A few months ago, when I first yodeled my way into Yahoo!, I told folks that I was stoked for the opportunity to join up with some of the smartest and best-in-class talent in the world to deliver the future products vision for a company with such a rich history. With more than 600 million worldwide users, Yahoo! has become one of the largest and most trusted Internet brands ever. In fact, we’ve been so successful in bringing the Internet to the masses that, for many, Yahoo! is synonymous with the Web. Over the last 15 years, we’ve delivered habit-forming communications products, highly intuitive search functionality, and awesome content services that make us central to the online lives of vast audiences on global scale — in turn, driving killer value to publishers, advertisers, and developers.

As I’ve learned more about the people and products that make Yahoo! great, I’ve grown even more positive that our future will be a bright one. Our products continue to evolve — and at the heart of that evolution is our commitment to bringing personal meaning to the Web for everyone. In short, that means helping you and the other 600 million people on Yahoo! cut through the vastness of online data by providing the experiences that are most important to you — whether that’s instantly finding the content you are searching for or connecting you with family and friends.

Key to creating these experiences for you, and adding value for advertisers and partners, is our constant technological innovation of products like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, and Yahoo! Search, as well as our mobile sites, tablet and Connected TV experiences, and content properties like Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, and Yahoo! Sports. You’re using these products every day, and starting this fall, you’ll see more frequent updates for them. Check out our live webcast to watch this morning’s “Yahoo! Product Runway” media event, which we’re hosting in Sunnyvale:

While you can’t always see “under the hood” as a consumer, you should know that we’re delivering a number of planet-scale technology components to make it all possible. For example, we have built our products on global platforms and one of the world’s largest cloud computing infrastructures. What this means for you is more features and enhancements for the products you love — sooner and more often.

Some of the updates you can expect to see this fall include:

• A new Yahoo! Mail experience with even more focus on performance and speed
• New Yahoo! Search experiences with rich, immersive results that keep you in the loop on the news and entertainment topics that matter to you the most
• Twitter integration on Yahoo! that will allow you to link your accounts so you can view and share updates with friends across both networks
• A new Yahoo! app for iPad and other tablets that's designed to deliver personally relevant news, information, and essentials like weather, commute updates, and more
• Customized Content Ads with creative formats that leverage an advertiser’s robust content and enable social sharing
• New Connected TV partnerships that provide consumers with thousands of video-on-demand content sources, social networks, games, music, shopping, and more — all while watching TV

Keep an eye out for updates to more Yahoo! products for consumers and advertisers in the coming months, including communication experiences, more social integrations, and improvements to our content offerings. At Yahoo!, our products are our babies. We create them, nurture them, and watch them grow to engage with hundreds of millions of people. Like any proud parent, we love them as they are — but we never stop trying to make them better.

-Blake Irving, EVP & Chief Product Officer, Yahoo!
@blakei