First, a quick review. We have hosted Open Hack Days since 2006 to foster collaboration and innovation within the developer community. This was our ninth event, preceded by shindigs at our California headquarters as well as in Taiwan, London, Bangalore, and São Paulo. We provide the hands-on workshops, tech talks, food, beer, Red Bull, and various hackery diversions, and developers stay up all night long to deliver creative mashups that they demo before a panel of judges.

About 300 developers attended our inaugural NYC event (sporting a greater proportion of blazers and ties than we’re used to seeing), which kicked off Friday morning with a keynote by Clay Shirky, a New York University professor and social media guru (here’s a video interview we grabbed). After a day of workshops and training sessions, developers adjourned to a hacker lounge with a steampunk theme. Victorian bird cages dangled power cables above each hacker table. A bright red wall was hung with gilded portraits of various well-known innovators. A Victorian maiden was hacked with a monitor for a head, displaying the latest tweets with the #openhacknyc tag on her face. Chalk boards featured ornate steampunk-inspired drawings that would have impressed H.G. Wells. And, of course, there was the table of hacker snacks and a beanbag-filled corner dedicated to Guitar Hero.

Before the hacking began, we hosted a geek’s open mic event with Ignite NYC. For two hours, participants had five minutes on stage to talk through 20 slides that automatically rotated after 15 seconds. It was a bit like the everyman’s TED. We heard about Moby Dick written in Japanese Emoji, the violence of the media, how to save journalism, what “open” means, patents, surprisology, benefits of living in colonies at sea, the New York Times Index (yes, it’s still printed on paper), clothing made of scissors and agave leaves, and the tyranny of a flavored chewing-tobacco lover on YouTube. There was even a visit from the Spaceman from Outer Space (who apparently wasn’t a fan of Alien IV).

By Saturday afternoon, about 100 hackers persevered and submitted 40 hacks. Without further ado, our winners:

• Best Overall – InsiderTrade.org: You can sign up for instant alerts about insider trades for the various stocks you follow. It’s live – try it.
• Best Overall, Runner up – TVitter: If you’re a Mystery Science Theater 300 fan, you’ll love this one. The team hacked our Connected TV widget to produce an app that lets people watch TV together and throw out comments that others can see.
• Connected TV (1st place) – Recipe Finder: This app lets you find and display recipes and even includes a countdown timer so you don’t burn your cupcakes while you get engrossed in Glee.
• Connected TV 2nd prize – Fantasy Football Widget: Brings the #1 fantasy sports league to your TV.
• Connected TV 3rd prize – Couch Potato RSS: This app lets you follow your favorite RSS feeds while you’re surfing TV.
• Best UI – Inhabited Web 2.0: Brings a social filter to individual websites by letting you see where people are congregating on a web page – “perhaps next to a great deal, interesting news story, or funny video.”
• Best Mobile – Community Bulletin Boards: This app brings community bulletin boards to your iPhone so you can find, create and add to message boards based on location just like physical bulletin boards that one sometimes finds in parks, on streets, in shops etc.
• Accessibility – Audio Texter: An app that allows blind and visually-impaired people send and receive SMS messages.
• Best Food/Hardware Hack (tie) – The New York Toast: From Team MakerBot, we had a 3D printer that printed news, weather, and photos in peanut butter, jam, and frosting… on toast. News for breakfast.
• Best Food/Hardware Hack (tie) – Delicious Cake: Since Team MakerBot found cake mix in their grocery bag and an extra supply of wire and LEDs, they spawned another team that created a cake that showed sentiment (positive and negative) for del.icio.us URLs. It was not eaten. This team included Diana Eng, overall winner of our very first Open Hack.
• Hack for Good – Power Trends: A platform that helps consumers save on their energy bills and helps energy providers predict load but leveraging social media. It measures energy usage for participating towns, who compete for prizes for being below their power consumption baseline.

Here’s a quick video recap of the event:

For more of that just-like-being-there feeling, you can view our Flickr photoset, other photos from the event, and check out tweets here.

