Aviate now @ Yahoo

Today, at CES, we announced the acquisition of Aviate, a company that shares our vision for simple and intelligent mobile experiences. The Aviate team has created a product that changes the way users interact with their Android devices by connecting them to information at the moment it’s useful.  We’re thrilled to share what they’ve built and extend it to our users.

We hope to make Aviate a central part of our Android-based experiences in 2014 (and beyond), and we are committed to continued innovation on the product.

What we saw… The average person has screens and screens of apps on their mobile phones, with only a handful of those being used daily. Yet we spend our time swiping from screen to screen, hunting, loading, seeking information; our homescreen (launcher) experiences are far from smart. Think about the repetitive nature of getting in your car every day and launching the same apps, or arriving home and yet the same screens are there. We know there’s a better user experience.

We envision homescreens becoming smarter, more personalized, aware of your context. Aviate helps us bring this vision to life. Aviate auto-categorizes apps on your Android phone and intelligently gathers them into “spaces.”  By using signals to understand your context - WIFI, GPS, Accelerometer, Time, etc - Aviate automatically surfaces information at the moment it’s useful. So whether you’re just waking up, driving, at work, or maybe out for the night, Aviate learns your habits and helps anticipate the information and apps you need - making your phone smarter.

At Yahoo, we want to make everyone’s daily habits more inspiring and entertaining through beautiful, personalized, and innovative products. Aviate fits perfectly with our team and vision. We are excited to welcome Mark, Paul, Will, and the team to Yahoo.

Aviate is still currently in private beta, but we’re opening it up to the first 25,000 people who use code “YAHOO” to celebrate the news.

We’re just getting started, lots more to share in the coming months, so stay tuned.