CES: 1.8 million square feet of booths and tents. 140,000 self-acclaimed geeks. 2,700 exhibitors. 30-minute taxi lines. And just 10 contenders for the annual Yahoo! Tech “Last Gadget Standing” contest.

After reviewing hundreds of the latest, cool, hip gizmos and contraptions, we’ve whittled them down to the Top Ten and are pitting them against each other tomorrow morning. Think “Survivor” meets “American Idol.”

Here’s how it works. Each of our ten finalists will have four minutes to make their spiel. Using a highly scientific applause-o-meter, we’ll ask a live audience of about 500 gadget hounds to help us pick our winner. We’re not looking for the latest flash in the pan — we want something with staying power. That thing that defines or redefines how we get things done… whether that’s cleaning our gutters, steering clear of traffic jams, improving our golf game, or getting photos off our cameras. Last year’s fast-paced demos were highly creative and entertaining — we were even graced by an Elvis appearance.

Here are the final contenders:

• Asus Eee PC 4G is a computer that costs only $399, has a tiny 7-inch screen, runs Linux, and comes with a suite of great software applications.
• Eye-Fi is a specially designed low-power wireless chip with a 2GB memory card that lets you automatically transfers photos from a camera to a Mac or PC or places like Flickr and other social networks.
• Dash Express is an Internet-connected GPS device that gives real-time traffic conditions based on data transmitted from other Dash users (think social networking meets traffic reports). It also taps into Yahoo! Local for up-to-the-minute info on everything from movies to gas prices.
• Electric~Spin’s Golf Launchpad Tour is a unique golf simulation input device that lets you play golf in the convenience of your home, with your own clubs.
• Fujitsu’s U810 WWAN is an ultra-mobile PC with state-of-the-art connectivity.
• iRobot’s iLooj is a robotic gutter cleaner that will clean a 60-foot stretch of gutter in ten minutes.
• The LG Voyager phone has a touch screen and beneath the flip is a QWERTY keyboard for easy typing.
• The Logitech DiNovo is a wireless keyboard that fits in the palm of your hand.
• Sansa TakeTV offers a simple and less expensive way to move downloaded TV programs around the house. Using a cradle with standard RCA and S-Video plugs, your TV media is stored on the USB memory stick.
• Toshiba’s TDP-EW25U wireless DLP projector can produce an image that casts 41 feet or 1.6 feet, create a 60-inch picture even when it’s positioned 2.4 feet away, and accommodates high-def video.

If you’re here in Vegas, my fellow Yahoo! Tech advisors and I invite you to come to the Convention Center’s North Hall (Room N255-257) at 10:30am tomorrow. If you can’t be here, we’ll be posting a video recap of the showdown later this week.

May the best gadget win.

UPDATE: And the winner is…. the Eye-Fi! This new wireless memory card makes it a snap to move photos from your camera to your computer or upload them to your favorite website. They stole the show in spite of an appearance by the Verizon Wireless guy to promo the LG Voyager phone. Here’s to redefining how we make use of our photos. Congratulations to the Eye-Fi!

Robin Raskin
Yahoo! Tech Advisor – The Boomer

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

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