Up next? Taiwan. We’re coming to hack you. This weekend. Get ready.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Photos: 1. Hack maestros – Eric and Havi, 2. Winning hackers, 3. Best overall hack – insidertrading.org, 4. Judges, 5. YDN stickers, 6. Peanut butter printing, 7. Steampunked emcees, 8. Winning hackers, 9. Last minute hacking, 10. NYU’s Clay Shirky keynotes, 11. Hacking a nap, 12. Hacker heart, 13. Eli hacks the stickers, 14. Steampunked Twitter display, 15. Hacker lounge, 16. Creating the NY Toast

We kicked things off this morning with a keynote by New York University professor Clay Shirky, whose book “Here Comes Everybody” examines how Web 2.0 is revolutionizing the social order. He tackled the culture of online communities and what motivates people to participate in them. For example, why have more than 3,311 people built out incredible minutiae about Dr. Who on Wikipedia? Why does a guy build the Taj Mahal out of LEGOs and upload photos to a LEGO community site? What happens when a woman who normally blogs about fashion and her iPhone apps decides to post photos of a military coup?

We grabbed a few minutes with Clay after his talk to expand on his themes. Here’s the interview:

Our hackers now have bellies full of hot dogs, nachos, beer, and ice cream bars (nourishing hacker food) and are bedding down for a night of coding. We’ll see the fruits of their labor tomorrow afternoon when they each have 90 seconds to dazzle the judges with their wares. They probably won’t get much sleep, but we hope there will be Obama sandwiches for all.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

This year, delegates from 90 countries gathered to hear distinguished speakers like the UN’s Kofi Annan, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, Twitter’s Biz Stone, Bob Geldof, and the heads of the world’s largest advertising agencies. And jury members judged more than 22,000 pieces of the most creative advertising from every corner of the globe. In short, it was the place to be for ad types.

Since advertising is one of our passions at Yahoo!, you can imagine we wanted to support the festival, Yahoo!-style. Our goal was to communicate that the world’s biggest ideas should live on the world’s biggest stage –- the online arena. So, Yahoo! had an innovative, local presence at the festival. Naturally, we placed ads in local media saluting the creatives, but we also deployed an awesome purple van and hit the streets with a giveaway that literally declared “Nothing Creative Happens in Penny Loafers.”

Our Mission: Project Flip Flop
How do you show the creative community that you really love them? You make them comfortable, of course! Members of Project Flip Flop canvassed the Croissette with pairs of purple Yahoo!-branded Havaianas flip flops, slipping them on the weary feet of anyone with a festival badge. Meanwhile, our purple van circled the streets and our own Purple Pedals bike rode the promenade to document the mission. By the end of the week, thousands of feet were happier.

The response was très fantastique!

• Fast Company wrote that the flip flops were the most sought after prize at Cannes;
• The Cannes Daily covered the campaign (page 12);
• A creative director from a global agency said to me, “Thanks for letting us be free!”;
• The head of marketing for one of the largest global brands in attendance asked for pairs for her children;
• Even the Twitterverse played along. One tweet suggested that we put this campaign up for a Lion next year. Another from halfway around the globe asked to add a pair to a Yahoo! footwear collection.

To see the mission in action, check out this short video (below), view our Flickr album, and see some of the images that our Purple Pedal picked up.

Creativity is the secret sauce in the best advertising and we want your Yahoo! experience to be well seasoned with it. For a look at the creativity that snagged the Lions, check out the official site at canneslions.com.

Elisa Steele
Chief Marketing Officer

The AllThingsD.com site has a liveblog recap of Carol’s interview. You might also head to the Twitterverse for a taste of how she was received. Some of our favorite tweets:

• Chris Anderson (@TEDchris): Yahoo’s new CEO Carol Bartz knocking ‘em dead at D7. Smart, focused, engaging, funny, persuasive. Memo to self: buy YHOO?
• Peter Kafka (@pkafka): I think this may be Carol Bartz’ first big public appearance since coming to Yahoo. IMHO she’s crushing it.
• Larry Magid (@LarryMagid): Yahoo’s Carol Bartz is one of the funniest speakers ever at D.
• Katie Boehret (@kabster728): Our stage manager says: I wanna see the sitcom w/these two (referring to @karaswisher and Carol Bartz, Yahoo CEO).

