What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. Unless it’s big announcements from Yahoo!, that is. As the Wall Street Journal reported before the sun rose on the insanely massive Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, we’ve announced Yahoo! Go 2.0 and Yahoo! oneSearch (along with a slew of distribution deals). A Yahoo! Go-enabled Motorola handset flew across the front page of Yahoo! yesterday to herald the moment. I’ve been here with the press, analysts, tech freaks, a gazillion temporary workers, and a bunch of Yahoos to enjoy the goings on.

Right now I’m in the Yahoo! “Big Scoop” tent/exhibit, which is a mashup of user-generated content, Yahoo! Go product demos, and Cold Stone Creamery ice cream. Several thousand people have already come for the ice cream and stayed for the exhibits. Light bulbs flash as our visitors come into the tent to blog, upload Flickr photos, and post video comments that reflect their take on the CES show (they are the stars!). They’re enjoying Moto-java crunch, Yahoo! Go-odness, and the Big Scoop Bonanza ice cream. But the demos are what they’ll go home talking about.

We’re demo-ing the sleek new Yahoo! Go for Mobile application, which features a swirling carousel of little widgets that bring local content, news, sports, finance, Flickr, and, of course, search right to your phone. The Yahoo! oneSearch product we debuted is a one-stop shop for mobile searching and is drawing raves. I used it throughout the day to follow the press coverage of it! And you might have heard that it’ll be integrated into the gotta-have-it iPhone unveiled at MacWorld today.

We’re also showing off the Yahoo! Fantasy Sports app and “my channel,” both for the IPTV environment in our Digital Home demos. Messenger on Vista, Jumpcut, and Answers are also getting some pub, and the gang from Yahoo! Tech is in the control room documenting everything (here and across the show).

Marco Boerries, who runs our Connected Life division, bought a new suit and showed it off during a 20-minute segment with Motorola CEO Ed Zander in the opening keynote of the show. He introduced products that we think will simply change the way people use their phones. Marco crowed that we’ve finally created content that “fits” the phone. And with 2 billion phones in the world (up from 1 billion only three years ago), that’s a lot of phones to fit!

We’re off to celebrate a great beginning for Yahoo! at CES 2007. Whatever happens tonight… well, that may just have to stay in Vegas.

UPDATE: Check out this Forbes.com video on Yahoo!’s CES presence.

David Riemer
VP Marketing, Yahoo! Connected Life

In this neck of the business woods, where thriving web companies are created virtually overnight, it’s often about the next, next thing. I work with a team at Yahoo! that is creating new digital experiences on emerging mobile, digital home, and other devices, so knowing “what’s next” is crucial.

Recently, I’ve had the good fortune of looking right into the future, and the good news for time travelers is that it’s only 10 hours away (from California anyway). No teleporter required. Hop on any flight to Tokyo or Seoul, and, well, just look around! I’m lucky enough to have visited our teams in both Japan and Korea in the past few months, and it’s been a revelation.

Our team is spending more and more time with our Asian team leaders, because so much innovation is happening there. We all know the story of Cyworld in Korea presaging MySpace and Facebook in the U.S., but many wonder if that story will repeat itself. Of course it will (and it already has)! Our Korean team showed me a web site they have just launched for mashing up videos online. This concept originated at our Berkeley research lab but the Korean market has been ready to embrace it.

During our visits to Korea and Japan, we saw kids living the digital lifestyle everywhere we went. We visited consumer-electronics companies that are inventing devices that would make Steve Jobs’ head spin. In this “future” world where bandwidth is bursting from wireline fiber and broadband wireless spectrum and portable devices are all-powerful, it seems that almost anything is possible. Web interfaces are routinely in 3D, pocket TVs are appearing on the subways, phones have become the Swiss Army knife of daily life, and virtual economies are blossoming like so many floral wallpapers on Cyworld. (The personal Cyworld tour we got from one of our young product managers in Korea was a highlight of the trip!)

I watched people using their phones to enter subway turnstiles and photograph barcodes in magazines and web sites to buy ringtones. I met with our mobile team at Yahoo! Japan and learned how families are using GPS-enabled phones to monitor their kids; how phones with motion-control sensors are being used to track the stars in the sky; and how real-time auctions are exploding in the mobile space.

It was fascinating to see and hear how phones are becoming debit and credit cards, gaming devices, high-end IDs, and even TVs. But most importantly, we’re seeing that phones are being used as — drum roll, please — advanced communications devices! The only difference is that people have completely different expectations for how they communicate. This is a world of mobile blogs, new messaging tools, personal videos, and photo sharing. In Korea, we saw mobile photo blog applications that you could get lost in for days and a Yahoo! web site that you could use to create your own mobile web page. Anyone can be a mobile web developer in Seoul!

Thank goodness we have operations in Japan and Korea where our teams share their ideas. They are also some of the first to deploy the more advanced Connected Life technologies that we’re developing elsewhere in the world. We’re even launching a mobile service in Japan with a Yahoo! logo hot key on every phone to take you directly to your Yahoo! stuff.

Think global, act mobile, I always say…

So if you want to know “what’s coming next,” just jump on a plane and take a trip to Akihabara and Harajuku!

David Riemer
VP Marketing, Yahoo! Connected Life