The second From the Labs was presented by
Usama Fayyad and
Prabhakar Raghavan.
The presentation started by listing a number of Yahoo!'s recent innovative product releases such as Yahoo! 360o, Yahoo! MyWeb 2.0, Yahoo! Mail beta, Yahoo! Music
Engine and Yahoo! Messenger with voice. Yahoo! launches 100s of products a year and recently started spending more resources on research. They want to create a science to explain the various characterisitic of the Web which they can use to build innovative products.
So far they have launched the Yahoo! Tech Buzz Game which was launched at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference earlier this year. It is a fantasy prediction market for high-tech products, concepts, and trends. They also demoed Yahoo! Mindset which enables you to sort search results by your intent. The example scenario on the website is being able to sort search results for terms like "HDTV" based on whether you are doing research or trying to buy something. This is something Robert Scoble was recently asking for in his blog as the next generation in search. This is very impressive if they can actually scale it out to be more than demoware
Finally they showed off an application called Tagline which was a visual representation of popular photos and tagging trends in Flickr over time. It was a very flashy looking application but I couldn't see what the practical uses could be.