Yahoo this morning unveiled Livestand, a tablet-friendly personalized ‘digital newsstand’.
Yahoo Livestand is slated to be available to consumers as iPad and Android tablet apps in the first half of 2011. No word on pricing, however.
For publishers, Yahoo promises that they can use Livestand to develop their publication once and easily deploy it on most popular tablet devices, but in a highly personalized fashion.
Advertisers, on the other hand, will be able to “create personalized brand experiences with ads that adapt and respond to user interaction and combine the interactivity of a tablet with a brand building, TV-like, ad experience.”
From the sound of it, the Livestand platform will not remain tablet-only long, but should be getting a version that’s fit for modern smartphones and mobile browsers in the near future.
Yahoo content – which includes Sports, News, Finance but also services like Flickr as well as the Yahoo Contributor Network – will initially power Livestand. Content from other publishers will evidently join the line-up, although who and when remains to be seen.
We’ll be looking for a demo and hopefully more information at next week’s Mobile World Congress, where Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz is scheduled to speak.
Truth to be told, there’s a lot of room for improvements in personalized content delivery on smartphones and tablets, so I’m genuinely looking forward to seeing how Yahoo thinks it cracked that nut.
Blake Irving, EVP and Chief Product Officer at Yahoo, sure sets the bar high:
With Livestand from Yahoo!, what you’re reading will be personalized based on your interests, your location and even the time of day. Your experiences, which will begin on tablet form factors, will include intuitive touch interactions and an elegant design that focuses foremost on the content.
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posted Feb 23rd 2011 6:11PM 
Been sick with jealousy over all those people reading The Daily on their iPads? Well, it looks like that could all end some time soon if AllThingD's PKafka has heard correctly. Apparently, News Corp's tablet-only magazine / newspaper will be heading to Android this spring (or some time in Q2). Considering the team has gotten quite a bit of help from Apple on the development side (word is Apple also rushed to help them fix some of the early bugs) and was the first to use Apple's new subscription service, that does seem a bit quick, but we're certainly not complaining about more apps coming to those Honeycomb tablets. We just hope the random crashes and slow load times are fixed by then.
Pulse News, by startup Alphonso Labs, has helped usher in a new way of consuming social news on mobile devices. A new