(UPDATE: The folks at D have taken down Carol’s video to replace it “with one that contains 100 percent more profanity. It’ll be up soon–we apologize for the inconvenience.” We’ll get it up when the link is available.)
UPDATE #2: And it’s back!

Here’s the video — uncensored:

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Photos by Asa Mathat, AllThingsD.com

Around 125 hackers answered our call and spent a few hours listening to Tech talks covering Yahoo!’s newest developer offers before going down to some serious hacking for a 24 hour period.

Even if you didn’t get the chance to come, you can get all the information of the event on the Open Hack 2009 Wiki, where you can also find the slide decks of the Tech Talks. Of course the real value of the Tech Talks is the face-to-face time with the experts, so be around next time to get the full experience.

After the information section with tech talks and the first refreshments break, Chief Yahoo David Filo introduced the hack day and started the 24 hour hack period.

Keeping things real and close to the host country, not all was numbers and algorithms though. We had a dance group performing and trying to teach both the hackers and the Yahoo! Hack team some Bollywood and — as it was Valentine’s Day — salsa dance moves. There’s some footage of these already on the Web and lots of pictures on flickr. Please try to overlook my awkward performance in the background should you stumble upon it.

All in all, the Open Hack day was a tremendous success. The hackers formed teams and delivered 66 Hacks, of which 9 were picked as overall winners. The range of technologies used in the hacks was impressive, with the open search technology BOSS being the most used, followed by our mobile platform BluePrint, the location brokerage service FireEagle, OpenMail, and the Yahoo! Application Platform.

The enthusiasm and thoroughness of the hackers was contagious and the helpers and Yahoo! experts stayed up the whole night to help out with advice, code and by pointing people to the right direction.

The main benefit of hack day for Yahoo! is to see how easy it is to use our developer products and where developers get stuck. In that respect the sleepless hours were of tremendous interest for me as it was great to see how fast developers can build something impressive by digging into the documentation of YUI, YQL and BluePrint and simply going for it.

I’ve learnt a lot myself during this period and know now where to alter documentation or provide new and easier-to-understand examples. Nothing beats meeting your audience face-to-face and, in the case of the Hack team and the Yahoo! Developer Network, our audience are the developers in the field.

After 24 hours, the winners of the hack day were chosen by the team of judges (a mix of senior Yahoos of the US, UK and India and a director of an Indian VC company):

• Best Search Inside – Y! Grep (by pi: Ravi Bhushan Kumar & Ravi S. Math)
• Best Gone in 90 seconds – BOSS in 90 seconds (by The Flex Ninjas: Raghunath Rao Thricovil & Harish Sivaramakrishnan)
• Best Social Travel Helpdesk – Travel Assist (by Beanbag-Hackers: Nidhi Chaudhary & Anurag Jain)
• Best Keynote from a Traffic Jam – Slideshare for Mobile (& openMail by scriptease: Kapil Mohan, Sri Prasanna, Mani Kumar & Ciju Cherian)
• Best Crossing the Language Chasm – Translate This (by kroniks: sourabh behra)
• Best Confidential Messages – Redact Mail (by BabuSrithar)
• Best Socially Mobile – Kiva Mobile (by SocialSync.org: Akshay Surve)
• Best Navigation Bangalore Traffic – MyBus (by Parageeks: Pradeep BV, Akash Mahajan, Aashish Solanki & Rohit Talukdar)
• Best Built from Scratch – Search Engine with Hybrid (Human & Artificial) Intelligence (by API [Advancing Predictive Intelligence]: Antano Solar John & Niranjan Prithviraj)

I cannot end this without saying a big thank you to all involved in planning, executing and also taking part in the Open Hack Day Bangalore. It was a blast and I am very much looking forward to the next activities we’ll do in India.

