Yahoo releases 2016 Year in Review for Singapore

Yahoo, the guide to digital information discovery, has announced its 2016 Year in Review (YIR) for Singapore. The YIR is an annual recap of the top search trends, happenings and events which caught the imagination of Internet users in Singapore, based on users’ daily search habits and an editorial selection of what they read, recommended and shared most on Yahoo in 2016.

The list of Top 10 Singapore Headlines of the year is led by swim superstar Joseph Schooling and his clinching of Singapore’s first Olympic gold medal. Making the list are moments of political significance, such as the changes to the Elected Presidency, as well as the resignation of MP David Ong. The city-state also witnessed its first Zika outbreak, the first bank robbery in 12 years and the world’s first Michelin-starred hawkers stalls.

Viral stories included the Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen (PPAP) song in No. 1 place, Singapore Airlines’ photo fail with Joseph Schooling, which comes in at second, and incoming US first lady Melania Trump’s alleged plagiarism of current US first lady Michelle Obama’s rally speech.

Sports dominated the list of Most Popular Searches of 2016, with Euro 2016 and Rio 2016 Summer Olympics taking the spotlight. Also making the list were politicians such as Malaysian Prime Minster Najib Razak, who continued to battle scandal in relation to a state-run fund, and Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong following his fainting spell during the National Day Rally. Gal Gadot, aka star of the upcoming Wonder Woman movie, also made the list of top searches, and is the only celebrity in the list.

Brexit tops the list of Top 10 Business News Headlines as it created shockwaves across international markets with the UK voting to leave the European Union. Locally, concerns were focused on retrenchment in Singapore, which made headlines several times this year. The worldwide trend of the rise of automation also made the top three, with Singapore becoming the world’s first country to run trials of on-demand driverless taxis.

Lists in the YIR include:

Top 10 Singapore Headlines of 2016

1. Joseph Schooling and Singapore’s first Olympic gold medal
2. Elected Presidency changes
3. Singapore’s slowing economy
4. Singapore’s Zika outbreak
5. PM Lee Hsien Loong’s fainting spell and Minister Heng Swee Keat’s stroke
6. MP David Ong’s resignation and the Bukit Batok by-election
7. Former President SR Nathan’s death
8. Standard Chartered bank robbery
9. Death of two SMRT employees at work
10. First Michelin-starred hawker

Top 10 Viral Stories of 2016

1. Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen song
2. Singapore Airlines photo fail with Joseph Schooling
3. Melania Trump’s speech similarities with Michelle Obama’s
4. Iguana being chased by snakes
5. Mannequin challenge
6. Olympic Games’ most unassuming medal winner
7. Shiny legs optical illusion
8. Killer clown craze
9. US  President-elect Donald Trump’s granddaughter Arabella Kushner recites Chinese poetry
10. High-rise SPCA kitten rescue

Arabella wanted to have a pre-bedtime #ChineseNewYear party this past Sunday evening. She got all dressed up and performed songs and poems for Jared, Joseph and me. It was pretty adorable 🐒#yearofthemonkey #happyChineseNewYear

A video posted by Ivanka Trump (@ivankatrump) on Feb 10, 2016 at 5:29am PST

Top 10 Singapore Searches of 2016

• Euro 2016 (football)
• Rio 2016 (Olympics)
• Najib Razak
• Lee Hsien Loong
• UEFA Champions League (football)
• Lee Chong Wei (badminton player)
• All England Badminton
• Europe’s migrant crisis
• Gal Gadot
• Singapore Open (golf)

Top 10 Business News Headlines 2016

• Brexit
• Retrenchments in Singapore
• Rise of automation
• Samsung Galaxy Note 7 fiasco
• Singapore bond defaults
• Banks caught up in 1MDB scandal
• Panama Papers
• Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat’s health scare
• SMRT’s privatisation
• Chicken rice recipe’s $2 million price tag

*Results are not a representation of a popularity contest or voting; trends are determined by experts on the Yahoo editorial team. To develop the Yahoo Year in Review, editors analyse users' interest patterns on what they searched for, read, recommended and shared. It takes into account a number of factors including absolute volume and growth from previous periods to see which themes and trends bubble to the surface. Individuals and their preferences always remain anonymous. In addition, editors also exercise their editorial judgment to decide which topics had the greatest significance and public resonance in the year.

Opera Mini finds out what its Indian users get up to

Users of the Opera Mini mobile browser have saved 40,135,582 GB (36,000 Terabytes) of data in one year*, according to an analysis** of the behaviour of Opera Mini users in India. Opera Mini’s compression technology shrinks data by up to 90%, helping users save approximately Rs690 crore (Rs6.9 billion), when calculated on the basis of 1GB costing an average of Rs173.
 
Search is the primary reason to go online from a web browser

Eight out of 10 Opera Mini users in India frequent Google to search online. Although search websites experience a high amount of visitors, the number of search pages viewed account for only 10% of all pages. It is possible that these users then branch out to news and download websites, which make up 28% and 17% respectively of the top 100 most-visited websites.

