@CES: Yahoo's Jerry Yang on Mobile Internet

Yahoo’s (YHOO) CEO Jerry Yang comes out in khakis and a blue polo shirt.

“We’re ready and excited about what the next phase of the Internet has to offer.”

Yang wants to talk about the changing face of Internet consumers. We’re going down memory lane first. “13 years ago, David and I founded Yahoo! … Our intention was always that the Web would go mainstream … going from a few thousands users to now a billion users online.” Plus ca change, plus elle reste la meme, says Yang, in effect.

“We all read more blogs, tapping on multiple sources…” How do we make that simple for people to use, Yang asks. By being the “premiere Internet starting point," he says.

Yang will talk today about two things, about progress on the mobile version of Yahoo!, and then a “sneak peek” of what’s going on with the “desktop experience” of Yahoo!

Introducing Marco Boerries, head of Yahoo!’s “connected life” division. Year ago, says Yang, introduced Yahoo Go! 2.0 for mobile phones. Today, announcing Yahoo Go! 3.0. They are bringin up a mobile phone screen capture on the screen. Made the UI “more beautiful. A new blue menu at the bottom of the screen allows for shortcuts to compose message.

See all the Flickr photos that friends have posted. (Yahoo! owns photo-sharing site Flickr.) Completely written from scratch the Yahoo! home page for Yahoo! Go! At the top of the screen is a search dialogue, below that is a “What’s New” section. And then “Snippets,” previews of the Yahoo! content one uses, like news, weather, etc. There’s a Snippet “Gallery” that contain things from third parties.

Hmm, sounds like a Facebook move. You can subscribe to the services that you’ve set up in your profile.

Starting today, any publisher can make “widgets” that plug into Yahoo! Go! Showing some icons on screen of eBay (EBAY), News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace, and Viacoms (VIA.B) MTV. Been working in partnership with eBay, Viacom and News for past few months, have some widgets developed with them.

A “widget” is a fully fledged mobile app, Boris is insisting — “Everything I do on my PC I can now do on my mobile phone.” Showing off MySpace, friend requests. Yang: “We have the potential for many, many developers to join this.”

Yahoo! Go! available on over 300 devices. Yahoo! Go 3.0 will be offered on over 30 devices when it goes live. As part of the developer strategy, also manage to runs the widgets on any phone with a Web browser, which means a phone doesn’t have to have the Yahoo! Go! code on it. Able to call up one’s personalized list of widgets from any phone.

Working with LG Electronics and other phone vendors to make widgets run natively on phones.

Yang points adds are running on the user interface of the phone, segueing into mobile advertising. Taking technology for widget developers and giving it to advertisers to make “rich ads.” In the demo, clicking on the “stores” link for an advertisor leads to a scrollable map of store locations.

You’ll be able to check out a beta version of 3.0 later today by directing your phone’s browser to http://beta.m.yahoo.com