Chris Heilmann
International Developer Evangelist, Yahoo! Developer Network

As a technical developer, it’s a wonderful feeling to go where you are utterly out of your depth, and yet realize that you’re surrounded by people who not only understand the material, but also have intelligent questions to ask. For two days, we all chose from among more than 50 lectures and no less than 80 less formal poster sessions. There were experts in geographic intelligence, accessibility, mobile widgets, data center efficiency, the future of drag-and-drop. Everything we talked about will affect you in ways you see… and some you don’t. For more technical detail, head over to our developer blog next week.

The theory behind Tech Pulse is simple: By having the inventors of all these key technologies explain them to the other techies, we’re making it possible to implement more of them for your benefit. Yahoo! is at heart a technology company and the more technology we have at our disposal, the more we can use it to create fun, useful, interactive experiences. The best way to spread all these amazing discoveries through our own tech community is to bring everyone together to listen and discuss. I’m sure that when all the engineers went back to the mothership, they shared their new knowledge with co-workers and the cycle of innovation started over again.

If nothing else, Tech Pulse emphasized the amount of raw talent at Yahoo!. While I can’t give away any secret sauce, trust that there’s an astounding depth of knowledge here to take concepts from theory to reality. We’re doing incredible things to create better experiences for you.

Tom Hughes-Croucher
Technical Evangelist
Yahoo! Developer Network

In the first round, Yahoo! played Microsoft in a game to 7 points. Microsoft was unprepared for Jake’s superior passing and quick snake shot. They were unable to get past Daniel’s brilliant defense. Yahoo! beat Microsoft 7-1.

In the next round, Yahoo! played Google in a game to 7 points. Google’s team put up a valiant effort, but they too were beaten easily in a final score of 7-0.

Next up was the Google vs. Microsoft match. Google easily beat Microsoft 7-0.

For the final round, Yahoo! played Google for the Foosball Trophy. It was a best of 3 series, with each game played to 5 points. The Google fans started to crowd around the table, and tried to motivate their team with cheers. However, the Google cheering soon turned to silence once the Yahoo! team started to dominate the scoring. Google’s team couldn’t keep up with the fast paced passing and scoring from Yahoo! Yahoo beat Google 5-2.

Game 2 of the Finals was pretty much more of the same barrage from Team Yahoo!. The final score for Game 2 was 5-2 in favor of Yahoo!.

Final results:

• 1st place – Yahoo!
• 2nd place – Google
• 3rd place – Microsoft

Best quote of the day was from the Microsoft team after Jake scored the first goal on them: “What was that? Is he spinning?” Jake’s snake shot was so fast that they couldn’t tell how he scored. :)

Oh, and our search engine competes pretty well, too. For more information on how Yahoo! fared in the SES Awards, head over to Yahoo! Search Blog.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

We’ve definitely proven Yahoo! to be the partner of choice for mobile carriers around the world. How? By making our products mobile-first. From Yahoo! Mail SMS Alerts, which we just announced in India, to Yahoo! Go 3.0, we want to give users around the world the best possible mobile experience — no matter what mobile device they’re using.

Let’s start with mobile search. Today, we announced five new Yahoo! oneSearch™ partnerships with leading mobile operators in India, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Taiwan. With these partnerships in place, we now reach 95% of the mobile users in the Philippines and more than 50% of the mobile users in India, one of the fastest growing markets in the world.

We’ve also introduced an English version of Yahoo! oneSearch with voice that recognizes regional accents for India and Singapore. I’m also excited to announce the launch of Yahoo! Go 3.0 for India, Australia and Southeast Asia, including a local language version for Indonesia.

