Yahoo! has announced the launch of a web portal that is celebrity-orientated, in collaboration with TV show Access Hollywood, as well as new mobile phone photo-viewing software.The website will be entitled omg!, which stands for oh my God! and is expected to go head-to-head with Time Warner's own popular celeb channel TMZ.com.
It will be a female-targeted site, in a similar vein to magazine titles like US Weekly or gossip blog PerezHilton.com.
The site will feature news, photos and video clips from the celebrity and entertainment world, with photo agencies X17 and Splash News also involved.
Yahoo! had been expected to delve much more heavily into the entertainment sphere in recent years, but the omg! site represents its first collaboration with Hollywood for quite some time.
Meanwhile, Yahoo! users will be boosted by the news that its Berkeley Research team has unveiled prototype mobile phone software called Zurfer - which allows people to use a location-aware version of its Flickr service.
The software shows photos taken recently in a mobile phone user's vicinity, adopting Yahoo!'s ZoneTag technology.
Zurfer also enables people to perform traditional Flickr applications, such as searching for photos and accessing an account.
The pictures that are part of a user's "Photo Wallet" Flickr photo stream are automatically highlighted in Zurfer.
Yahoo! has warned users to beware of roaming costs, as Zurfer sends many of the photos over a phone's internet connection.
