Hey CES: All things considered, booking Microsoft chairman Bill Gates as the first speaker for your show is setting the bar kind of high. After arriving 3 hours early for yesterday's keynote only to have to queue up behind several hundred people, I was convinced I was running late for Jerry Yang of Yahoo!'s speech today. I just arrived at the Hilton Theater, 40 minutes before he's scheduled to speak.

The difference between the lines for the two men is marked, to say the least. When I got here, about five members of the press were waiting outside the door. To say that Yahoo! isn't the buzz brand it once was is understating the situation. The company is going to have to pull out something huge here to garner some notice among the deluge of CES press releases, talks, and product announcements.

I hesitate to speculate too much, but word is that Yahoo! is going to open up its mobile platform, ala Facebook and Google's OpenSocial. If that is the case, the announcement hardly seems earth-shattering.

Whatever the announcement actually is, I'll bring it to you.

11:00 AM: The Yahoo! keynote is running a few minutes late, but the screen is keeping us entertained with Fun Facts like this: "A chain of all of Yahoo's users would wrap around the earth 11 times [huh?].

11:10 AM: Okay, now it's ten minutes late. We've got a video with an over-the-top rock riff intro, kids on skateboards high-fiving, lots of people using their mobile devices.

Announcer: Ladies and Gentle, please welcome Jerry Yang.

Jerry: I'm sorry to disappoint you, it's still the same face. It's time to get Yahoo! yodeling again, and as CEO, I'm excited to introduce what the next phase of the Internet has to offer.

I want to talk about the changing face of the Internet consumers out there. From the newest to the most experienced users out there, it's our job to help you use the Internet to the fullest. Our goal is to help you make the most out of your life as the starting point of your entire Web experience.

David and I started Yahoo! 13 years ago. The Internet was a free-for-all that needed to be organized. Our goal was to be your starting point. Our intention was that the Web would go mainstream,and now there are over 1 billion users on the Web today.

It's a communication, commerce, productivity medium. It consolidates all of the information that's come before. A dozen or so years later, we still have the same goal, to be a rich starting point.

We all have multiple social networks, are reading blogs--how do we make these relationships really simple for people to use? At Yahoo! we're the most simple starting points for your life.

What's changing? It clear that the world is becoming more open and interoperable. Everything is becoming mobile and social. The futures is about making the Web experience simpler and more efficient for everyone.

First we have a series of announcements on our mobile platform and have a sneak peak of our desktop programs.

The mobile challenge is creating a simple staring point for all users, devices, and services. I'd like to introduce Marco Boris.

Marco: Yahoo! Go Is going 3.0 [holding up a real phone. Phone is on monitor] We have made Yahoo! Go 3.0 more beautiful with animation and preview bubbles. There's easy navigation and a nice environment.

We've made it easier to use [demonstrating mailing features, Flickr widget].We have other classic Yahoo! Features like news, weather, sports, and entertainment.

Yahoo! Go now remembers what you did with each widget. IfI'm browsing a map, looking at new driving directions and a call comes in, it knows what you're doing.

We're announcing the new Yahoo! homepage for mobile. We've completely rewritten it from scratch for the mobile environment. It has the My Snippets section. They are preview modules of the Internet services that you're using, like entertainment and weather. You go to the Yahoo! starting point, get your preview, and interact with the Yahoo! features that you want.

The internet is more than just Yahoo! The whole point is about opening up the Yahoo! homepage to the whole internet, not just Yahoo! services. You can put any content that you want. You can add RSS feeds and other things. It allows you to quickly add other services. With one click, i can have a selection of all of the stuff that I've customized on My Yahoo! It's a quick way to hae everything that's essential to your life.

Everyone loved Yahoo! Go and loved the experience, but people wanted other experiences. We're opening up Yahoo! Go to the world, so every company, big or small will be able to create widgets for Yahoo! Go.

We're also announcing partnerships with three companies, MTV News, MySpace, and eBay. We've been working with these companies for several months. The icons are now part of your carousel.

The real advantage of writing a mobile widget is that you have an easy way to write a powerful widget. A widget is a mobile application that is easy to use and feature-rich. Everything I can do on the PC, I can now do on my mobile phone.

Jerry: What's exciting is that we have the potential to make many partners.

Marco: Yahoo! 2.0 is available on over 300 devices, and we expect 3.0 to be on that many devices. It will be on 30, during the beta stage.

Jerry: One of the goals for us is to create a developing platform.

Marco: Our strategy is to create an ecosystem that is open to a broad number of users. Widgets can now be used on any phone with a mobile browser that's HTML-based. You write the widget once, and it's our job to get it into the Go and browser environment. With just one click, I can run the same MySpace widget in the browser. MySpace didn't need to write these widgets once, but they work on both environments.
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The other thing we're doing is, together with Motorola, LG, Excess, is running these widgets directly on their devices. It's our job to give users the best experience on these devices.

As you know well, the way Yahoo! makes money is through ads. We've been a leader in mobile advertising. We're now taking the same tech that we've used for developers and giving them to advertisers to create a rich advertising experience.

We believe that be providing advertisers tools, we'll kickstart this mobile ecosystem. The interesting thing is that the advertiser can use the components of the mobile platform. [Showing a map with store locations.]

Not only do we make it run on every device, we give users the tools to make the experience richer and easy. Eventually we want to reach a billion users, we have to remove obstacles. Today we are opening up these technologies to developers to build this ecosystem.

Imagine that you're taking Yahoo! Mail and making it an open platform for developers to create a richer user experience. [Showing inbox with email, IM, text messages, voice mails.]

We're creating a universal inbox. Once I click on Simplify My Inbox, it shows me connections in Yahoo! services and third parties, like LinkedIn or Myspace. Yahoo! is going through my networks and weighing contacts based on volume and messages. This creates a relevance ordering for people that are important to me.

We get updates for locations and people selling things on eBay [looks like Facebook--ed.]

I see Recommended, which means things that I haven't added, but people in my network are recommending for me.

[Dragging message from inbox into Yahoo! Maps. Takes address from message and throughs it on map as well as information about the sender. Click on Tags button. It's basically a tag cloud laid over a map, using the world's most popular tags from places like Flickr. Click on the tag and Flickr photos show up.]

Because of all of the data that we can understand from places like Flickr, as we open up that infrastructure, we'll be able to access ever more data. One of the things that we're envisioning for the future is the idea of My Conversations, which digests different conversations and threads.

[Drag thread onto map. Users show up and places on the map--restaurants. Suggests restaurants based on user preferences. The bigger the number, the more matches].

[eVite is integrated. Pulls relevant information from map and restaurant writeups and creates an eVite for all of those on the thread]. We're leveraging eVite's very popular data system. Sending out the invitation as a mobile message, also overlays message on TV].

As we go back to the new front page of our inbox, we're using a very simple metaphor to showcase some very complicated information.

As we wrap up the demo, I wanted to mention that this is trying to demonstrating that the Web is about complicated infromation integration and sovling some very complicated problems in a very simple interface.

[Cofounder David Filo Enters]

David: Opening up the network is very interesting. Those essential services are opening up. The good news is that we're that that far away from this. Some of the basic building blocks are available. We're really going to see the power of openess on a big scale. You'll be hearing a lot more from us, in the coming months. We're taking our experience, and allowing other people to build on top of that.

Jerry: We're still trying to make things simple, going forward. On the front end, we're driving simplicity. It's a pretty exciting future. We're ready to show you what Life with an exclamation point is going to be like.

[End of keynote]