Following our news about a new original video series with Tom Hanks made this morning at the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show, we have news for all you TV lovers out there about Yahoo! Connected TV and IntoNow from Yahoo! as well.

For Yahoo! Connected TV, we’re excited to announce that broadcast interactivity becomes available on Sony BRAVIA® TVs at CES this week. Yahoo!’s broadcast interactivity technology shows real-time Internet content and activities that complement the TV show or commercial you’re watching. For example, you’ll be able to vote for the boxer you think will win a live match on Showtime, or research and purchase an item featured on HSN in real-time – all right from your remote control! In the future, you’ll be able to get this technology on many more TVs as well, so that while you’re watching your favorite shows, you can also enjoy relevant show trivia, voting, shopping, videos, photos, game show interaction and more.

Each month, more than a million people engage with the Yahoo! Connected TV experience to access Internet and video content from a collection of more than 180 TV apps. New TV apps from top brands including ABC, AT&T Yellow Pages, Disney, ESPN, iHeart Radio by Clear Channel and The Wall Street Journal will be showcased this week at CES. We’ll also be demoing new Yahoo! Connected TV mobile apps that will let people use their smartphones and tablets to more easily interact with their TV apps, whether it’s for remote control-like functionality, or for video playback and text-entry capabilities for posting updates and comments or making purchases.

IntoNow from Yahoo! is teaming up with Spike TV, which will broadcast live from the CES show floor. During their broadcast tomorrow, you can use IntoNow to tag Spike TV’s coverage of CES and unlock exclusive behind-the-scenes footage, chat with the hosts and more!

It’s clear that people are relying on apps across all of the screens in their lives, and we expect consumer usage of TV apps to evolve and rapidly increase as Internet-connected devices become mainstream in 2012. Stay tuned here for more in 2012 about new and innovative connected experiences from Yahoo!.

Since the debut of Yahoo! Connected TV at CES 2009, we have defined the category of Internet-enhanced television, working with top TV brands to bring the TV app experience to life across Sony, Samsung, LG, Toshiba, and VIZIO TVs. This year, we’re taking the TV experience into a new era through the introduction of a ground-breaking feature we call broadcast interactivity.  Imagine a TV experience that brings you even closer to the programs and brands you love by letting you interact with the programming in a way you never could before. You’ll be able to play along while watching your favorite show, vote for a reality-TV participant, get more information about characters, or make e-commerce purchases using a TV app.

Yahoo! is collaborating with television network powerhouses ABC, CBS, HSN, and Showtime and top brand advertisers Ford, Mattel and Microsoft on content for a pilot program launching in the first half of 2011, and will showcase examples of the new feature during CES.  Read more about it at the Connected TV and Yahoo! Advertising blogs.

That’s not all though. We’ll also be demonstrating new ways to take advantage of the many connected devices we use today – from mobile phones to tablets and Internet-connected TV and more:

• D-Link Internet-Connected Media Player, Featuring Yahoo! Connected TV: D-Link announced plans to launch the first ever Internet-connected media player, featuring the Yahoo! Connected TV platform. The D-Link device will provide consumers access to the Yahoo! Connected TV experience without the purchase of a new TV.
• New Yahoo! Connected TV Apps:  Today the Yahoo! Connected TV experience centers around a collection of more than 100 easy-to-use TV apps that run the gamut from social networking to music, games, news, weather, finance, shopping, and more than 50,000 movies and TV shows on demand. New TV apps launching at CES include CNBC, Clear Channel Radio, NBC, QVC, mgMedia, and more.
• Flickr App Preview for Windows 7 Devices:  We’re making it even easier for you to share and organize your photos using the leading online photo sharing community in the world. The Flickr apps for Windows 7 phones and the Slate tablet – launching in a few weeks – will provide a sleek user interface and unique inter-connectivity between phones, tablets and laptops.  Check out more details on the Flickr blog.
• Yahoo! Local for Mobile:   Our goal with the new Yahoo! Local is to be the best place for people to find what’s happening in their neighborhoods, whether they’re at home or on the go. With rich hyper-local content, the new Yahoo! Local provides people a truly personalized experience across desktop and mobile (currently available via the mobile web on iPhone and Android), enabling them to discover and contribute to the best local news, deals, and events nearby, all in one place. Check out more details on the new Yahoo! Local for mobile on the Yahoo! Mobile blog.

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to keep up with more of the latest news, pictures, and videos featuring Yahoo! at CES 2011.

Cheers,
Irv Henderson

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

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

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