And we’re not stopping there. Today we also announced several new mobile widgets specifically geared to the Asian markets. We’ve got something for music lovers (MTV Asia), sports fans (Yahoo! Cricket), movie fans (Yahoo! India Movies Showtimes), and even one for fans of the hit Australian TV show “Home and Away” to name but a few of the widgets added to our growing roster.

For those of you wondering how mobile brings home the bacon, we’ve got big news there, too. Mobile operators around the world are looking to content and services for additional revenue growth. Enter mobile advertising, which will ultimately offer these carriers new revenue streams.

This brings me to my final announcement here at CommunicAsia. We’ve just added Malaysia’s Maxis Communications Berhad and India’s Idea Cellular Limited to our growing list of mobile advertising partners, which includes AT&T, T-Mobile International and Vodafone UK.

With mobile usage nearing ubiquity in Asia, we’re really pleased with the increasing array of services we’re offering this important market. And we believe these latest announcements show that we are on the right path. We’re getting ever more excited about where that path will lead us. Keep an eye out for what we do next.

Dave Ko
Managing Director and VP, Connected Life Asia Pacific

Photo from KarlMarx

The focus of this event is to explore how new technologies and business models can support journalism and participatory democracy through a “concept/design mash-up.” This is a natural fit for us at Yahoo! — providing the platform for others to convene, share ideas and insights, and discover new ways to make a difference. Discussion topics will include how the concept and practice of journalism may adapt to search and social networks, crowdsourcing, diverse, fragmented audiences and digital, participatory politics. It’s all about best practices and new technologies that can facilitate fact/data-rich, citizen-supported, machine-using, inclusive journalism that promotes accountable government and open institutions.

I’ve been at Yahoo! since we were just a handful of people building a searchable directory of websites. From the beginning, we’ve been driven by sheer passion and enthusiasm for the transformative possibilities of the Web — we couldn’t wait to make it accessible to everyone, because we knew amazing things would happen when others applied their creativity, resourcefulness, and ingenuity. We’ve never had all the answers — the website directory was just a bunch of links to other people’s stuff — but we brought those links together to invite and inspire others to realize the possibilities of this medium.

Promoting freedom of expression and the open exchange of diverse ideas and information — that’s been at the core of everything we do. We believe information is power, and access to information is a democratizing force. And even though we started out merely linking to “other people’s stuff,” we thought a lot about how the mere act of aggregation is creation, and with that comes great responsibility. These very beliefs are at the heart of “journalism that matters.”

It’s these same beliefs, together with our passion for helping others apply their expertise to unlock the power of the Web, that drives our focus on making Yahoo! more open and social. We are creating flexible tools and platforms for others to build on, and look forward to working with like-minded collaborators in an evolving community.

To that end, several members of our news, front page, and central editorial teams will be in attendance this week. As always, we don’t have all the answers. But we can’t wait to see what emerges when we come together with those who do.

Srinija Srinivasan
VP and Editor-in-Chief
Yahoo! Editorial

Enter the Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS). Imagine a world where you can write code that will meaningfully reach millions of users in a single bound. That’s the promise of an open Yahoo!.

Ari Balogh, our new CTO, just offered a preview at Web 2.0 Expo of a very new kind of Yahoo!. One that invites developers to take advantage of our huge scale to write applications that build on our existing properties (think Mail, Sports, Search, our front page, mobile, My Yahoo!, etc.), tap into millions of loyal users, and make Internet experience more relevant and useful. You’ve heard us hint at this for a while and now it’s right around the corner.

Think about it: Yahoo! serves more than 500 million unique users every month. We serve 120 billion page views per month. Yahoo! users spend 235 billion minutes a month on our sites. More importantly, some 10 billion relationships exist on user buddy lists and in Yahoo! address books. All that represents a mind-boggling audience for developers.

There’s a massive, latent social network within Yahoo!, and we’re going to bring it to the surface. We’re making Yahoo! more social, but we’re not building yet another social network. We already have an incredible social network… we just need to unlock it.

