LGBT community, and to facilitate discussion and dialog for the important issues facing the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning community.

By Laura Begley Bloom, Editor-in-Chief, Yahoo Travel

We at Yahoo Travel believe in the transformative power of exploring the world: It alleviates stress, helps form new bonds, and opens our minds to other cultures. Yet, many people dread traveling during the holidays: Airports are clogged, traffic is a nightmare, and travel costs increase dramatically. The idea of a vacation can seem overwhelming.

To help ease the anxiety, Yahoo Travel is introducing #StressFreeTravel, an initiative dedicated to making travel better in every way possible. Throughout the week and beyond, we’re providing exclusive content to make hitting the road easier this season.

To kick off the week, Yahoo Travel reveals exclusive research examining how people travel this time of year — we talked to more than 2,700 people to see what it is about holiday travel that causes you stress and how you handle it.

#StressFreeTravel offers savvy, insider advice on how to reduce travel anxiety for you and your family — with great tips and ideas from industry experts and revealing profiles of the people and businesses that are changing the face of consumer travel for the better.

By Megan Liberman, Editor-in-Chief for Yahoo News

Today Yahoo is launching “U.S. & Cuba: One-Year Later,” a week-long series marking the one-year anniversary of the announcement by President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro that they were normalizing relations between the United States and Cuba.

After more than a year of secret negotiations, the December 17, 2014, agreement to restore diplomatic relations, “was more than a daring move on the geopolitical chessboard,” as Yahoo Politics Editor Jerry Adler writes in an introductory essay. “ It marked a new act in the long psychodrama that has played out between the countries.”   

To help understand not just the political implications of this change, but the deep and mutual cultural fascination between the two countries, Yahoo journalists spent months in Cuba, Washington D.C. and Florida, unpacking the last several decades and looking ahead at what is to come.   

The depth and breadth of our coverage spans the entire Yahoo Media Network, with more than 30 original stories, videos and slideshows, including contributions from Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Style, Yahoo Travel, Yahoo Beauty and more.  These include Rick Newman examining the reality of business opportunities in Cuba, Noel Duan on the revolutionary roots of Cuba’s fabled ice cream parlour, Jeff Passan on the Cuban baseball players who chose not to leave, a photo gallery of Cuban street art, Garance Franke-Ruta’s interview with leading LGBT activist and first-daughter Mariela Castro, and special contributor Patrick Symmes on his 24th visit to Cuba to see what has - and has not - changed over the last quarter century.

And to kick it all off, we have an exclusive interview with President Obama by Chief Washington Correspondent Olivier Knox, in which the president talks about his relationship with Raul Castro, plans for the detention center at Guantanamo Bay and whether he will travel to Cuba before leaving office. This is the second time that President Obama has sat down for a one-on-one interview with Yahoo News in less than seven months.  

By Shiv Shankar, Senior Product Manager

When we launched the redesigned Yahoo Mail app in October, users called it “slick,” “speedy” and “elegant.” The app now has a four-star rating in both the Apple App Store and Google Play. We introduced multiple mailbox management for Outlook.com, Hotmail and AOL Mail. Yet, something was missing from the list - the ability to connect your Gmail and Google Apps account to Yahoo Mail. You asked for it and now it’s here!

All the features you need and love in Yahoo Mail – powerful search, smart contacts, rich compose features and Yahoo Account Key for password-free sign-in – are now available with Gmail. Here’s your path to a more convenient, powerful and personal email experience. You can now search across your entire history of emails, from day one, for all connected mailboxes! (Not just your most recent emails, which is how it’s done in many apps today).

We even sync every single action across all your mailboxes, like moving emails between folders, deleting emails, marking them as read, etc. When you compose an email, you can send from any account you’ve connected (i.e. personal, school, work, etc.) even though you’re using Yahoo Mail.

Here are some of the Yahoo Mail features that you can now use across your Gmail emails:

Sign in, Password Free: With Yahoo Account Key on mobile, you no longer have to memorize complicated passwords. Account Key makes signing in to your Yahoo account as easy as tapping a button.

Compose Engaging Emails: Easily add photos and videos with the new Yahoo Mail app. Or, try the new compose feature on desktop to find and add not only photos and videos, but also GIFs, files and links too. Just click on the “+” sign when composing a new message.

Search Smarter: Find what you need quickly with our search results pages that not only display relevant messages but also files and photos from all your connected mailboxes.

Access Contacts Across Your Mailboxes: Our intelligent contacts manager, powered by Xobni technology, makes suggestions for who you should email based on your habits. Yahoo Mail also displays contact cards that include information you may need about someone (i.e. email addresses, phone numbers, social media info, email history and more).

Multiple mailbox support for Gmail within Yahoo Mail is available globally today in the Yahoo Mail app and on the desktop browser. To connect your Gmail account, go into your Account Settings in the Yahoo Mail mobile app or on the desktop.

We’ve also announced new features and capabilities for the Yahoo Mail iOS and Android apps.

Go on now and email your heart out, straight from Yahoo Mail, no matter which email service you use.

By Robby Stein, Senior Director, Product Management

As your favorite movies and TV shows continue to migrate from the cable box and into a variety of streaming services, it’s becoming increasingly painful to actually find and watch them. That’s why we built Yahoo Video Guide – it’s our first step in bringing you an easier, faster way to find and stream your favorite movies and TV shows in the cord-cutting age.

Now, you can quickly and seamlessly search across your services to find where the latest season of your favorite show is streaming. You can then start watching instantly by tapping a playback button that redirects you to the right app on your phone, including HBO, Netflix, Amazon and Hulu.