Social networking accounts for the bulk of time spent online

More than half of all webpages viewed by Opera Mini users (55%) are social-networking sites. Facebook leads the pack - half of all webpages opened by users are from Facebook. Other popular social destinations are blogging sites, such as Blogspot and WordPress, followed by Twitter, Pinterest and Quora.

News is the second-most popular type of content viewed by users

Thirty-one news websites are part of the list of top 100 websites for Opera Mini users in India. Consumers are reading up on general news to sports and technology as well as politics. Opera also found that there is a consistent growth in visits to news sites in the Hindi language.

“With their increased usage of smartphones, consumers have moved beyond using Internet only for social networking. Consumers are now using their smartphones as handheld computers to browse news, shop online, watch movies and listen to music on the move,” says Bruce Lawson, Deputy CTO at Opera. “To stay ahead of our consumers’ ever-evolving needs, we keep updating Opera Mini to help them browse faster and more efficiently. The latest version of Opera Mini comes with new updates such as language support, ad blocker integration and video boost.”

Music sites are most visited among download portals

Of the top 100 sites visited by Opera Mini users in India, 24 are download portals. Three quarters  of these are for downloading music. The most-visited websites include Mp3lio, Pagalworld, Webmusic, Raagtune and Mp3mad.

YouTube is the all-time favourite for viewing videos

The rise of affordable smartphones with large HD screens means today’s consumers are watching more videos on the go. With faster 3G availability and features like Opera Mini’s video boost feature, consumers also can watch video with fewer buffer delays. YouTube continues to be one of the top-three most visited sites in India, along with Google and Facebook. In terms of video-streaming sites, YouTube is followed by Vuclip, Dailymotion and Hotstar.

Browsing products from smartphones gaining popularity

Consumers find it more convenient to check out products from their smartphones. E-commerce and classifieds mobile websites provide an equally enriching shopping experience compared to their desktop or app versions. Around 9% of the top 100 websites visited are e-commerce and classified websites. Some of the most visited sites are Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal, ShopClues, AskMeBazaar and Olx.

 

*Calculation of savings in data cost: From the 12 months of data between June 2015 - May 2016, we were able to determine the amount of data that was sent from the websites to Opera’s servers (uncompressed data) and the data that Opera sent to users’ phones (compressed data) after shrinking it. This gave us the total amount of data that Opera’s servers helped save users in 12 months: 40,135,582 GB. Then, to be fair, we used an average of 2G in data costs (1 GB at Rs173) to calculate the minimum amount that users ended up saving to arrive with the figure of Rs690 crore worth data saved.

**Information contained in this report is based on aggregated information obtained from Opera Mini servers from June 2015 to May 2016. All content analysis is based on a review of the top sites ranked according to the number of unique visitors in India. The designation of sites to specific categories has been done with local content experts who followed Opera’s guidelines to characterise each site. Adult-only sites have been excluded from the analysis.

Yahoo launches new bots to help users stay connected

Yahoo has launched three new bots to help users get the latest news, stock market trends and weather forecasts respectively. A fourth bot is a virtual pet monkey that will exchange chats and emojis with the user.

The Yahoo Finance, Yahoo News, Yahoo Weather and MonkeyPet bots are now available on Facebook Messenger.

To get started, users can simply type @YahooNews, for instance, in the Facebook search bar and message the Yahoo News app to get the latest news. The bot will immediately answer, and might provide additional links to information or options.

Source: Yahoo. 

Yahoo Finance (@YahooFinance), exclusive to Messenger, is a bot that allows users to search the latest finance and stock news and information. Information can also be shared with your friends.

The Yahoo News bot (@YahooNews) helps users to discover trending stories and dive deeper into the news.

Yahoo Weather (@YahooWeather) gathers weather information and allows selected Flickr images to be shared.

MonkeyPet (@MonkeyPet) is a virtual pet that shares selfies from its “travels.”

Interested?

Open Facebook Messenger on either iOS or Android and send a message to @YahooFinance, @YahooNews, @YahooWeather or @MonkeyPet.

posted from Bloggeroid

Free Fuuzle news consolidation service translates content into 26 languages

Fuuzle aims to make looking for information easier. The company collates and makes available the contents of millions of newsletters and RSS feeds from across the globe and translates them into 26 languages to a reasonable degree of accuracy. According to Fuuzle, some of this information "can hardly or not be found via search engines". 

Source: Fuuzle website.

Now in beta, the company's database sees more than 100 million unique RSS feeds and more than 5 million newsletters added a month. With 26 translations per document, that's around 2.75 billion documents per month since spring (Editor's note: roughly late Q2).

Fuuzle is offered free of charge, and will generate its income through unobtrusive geo-specific advertising. Fuuzle aims to have 15 to 90 million regular users in the near future. 

Fuuzle expects its main growth to be in the fields of the knowledge-based economies: the US, but also in Europe (Great Britain), Japan and South Korea.