We are rewiring Yahoo!, building platforms that fundamentally change how Yahoo! works. We’re also opening up to developers to take advantage of the social aspects of our many favored destinations, creating what we call “vitality” — a lifeline into what’s happening with your social connections. We plan to open the best platform on the web, where tens of thousands of developers will create applications and features (many we’ve never even thought of) for our network and our consumers.

Of course, lots of Internet companies are on the “open” bandwagon. In fact, the bandwagon is getting pretty crowded (I’ve never actually seen a bandwagon, but go with me on this). Yahoo! has been in the “open” camp for years, starting simple with RSS feeds in 2003. And now Flickr is the second-most popular API on the Web. We’ve also been a leader in industry’s efforts to embrace open development.

A first taste of our strategy is SearchMonkey, which will let developers mash up helpful data with our search engine results. A Japanese restaurant would no longer be a simple link. Instead, it could include a photo, address, ratings, reviews, and links to online reservations. Search Monkey will be available in a few weeks. Make sure you come to our launch party on May 15th.

And it doesn’t stop there. Y!OS will let developers make Yahoo! portable so that everywhere you go, a more relevant, social and useful online experience is available to you. Shopping on a third-party site? Why not have instant access to your Yahoo! Address Book? I know I want it! ;-)

We’ve previewed Yahoo! OS with leading development shops and they’re very excited to do their thing on Yahoo!. In fact, they plan to dedicate a lot of resources to this platform. It all comes back to the size of the opportunity, right?

Today’s just the beginning. There’s plenty more to come in the months ahead!

UPDATE: Here’s a video of Ari’s Web 2.0 Expo keynote from this morning.

Neal Sample
Chief Architect, Platforms

March is a great month to get your geek on. Tech conferences flourish: O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conference, now in its seventh year, heralds springtime in San Diego. South by Southwest (SXSW), Austin’s annual music, multimedia, and film extravaganza tests the stamina, sociability, and interaction skills of thousands web developers and designers from all over the world, with more than a week of panels, presentations, and parties.

Last Wednesday at ETech, Tom Coates from Yahoo!’s Brickhouse invited participants to “ride the Fire Eagle.” His keynote announced the developer’s beta launch of Fire Eagle, “a secure and stylish way to share your location with sites and services online while giving you unprecedented control over your data and privacy.” Fire Eagle invitation cards flew out of the booth and into the hands of hundreds of developers attending the event.

O’Reilly Media also hosted Graphing Social Patterns (GSP), a new conference held in conjunction with ETech, focused on the business and technology of social platforms. Yahoo! Developer Network participated in ETech and GSP as a gold sponsor. Following Charlene Li’s Monday morning keynote on the Future of Social Networks (you can view her presentation deck here), MyBlogLog product guy Ian Kennedy announced the opening of MyBlogLog’s APIs.

MyBlogLog is a Yahoo! service that powers the “Recent Readers” badge, which you’ll find on our sidebar and all across the blogosphere. MyBlogLog is a tool that lets people learn about their community of readers, and gather and display pointers to all the online social services they use. By opening its APIs, MyBlogLog gives developers tools to create interesting new social mashups and news ways to visualize online communities and social activity data.

Speaking of social activity streams: dozens of Yahoos participated as speakers, panelists, booth staffers, and attendees at ETech, GSP, and South by Southwest. Take a peek at some highlights of our ETech presence, captured by Ricky Montalvo for the Yahoo! Developer Network theater:

Havi Hoffman
Yahoo! Developer Network

Photo from James Duncan Davidson

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

When we approached Beck’s management (working a skateboard angle), we suggested a low-key acoustic set, assuming he wasn’t big on corporate events. Instead, they rolled up with three tour buses, two semi’s filled with staging and lighting equipment, a puppet show, bear costumes, and a video they custom produced for the grand finale. Safe to say every expectation was exceeded.

After the concert, Beck et al lingered to check out the hack action, pick up some schwag and talk to some “epic genius freaks.” One thing is for sure — we’re all wondering how we’re going to top this.