Way back in the early days of the Internet -- the mid-1990s, that is -- most big innovations emanated from teams of university students playing around with new technologies.
The first version of the Yahoo search engine and the original Netscape Web browser are perhaps the best examples of efforts from this time.
Now, Yahoo is returning to its roots in academia by collaborating with the University of California at Berkeley on a project called Yahoo Research Labs.
The lab will explore innovations in Internet search technology, social media and mobile media, said the organizations.
Information Wants To Be Shared
Assistant professor at UC Berkeley's School of Information and Management Systems Marc Davis will head the effort.
He is currently director of a group that focuses on the intersection between people as media consumers and as media producers. He cofounded the UC Berkeley Center for New Media.
The group will look at what it calls "social media," an area of technology that includes photos, video, music, audio and text created for personal, public or community sources and then shared, referenced or remixed by consumers in ways that help foster social relations.
This area intersects with another of the group's interests: mobile media.
Finding the Sweet Spots
Mobile phone handsets and other mobile devices are proliferating rapidly, marking the beginning of a new era of mobile media, said Yankee Group's Mike Goodman.
The challenge, though, will be finding the sweet spots in the markets the new devices produce. Discovering exactly which tools consumers will embrace and which they will reject remains very much an ongoing experiment.
In response to such challenges, Yahoo Research Labs will be investigating fundamentally new ways of doing research, said the organization.
The hope is to create what they call "sociotechnical" systems and to create ways for more people to access more Internet content on more devices from more places. The partnership initially is set to operate for five years.
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