Yahoo Adds Video to Flickr

Yahoo has added support for video to its photo sharing site Flickr.

Yahoo wants users to start sharing videos, shot by still cameras, camcorders and camera phones, as well as photos, and Video on Flickr provides an easy solution for consumers, according to the company.

Video can be up to 90 seconds long, and no more than 150M bytes in size. To upload video you have to be a Flickr Pro user, but everyone can watch.

Users can upload videos directly from mobile phones, and integrate videos and photos into a stream.

There is also an API for third-party developers to create programs or services using authorized video submitted to Flickr.

Whether it will be able to compete with Youtube remains to be seen, but Yahoo thinks there is a huge untapped market of which it can take advantage.

More than 40 percent of consumers between 18 and 44 are capturing personal video clips with their digital cameras, but they are not taking advantage of Web sites to effectively share their videos.

Fifty-five percent of respondents to a survey commissioned by Yahoo said they merely play back video clips for their friends on their camera device or PC, and 20 percent don’t share these clips at all.

Yahoo India Intros Maps in Local Languages

Yahoo! India introduced a new service for the first time in India – maps in local Indian languages and walking directions.

The service is available now available in 9 local languages, Hindi, Tamil, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam and Punjabi and can be accessed from Yahoo! India maps.

After recently introducing driving directions, Yahoo! India is also offering the option of walking directions. Users can walk to their destinations with a walking route. These directions can be sent to a mobile phone as an SMS. There is also an option to pan and zoom to any point on the map, save it as an image and share it with others.

If a user is visiting a city for the first time and is aware of one prominent landmark, it is still possible to reach the desired destination by using walking directions. Besides providing key landmarks along the route (ATMs, hospitals, etc.), walking directions also provide clarity on every major turn.

Yahoo! India users can search for directions across 179 cities, 4,767 towns, and 226,114 villages. Users can also search for over 3 million points of interest already marked by Internet users from around the web.