Taking the stage at CES

Posted January 7th, 2008 at 4:57 pm by Marc Davis, Social Media Guru, Connected Life

 8 Comments / Filed in: Conferences/Events, Trends & News

One of my favorite quotes hails from Karl Marx: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it.”

That’s why I’m at Yahoo! today. I run the ESP (Early Stage Product) team within Connected Life and my job is to imagine and invent the future of Yahoo! for social and mobile media for this group. We’re working to change the world by connecting all of us to the people and things we care about in ways that aren’t possible today.

Jerry Yang helped us imagine that world during the CES Industry Insiders keynote he delivered this morning, illustrating what’s possible as Yahoo! becomes a more open platform. People want to get relevant content, services, and connections wherever they are. A great example of this is Yahoo! Go 3.0, which Jerry and Marco Boerries, who heads Connected Life (my boss :-)), unveiled today. Not only is the new UI beautiful and simple, Yahoo! Go 3.0 is now open to let me access the services I want, whether they’re from Yahoo! or from third party developers.

We’ve created an open platform that enables developers, publishers, and advertisers to deliver mobile widgets that work in Yahoo! Go 3.0 and ultimately on any mobile browser. The platform creates distribution opportunities that never existed before in mobile applications—a developer can write once and publish to hundreds of devices. That has massive potential to change the mobile industry and how we live our mobile lives. It allows consumers not only to get the Yahoo! services they love, but also eBay, MySpace, and MTV... and I’d bet thousands more soon to come.

Then Jerry walked through a vision demo showcasing the possibilities of a more open Yahoo!, in this case focused on one of our key starting points, Yahoo! Mail. He showed how a smarter inbox could prioritize the most relevant connections in his life, both from Yahoo! and multiple social networks, and make all of his communications (email, IM, SMS, voice, status text, photos, etc.) simpler to manage. He then walked through how Yahoo! as an open platform—using Yahoo! Mail, Flickr, Yahoo! Local and Maps, and third party applications like Evite and eBay—could let you tap into the collective tastes, interests, and knowledge of the people you know and of the rest of the world. His example was trying to corral a bunch of very different friends, family, and execs for an awesome dinner. He was able to discover and explore what millions of people find interesting in Las Vegas (via Flickr and our TagMaps prototype) and what his dinner guests might enjoy as well.

Although co-founder David Filo’s recommendation was the Burger Palace (OMG, this vegetarian is glad we’re not going there), Jerry could easily find the best place we could all go together based on everyone’s interests (cuisine, entertainment, etc.) and what Yahoo! knows about the world. David Filo then came out and shared how making Yahoo! an even more open platform is going to power this vision for the future.

You should really catch the archive. If you missed the webcast, you can watch it here:

We’re all using multiple connected devices, communicating with each other, sharing our interests, our content, our social connections, and the places we care about. What Jerry, David, and Marco showed today is how a more open Yahoo! will help us live the connected lives we really want.

Marc Davis
Social Media Guru
Yahoo! Connected Life

Tagged: CES, conference, Flickr, TagMaps, Yahoo! Go

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8 Comments Add your own

Internet | January 7th, 2008 at 10:45 pm

That was an interesting keynote. He got favorable reviews from several tech blogs.

Yahoo! Go 3.0 sounds interesting.

GuillaumeB | January 8th, 2008 at 11:24 am

I honestly don’t know where to stand with Yahoo anymore. This keynote was simply very dangerous.
I just want to remind you that two years ago, you guys announced Yahoo! Go Desktop…guess what? we’re still waiting…

Why, oh why on earth do you guys “sneek peak” such features when we are still waiting for a Calendar/ Notepad integration… Man it’s been two year and a half now.

There is a real paradox here. Yahoo Mail is not just about Mail. It never was. It’s a PIM. The beta HAS NOT ended we’re just half way thru it.

For me this keynote really was just about media agitation and does not announce anything real at all. i’ve been waiting for a new calendar for 25 months, I am not expecting such a product before 5 years…at least from Yahoo!

You guys will really need to make something uber great to make up for all this time.

Oh and by the way, all this giant mashup should have been built upon My Yahoo and not Yahoo! Mail…I mean, WOW! who’s gonna want such a cluttered inbox?? Is it a nice way to tell us that My Yahoo failed and that the new starting point should be Yahoo Mail?

I just feel like Yahoo is going idealistic these days. Take the Mail Plus subscription now: its outdated! Fix it! Take the briefcase: it’s been in a coma state for five years! Take the Launchcast player: still IE-centric…talk about openness!
Just fix the current problems first and you wont need to make any promises.

I really feel bad because there is such a huge potential there.

As for Go Mobile 3.0, I hope it will be a success, well, using an iphone, I guess i wont be able to enjoy it before a long time but it looks promising.

=bg= | January 8th, 2008 at 7:36 pm

Big Yahoo fan here. I’d like to see a Calendar update- the UI looks pretty dated. I also like the Search box in the center of the http://www.yahoo.com page instead of left justified- I’ve seen it change from time to time. And the personalized catagories on the left hand nav column were great, too—saw them once, then never again.

And as long as I’m here..could we get some new logo wallpapers? There hasn’t been any new offered since the blog launched. I have a widescreen monitor, so 1440×900 would be nice.

Mark W | January 10th, 2008 at 9:08 am

None of the keynote video links are working. Player launches, but a brief video plays saying that the program is not available and to try later.

chris | January 11th, 2008 at 12:32 am

The video links (high, medium, low) are broken!

Jigar Shah | January 11th, 2008 at 6:23 am

Simply great…..I use only yahoo mail even if others tell me to switch…Its not just mail its complete PIM suite for me.
Overall Problem i see with yahoo that its slower then others. (But definately strikes at right place). all the features are cool only if they make it on in time. Like Yahoo mail 2 took so much time and still not all functionality is working like 2.0…(Calender Notebook etc.)

Its page is braking on just-to-come Firefox 3. (Standard compatible ?)

Make it good make it fast.

Nelson Bruton | June 6th, 2008 at 12:27 pm

Marc,

This is great to read about. I am curious how close this aggregation is to taking place at Yahoo? Are you saying I will be able to manage all my social networks through Yahoo?

If so, there are many people on inSocialMedia.com that would love to hear that is the case.

I look forward to following you.

Respectfully,

Nelson Bruton
MarketingExperiments.com

Tomek | July 10th, 2008 at 9:49 am

Great job, interesting interview. Thank you.