Las Vegas. Mountains. Desert. Slot machines. And the smell of consumer technology in the air.

It's the eve of the 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show, the country's largest annual tradeshow, for which nearly 150,000 people will cram into the Las Vegas Convention Center to be among the first to fiddle with the latest and greatest new gadgets and technology on the planet. And Yahoo! will be there in force.

CEO and Chief Yahoo Jerry Yang will keynote the show's Industry Insiders Series tomorrow at 11:00am Pacific (I'll update this post with a link to the live webcast. Live webcast options: high, medium, low. The archive should be available by 1:00pm Pacific.) and we have speakers representing social networking, advertising, Flickr, and Yahoo! Music. Our booth is not to be missed, nor are the vittles we'll be handing out. And on Wednesday, the experts from Yahoo! Tech will host the Last Gadget Standing, a head-to-head battle for the 2008 doohickey that reigns supreme (we'll post about it).

Check back tomorrow to catch Jerry's keynote, get a recap of the first day, and check out photos of the action.

Oh, and happy new year, y'all.

UPDATE: The archive of Jerry's keynote is available here.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor