Yahoo CEO Melissa Mayer chose the Consumer Electronics Show (CES (News - Alert)) going on in Las Vegas as the place to unveil how she is using the money received from Alibaba to remake the company, and leverage the high-profile talent the company has acquired, especially tech “guru” David Pogue.  As comedian Artie Johnson used to say on the old TV show Laugh In, “Very Interesting!”

In case you missed it, during a live blog at CES, Mayer disclosed the following:

• Acquisition of Aviate a developer of a service that recommends apps based on location and time. The acquisition will be used to help further personalize Yahoo's apps and sites.
• Availability of Yahoo News Digest, an app that leverages Summly's content summarization tech to provide twice-a-day news digests containing articles, photos, tweets, and other content
• Yahoo Tech, the much anticipated tech news run by the aforementioned ex-NYT columnist David Pogue who asserted that Yahoo Tech will serve "the middle 85% of normal people," and contrary to prevailing practice will not be monetized via banner ads.

Obviously, the ones that caught my eye were the Yahoo News Digest and Yahoo Tech.

Simply digestible

When it comes to the general news the Yahoo News Digest is aimed at what the company seems to believe is the fact that we have all become victims of attention deficient disorder (ADD). The theory is we are all so overwhelmed by the plethora of news that we simply don’t have time to invest in self-sorting and/or long-form (video as in TV or something more than a few words) content consumption. Therefore, what we need is an algorithm-based service to keep us informed in near real-time, i.e., twice a day. 

Source (News - Alert): Yahoo

While like everyone else, especially given my job here at TMCnet, I have an urgency to see what is going on, and with the caveat that I might not be representative of the target audience, I think I will stick with my own self-sorting mechanisms for staying informed—Google (News - Alert) Alerts, the various wire services, the several dozen trusted sources (CNN, CNET, The New York Times, and many more) I have booked marked or get pushed information from, and even Yahoo’s own technology section.  Indeed, while I appreciate the fact that this is will show up on my mobile device while intriguing just gives me another thing to delete after a quick scan. The reason is the likelihood that I will not have already seen it seems remote at best and the scan will take time that might be used more productively elsewhere.

That said, I will likely use the service since its aggregation capabilities shown above have the potential to point me in directions I might not otherwise explore that are not on Yahoo’s site which one would think is the objective of the exercise. 

Tech Talk 

Let me start by saying I am a huge fan of Mr. Pogue and have followed him for years. Again, this is a capability I will scan just in case there is some trend or insight I might not see someplace else. In fact, the aggregation of items from thought leaders and original content is convenient.  However, for those of you who wish to stay abreast of all things tech—in summary fashion, breaking news and also longer-form content—I highly recommend (and I say this objectively and not based on where I work) TMCnet.com, and our own twice daily news digests, TechToday (PM) and Tech Fast (AM). You can sign-up for those in the Tech Sectors area of the page.  We have been publishing both of these popular news blasts for quite some time.  And, I believe I echo the feelings of everyone in the tech publishing business in saying we welcome Yahoo to the community and look forward to healthy competition since it makes us all better. 

Yahoo!  (News - Alert)