Guest: Marco Boerries - Yahoo!
Host: Jennifer Jones - PodTech

Jennifer Jones - PodTech
Hi! this is Jennifer Jones and I'm with PodTech and I'm here at the Dow Jones VentureWire Consumer Technology Ventures Conference with Marco Boerries and he is Senior VP of Yahoo's Connected Life and we're going to be talking about his keynote here and the topic he is going to be covering in just about a half-an-hour and I'm sitting right in front of the elevator or the accelerator, so its coming up, so, all the sound you're hearing in the background is just that. So, Marco, welcome to PodTech, thank you very much for the interview.

Marco Boerries - Yahoo!
Thanks for having me, Jennifer.

Jennifer Jones - PodTech
So, how do you create the Connected Life, that's what it's all about, how you actually get things from one advice wise to another and you really ensure that people are really going to be able to read it, listen to it and look at it.

Marco Boerries - Yahoo!
Yeah, that's the mission of my group that's was the company mission that I sold to Yahoo about a year-and-a-half ago VerdiSoft. The whole idea as you know is the Internet is turning from a delivery vehicle HTML pages to really becoming a delivery vehicle of consumer services, and the big difference here is that rather than putting a browser on all of these devices, where it's a mobile phone or a TV but then connects back to the web as we know what and try to display sites that have been designed for the PC. Connected Life is really about how can we connect your services, your consumer services like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Search, Flickr etcetera into the device. So, basically connect people's lives through their devices and really bringing the Internet as a back-end service into your device, and really have a very much immersive device experience where you don't have to worry about, do I have the right data? Data gets pushed to you and based on your relevance and based on your settings, you really have this vitality experience that can become addictive as we know from the BlackBerry, right. Everyday the BlackBerry is buzzing hundreds of times it was email and it's personally relevant to me and that's what makes it addictive. What we are trying to do with Yahoo! Go, which is a product line of Connected Life is really take that to the next level and bring those services that you decided to use was Yahoo to use for your devices whether it's mobile phone, the TV or the desktop.

Jennifer Jones - PodTech
So, how are -- what are your biggest challenges in doing that?

Marco Boerries - Yahoo!
So, obviously it's finally the right user experience on the device. For example, let's take the mobile phone; we do believe that within the next five to ten years way more people will access the Internet through the mobile phone than through the PC. So, in order to maintain our leadership that we have today on the PC side, we obviously have to dominate and lead the PC and the mobile phone space as well which we are well intended to do. The mobile phone is very different, right. The interaction model is very different, the screens are very smaller, you have much higher latency yes the networks get faster, but still it's the difference between -- there is a huge difference between your PC and the small screen and the small set of keys that you have to design the UI. So, you have to completely come up with a new user interface paradigm and we feel that we have just done that, and then a lot of these things have to be much more relevant to you. Where the PC is a browsing experience, right, it's like you have this big screen, you go to Yahoo! Search or Google search, you type in your keyword and then you get like, 12 results on the first page which you quickly can scroll through and then you say, 'next' and go to the next one. A mobile you have to be much more relevant because the amount of results you can display on the mobile phone is much more limited, each next click could be a new network connection that takes time. So, you have to be much more relevant in terms of the content that you bring to the device, and we feel that Yahoo has a like up on anybody else here because we know much more about the user than anybody else because the user does much more things on our network than they do with anybody else. So, we -- was really we one click and you logging into Yahoo! Go on your mobile phone can bring the stuff that you care about directly to your mobile phone in a way that fits the mobile phone. We know your stock portfolio, we know your favorite sports teams, your new sources, we you're your address book, your calendar. So, really because of this investment that you have made into the Yahoo! Services is literally one click we can mobilize them and bring them in the right fashion to the mobile phone.

Jennifer Jones - PodTech
So, what do you think about any of the kind of thing that YouTube's done in terms of the content that's on there, how of much of that sort of mentality will actually effect, what is actually brought to the mobile phone in the future?