With Yahoo Video Guide, you’ll also stop missing out on the best new titles added to your services. And if you still don’t know what to watch, our Mood Picker can help you decide. Whether you’re looking for a thriller with a romantic twist or a dark comedy, you can find the perfect movie or TV show – just choose the GIFs that match your mood, and we’ll make recommendations based on fit.

By Bertrand Fan, Principal Engineer

Flickr members spend their days exploring the 15 billion photos uploaded by our community, and now they have a chance to deeply immerse themselves in some of the top photos. Today, we’re excited to offer a new virtual reality Flickr app (Flickr VR) for compatible Samsung Galaxy smartphones that allows you to dive into the 360° photo experience via Samsung Gear VR powered by Oculus.

Over the years, Flickr users have uploaded tens of thousands of 360° photos and today we’re offering a new way to explore and view these images. Flickr is the best platform for 360° photos because we respect the image quality of uploaded photos, and we want to be one of the best ways to access engaging virtual reality experiences.

When you first open the Flickr app on Samsung Gear VR, you’ll see a carousel of the top curated 360° photos from Flickr. Select any image and you’ll instantly be transported to another place and time. From Aurora Borealis in the glowing night sky in Finland to Horseshoe Bend of the Colorado River in Arizona, people who view Flickr 360° photos for the first time do not want to take the Samsung Gear VR off.*

Try the new Flickr app on the Samsung Gear VR. Stay tuned for new features and experiences for 360° photos for VR headsets, web and mobile. This is just the beginning!

For more information, visit our Flickr page.

The architecture of Anthelion

By Petar Ristoski, Peter Mika, Roi Blanco, and Robert Meusel

Would you like to collect large datasets from the Web? If so, then we have good news! Recently we publicly released Anthelion, a focused crawler for semantic annotations in Web pages that steers in the direction of HTML pages–which are annotated with markup languages like RDFa, Microformats, and Microdata–to GitHub.

Anthelion can be targeted to crawl for specific pages; for example, those including markup describing movies with at least two different attributes such as the title of and actors in a movie. The system includes a ready-to-run extension for the Apache Nutch Crawler (nutch-anth), which can be run on a single machine as well as a Hadoop cluster. In addition, the GitHub project includes a testing environment for crawler simulations that makes it possible to measure the efficiency of the crawler in a controlled environment, as demonstrated in our research paper, “Focused Crawling for Structured Data.”

With regard to methodology, the Anthelion system combines the benefits of online learning and a bandit-based selection strategy to adopt to the current crawling environment. Based on a given target function, each newly-discovered URL is classified, where the current crawled page is analyzed with respect to a target function and passed to the learner to further improve its quality. The final selection of what page to crawl next, is done by a bandit-based selection. The bandit chooses between exploration and exploitation (i.e., choosing between the most-promising page or a random page) based on a configuration parameter.

Experiments have shown that in comparison to a pure breadth-first search selection strategy, the number of retrieved relevant pages can be increased by a factor of three. In comparison to a pure online classification-based selection, the improvements are about 26%.

The complete code, which is released under Apache License 2.0, as well as a more comprehensive description can be found at the Yahoo GitHub repository: https://github.com/yahoo/anthelion

Have fun with the code and please let us know if you have any feedback!

By Jarah Euston, VP of Growth

The Yahoo Mobile Developer Conference is headed back to the West Coast! February 18 is a date you won’t want to miss.

After successful conferences last year in San Francisco and New York, we’re thrilled to bring you a fresh lineup of content and speakers.

This winter’s conference will take place at The Masonic in San Francisco, with a content-rich agenda featuring presentations and fireside chats with Yahoo’s Simon Khalaf, SVP of Publisher Products and some of Yahoo’s best and brightest. Additionally, developers will hear from some of the most talented leaders in the industry on some of the most pressing topics facing the developer community, including mobile monetization and user acquisition. The event will also offer an inside look at what’s new from the Yahoo Mobile Developer Suite.

For more information, updates on the agenda and speakers, and to request an invitation, please check the official event Tumblr. We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

By Michele Promaulayko, Editor-in-Chief, Yahoo Health

Nearly half of Americans make New Year’s resolutions each year, but a mere 8 percent of people actually achieve their goals. That’s where Yahoo Health comes in.

We’re kicking off 2016 with Body-Peace Resolution, a month-long initiative to motivate you to pursue wellness goals that aren’t vanity-driven — and therefore, destined for failure—but that strive for more meaningful outcomes, such as physical strength, mental fitness, nutritional nirvana and self-acceptance — true and total body peace.

Throughout January 2016, we’ll provide inspiring Body-Peace Resolution content, including:

An Original Yahoo Health Study: Exclusive research that reveals the shocking realities of male/female body perception. Released today, the results of the cutting-edge study are available here.

Daily Body-Peace Challenges: Yahoo Health enlisted a team of top wellness influencers to issue a daily Body-Peace challenge. Featuring experts such as celebrity trainer David Kirsch and bestselling nutritionist JJ Virgin, the Body-Peace Challenge encourages readers to take action in pursuit of health, and to share their experiences on social media using the hashtag #bodypeaceresolution.

Exclusive Content: From why ‘body neutrality’ may be the healthiest mindset to reclaiming the joy of eating, Yahoo Health’s Body-Peace Resolution content will inspire readers to feel confident in their own skin. We’ve also teamed up with Yahoo Style, Yahoo Beauty, and Yahoo Parenting to contribute to our coverage.

Resolutions Refined — Yahoo Health Body Peace Programming: Yahoo Health Editor in Chief Michele Promaulayko joins forces with Wellthily for an inspirational weekend focused on achieving total body peace. On January 23 and 24, Yahoo Health will host exclusive fitness classes and wellness seminars at New York City’s Refinery Hotel.