Yahoo is to launch a digital newsstand and personalization platform called "Livestand from Yahoo!" sometime in the first half of this year, paidContent reported. According to Yahoo's corporate blog, the idea is that it will deliver, in a tablet-friendly format, "a wealth of ever-changing content from multiple publishers, continuously programmed by a person's interests and contexts."

The Livestand will be available as an app on both Apple and Android tablet devices. For readers, Yahoo promises that "what you're reading will be personalized based on your interests, your location and even the time of day" and that the experience will include "intuitive touch interactions and an elegant design that focuses foremost on the content."

It will be launched based on Yahoo content, including Sports, News, Finance, Flickr, omg! and the Yahoo! Contributor Network, but will also allow other publishers to integrate their content, which only needs to be developed once to be distributed on both Apple and Android devices.

Advertising will be both TV-like and magazine-style, Yahoo claims. Ads will "adapt and respond to user interaction."

PaidContent reported on a conference call led by Blake Irving, Yahoo's chief product officer. He explained that engaging with Livestand means that the more you read, the more the platform knows how to personalize content for you.

Many publishers can't take full advantage of the tablet format with the resources that they have, Irving said, and this results in "a shallow and unrewarding experience for the consumer." Livestand seems aimed at addressing this.

Although aimed at the tablet market, Livestand will also be available on smartphones and PCs at some point.

Pricing is yet to be addressed, and it is unclear how subscriptions to other publishers' content would work.

The arrival of the iPad and other tablet devices has led to the creation of many third-party applications for news reading, as well as apps launched by publishers themselves. These include Pulse and Flipboard, which started as a way to read social network updates but has evolved into incorporating news articles also. AOL has also announced that it is planning to launch an iPad app called Editions based on personalization, although this will be based on aggregation from around the web, while Livestand will have tablet-adapted content from select publishers.

Will it prove successful?

Source: Yahoo, paidContent, Tech Crunch