Marco Boerries - Yahoo!
I think, whether it's YouTube, whether it's Flickr, whether it's del.icio.us a lot of company that Yahoo brought, all of these content forms will make it to the mobile device. I do especially believe that video and pictures are really great on the mobile device because a mobile device is a great communication device in terms of these multimedia tools, whether its video or photos.

Jennifer Jones - PodTech
So, give me some -- so, how hungry do you think are people for a different sort of looking feel on a cell phone. I mean the sense is that you look at the kind of content that you might get as I said on the YouTube but I really sense like the younger generation is impatient with sort of things that they're seeing on the web today then they are on YouTube. Do you think that's true?

Marco Boerries - Yahoo!
Partially yes, I think when you look on the mobile phone, there's literally three main things that people want on their mobile phone based on our studies. #1 because they have it with them all the time, it's an ideal vehicle to stay connected with the stuff that matters for me, whether it's my email or people, right. That's what the use of phone today is to stay connected with the people that we care about using voice. So, staying connected to my community, to my friends, to my email that is really one key part. The other part which a mobile phone is graded is because if we have the right tools which we believe we have, and is getting quick information. That's why we are completely redesigning our mobile search experience because we do believe that mobile search will be very, very different on a mobile phone than on the PC. Its not web search, right now whether at Google or Ask, we all deliver web search on the mobile phone which is pretty much useless and then 85% of people do is search adult pictures on their phone, that's not mobile search. So, we really working hard to reinvent that or to invent that category because it hasn't been invented, I'm very excited about that because getting quick info on the mobile phone is great because you have it with you all the time, its always connected. So, stay connected and getting quick information. A third category is, I have five or ten minutes to kill, so quick entertainment, casual entertainment and a lot of what people do today is, they do it via games, that's why you download casual games and stuff like that and just do a five-ten minute quick game play. We do believe as network gets better, a lot of that will then be turned into rather than playing a game for five or ten minutes, I watch a video, I watch a movie trailer, I listen to a song, I listen to a music video. So, we believe as network gets better -- I have the five-ten minutes to kill, quick entertainment will become more multimedia rather than games.

Jennifer Jones - PodTech
So, how much is the younger generation drive you -- do you -- as you look at all these opportunities do you sort of look to the people who are say, 18-25 today to drive How you are designing or do you actually looking people say, 35-50, just because of the bloomers and all of that.

Marco Boerries - Yahoo!
In general from a design perspective we skew a little bit younger on mobile as an early adopt their segment but then the moment that the rule of large numbers come in, the same as if you can look at YouTube or MySpace or Flickr all products that have been started to -- with the younger audience as they early adopt their audience today skew pretty much across all segments because the moment large numbers come in, you get everybody but you're right, you design it little bit for younger audience who is little more willing to test these things, to adopt these things who is a little bit of more comfortable in putting queries on the phone with triple-tapping or T9. So, but overtime we feel that it will go to through all age groups and also depends very much by region, right, the US is very different and for example, in Europe where SMSing or texting as it called here pretty much everybody does from young to old so to speak, which is very different here. Then when you go into other regions like Asia, which is very big for us, my mandate inside Yahoo, is to build global products and drive them globally. When you go to India, 75% of the population is under the age of 21. So, clearly when you look outside the US, there's different, different user experiences that you have do and we do different products based on those demographics and regions.

Jennifer Jones - PodTech
So, I did have a question that I forgot to ask you in the very beginning. So, in terms of Connected Life that is sort of a group within Yahoo that is just strictly focused on this whole area.

Marco Boerries - Yahoo!
Yeah, Connected Life is a group within Yahoo that basically - but our sole responsibility is to take Yahoo beyond the browser. So, basically take the Yahoo, take the Yahoo services you'll use often and connect them to your mobile device, connect them to your desktop outside the browser, connect them to the TV. So, really the next Internet 3.0 which basically is like, how do you deliver these services into the device experience rather on top of the browser?

Jennifer Jones - PodTech
Impressive! Well, I've been speaking to Marco Boerries and he is Senior VP of Yahoo's Connected Life and I thank you very much for joining us. Good job and very good luck on your keynote which is in about 20 minutes.

Marco Boerries - Yahoo!
Thank you!