If you thought surfing live TV with a seatbelt securely fastened about your waist was cool, try popping off an instant message, SMS or email at 30,000 feet! Yahoo! is partnering with JetBlue, RIM, and LiveTV (the JetBlue subsidiary that makes that seatback entertainment possible) to take our global email and IM leadership (and our promise to keep friends and family connected) to new heights – literally.

You might have heard the news by now, but as we speak, JetBlue Flight 641 is flying from NYC’s Kennedy Airport en route to San Francisco, equipped with an onboard wireless network that lets passengers use Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger in flight for free. Known as BetaBlue, the Airbus A320 is the first domestic plane to offer such a service. And it’s a six-month test we hope will expand.

For the last couple of months the Yahoo! Mail and Messenger teams have been working hard to develop custom, lightweight versions that perform particularly well with the bandwidth considerations of a high-altitude network. If you have a WiFi-enabled laptop, you can log on and find all of the basic email and messenger functionality. You can also check your Address Book, send text messages, and connect with your Yahoo! contacts as well as those using Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger. You can even have your Messenger status link to a map that lets friends on the ground track exactly where your flight is at that moment!

The other big news, especially for Crackberry addicts like me, is that, on BetaBlue, you’ll be able to check Yahoo! Mail and Messenger on your WiFi-enabled BlackBerry (the 8820 and Curve 8320) — though you still need to turn off the cellular transmitter.

How does it work? The service uses an FCC-licensed air-to-ground spectrum owned by LiveTV. It provides coverage in the continental U.S. above 10,000 feet and connects with 100 air-to-ground communications towers.

Last week I had the chance to take BetaBlue for a spin to preview our project with JetBlue founder Dave Neeleman, LiveTV CEO Nate Quigley, folks from RIM, and a handful of media. We headed off from JFK, got up to cruising altitude, and fired off some messages. As this is still a beta service, we are excited to work with our partners to make this an ideal consumer experience and look forward to hearing what BetaBlue customers have to say.

Unfortunately you can’t request to book passage on BetaBlue — it’s luck of the draw. But if you arrive at your gate and see our logo emblazoned on your plane, you’ll know you’re in for an entertaining ride.

Brad Garlinghouse
SVP, Yahoo! Communications & Communities

If you’re a student at Georgia Tech or an employee at Digg or Mozilla.org, you know just how excellent your email and group calendaring experience is. That’s because it’s powered by Zimbra, creator of an innovative Ajax-based mail client that integrates email, contacts, shared calendar, search and VoIP into an incredibly cool browser-based interface. So cool that we’ve just entered an agreement to acquire Zimbra for $350 million.

Zimbra is a global leader in email and collaboration software and its services are aimed at universities, businesses, and ISPs worldwide, which is a major driver of what made the company so attractive to us. We’re constantly being approached by these entities for our expertise in email and communications. Combining the best of Zimbra with what’s made Yahoo! Mail the top dog in web mail will not only allow us to cater to these markets better than anyone, it will allow us to expand our presence to partners and consumers at school, work, and home.

Zimbra, named after a nonsensical Talking Heads song, made its debut at the 2005 Web 2.0 conference, leaving TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington saying: “Zimbra is so damn cool and full of Ajax awesomeness…” Here’s what Zimbra co-founder and CEO Satish Dharmaraj had to say about Zimbra’s raison d’etre in their October 2005 launch press release:

“… e-mail is broken… From overflowing inboxes to the nuisance of organizing correspondence, to the cost of managing storage, viruses, availability, retention and legal discovery and compliance, dealing with corporate e-mail has become a nightmare. Zimbra’s server and application innovations solve these problems for both end-users and administrators.”

Zimbra offers incredible technology. We see great opportunities to incorporate some of their best-of-breed features (I really like their calendaring) into Yahoo!’s industry-leading communications products.

If you’ve never experienced Zimbra, be sure to check out the demo. You’ll really notice the wow-factor when you hover over content in email messages and get pop-up previews. The phrase “tomorrow at 10:00 AM” will display any appointments you have at that time, “701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale CA” will launch a Yahoo! Map, a tracking number gives you package delivery status, a phone number lets you make a VoIP call, a flight number provides status details, and so on. Some of these are mash-ups called Zimlets, which developers can create on Zimbra’s open platform.

Zimbra’s technology, talent and extensive global customer and partner network have received amazing industry recognition, and we’re excited to welcome the entire team, including Satish, Ross Dargahi and Roland Schemers (also co-founders) as well as President and CTO Scott Dietzen, aboard at Yahoo!.

Brad Garlinghouse
Senior Vice President
Communications & Communities

Today I woke up, logged onto Yahoo! Messenger, and pinged my friend Blake Irving, head of Microsoft’s Windows Live Platform Group, to applaud him and his team. Congratulations are definitely in order, as today marks a true milestone in Internet history. For the first time ever, interoperability (a.k.a. interop) between consumer instant messaging (IM) services is possible.

In July, Microsoft and Yahoo! introduced interop on a limited basis and received an overwhelming response. In just two months more than 90 million messages were sent and received across our networks — a level of usage that is a dream for us Internet geeks. Of course, this response wasn’t too surprising as we know that the ability to connect with other IM services is our users’ number one request. In fact, in a recent survey we found one in four respondents said connecting IM services is the next best thing since the creation of the cell phone. Today, the feature becomes available to everyone. Our combined communities — approaching 350 million user accounts — will be able to connect with friends and family across our instant messaging services. That’s huge, my friends.

This partnership really has all the makings of a marriage (humor me here). We went on dates, met each other’s parents, studied each other’s philosophies, and looked for habits that might drive us nuts. After our courtship rituals, we concluded that we really were compatible.

So what do two fierce competitors do before heading for the altar to make their products work together? Our first step was outlining joint guiding principles to ensure we were working against common goals throughout the negotiation process. They were simple and effective: Address our users’ number one request, get to market swiftly, make our interoperability easy to use, and grow the overall size of the IM market.

These touchstones played an integral role in a fundamental decision: establishing a server-to-server connection. Translation? Allowing consumers to sign into one IM service with one ID to connect across both services. (The Trillian service, in contrast, requires you to sign into multiple IM services with multiple IDs). This was not our initial approach as it was a huge technological undertaking. But our guiding principles set us straight as both teams agreed this was the only way to do right by consumers.

When I look at the competitive dynamics around IM, I get really jazzed. As the business guy, I’m obviously interested in seeing the IM market grow and I think today’s milestone will fuel that. It will also forever change the way IM services compete. Historically consumers chose their IM service based on where their friends were hanging out online. With interoperability, people will start choosing their service based on the features they want. This is analogous with how people choose e-mail services today, since they’re all compatible. Why should IM be any different? At the end of the day, the biggest winner of this trend is you, the consumer.

Since no back story is complete without a few insider insights:

• Because of the confidential nature of the project, Yahoo!’s internal code name was “Morpheus.” Clearly a business development guy was a fan of The Matrix — once people were in the know, there was no going back.
• To spice up negotiations, our business teams used “Larry,” “Mo” and “Curly” to help keep our players straight in hypothetical scenarios. You’re on your own as to who’s who.
• To celebrate interop going into beta, Blake Irving and I caught the final World Cup match in Germany. The picture you see below is Blake (left) and me standing in front of the Berlin Wall. Assign whatever irony you like.

Making this milestone possible was exciting, exhausting, stimulating, taxing, entertaining, but most importantly, it was rewarding. We hope you’ll agree.

Brad Garlinghouse
Senior Vice President
Communications, Community & Front Doors