It seems like Yahoo chief Jerry Yang fell into the usual trap of keynoters at CES of trying to sound relevant by demonstrating products in January, but then admitting they will be delivered who knows when?

And for a company that seems forever trapped in the process of trying to make something synergistic from its disparate parts and acquisitions (think Flickr, Upcoming and Del.icio.us), that can’t be good.

Mr Yang said it was time to get Yahoo yodelling again, but the only substance in his speech was the announcement of Yahoo! Go 3.0 for mobile devices and a demo of what Yahoo Mail could look like in the future.

Yahoo Go did look a big improvement on the 2.0 version and the carousel of services it offers, always limited by the size of the mobile screen.

It includes a redesign, a new mobile home page and mobile widgets that third parties are expected to provide now Yahoo is opening up its platform. But the service is only in its early beta phase and is limited to just a few devices.

The Yahoo Mail revamp looked impressive with its ability to rank the importance of address-book contacts and reveal their activities in a style similar to Facebook’s newsfeed and Plaxo’s Pulse.

Jerry Yang showed how an email or instant messaging discussion about where to eat for dinner could be dragged onto a Yahoo Maps icon to reveal favoured locations or turned into an Evite invitation.

However, as Mr Yang and fellow co-founder David Filo confessed, this was still very much in the concept phase.

“We are not that far away, some of the building blocks are there today,” said Mr Filo, in a statement that summed up Yahoo’s continuing quest for its holy grail of joined-up social networking and Web 2.0 services.

Portable navigation devices should be a godsend for finding your way around the vast Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and there are plenty of new ones to choose from on display in the booths.

Garmin has refreshed its lineup and announced a $100 plug-in that GPS-enables a laptop, with its familiar mapping software and directions included.

Magellan said its next generation of devices will have a wireless connection that allows them to connect to Google Local Search to find businesses in their area and get directions to them.

Sony has re-entered the category in North America with two new devices, the nav-u NV-U73T and NV-U83T. They are much-improved successors to Sony’s first effort, the NV-U70 unveiled at CES two years ago. The company says it planned an update to the U70 before deciding to "go back to the drawing board" for these models.

I was given a pre-show demo and was impressed with a non-electronics feature – a suction-cup base that provides a rock-solid connection to the dashboard but, with the release of a lever,  can be easily moved and remounted.

The high-end 83T has a 4.8-inch touch-screen display, which offers a dual-view as the driver approaches turns and gesture commands - drawing a roof with a finger, makes the destination become home. A POSITION Plus feature uses a pressure sensor, gyro sensor and an acceleration sensor to judge altitudes and give better indications of position when a view of the GPS satellite is blocked.

The 83T also includes a built-in microphone and Bluetooth to add hands-free phone calls with Bluetooth-equipped cell phones. The 73T should sell for around $350 from February and the 83T for $500.

This batch of announcements could cause a rethink by Silicon Valley start-up Dash Navigation, which made its internet-enabled Dash Express available for pre-order last month at a rather costly $600 and with monthly charges of $10-$13.

"The subtext of this show is that the internet has won."

So declared Intel executive vice president Sean Maloney when I met him for breakfast at the ungodly hour of 7am in Las Vegas today.

To which the obvious response is: Well, up to a point.

As at other recent Consumer Electronics Shows, bringing internet services and content into the consumer electronics realm has been a big talking point at this years’ event. Sharp and Samsung showed off TVs that can draw content straight off the internet, no PC required. Microsoft added some more partners for its Xbox Live video marketplace.

Yet given how big the expectations -and the hype - have been, this seems very little to brag about (and anyway, doesn’t viewing weather forecasts from USA Today on your Samsung TV somehow feel very 1992?)

Robbie Bach, Microsoft’s top consumer honcho, was putting a diplomatic face on things when I met him later. He pointed out that the big TV networks are all trying out ways of distributing shows online, even if they can’t agree yet on a business model, and the movie studios are releasing more titles, even if they generally still feel safer for now with the familiar video-on-demand model rather than download-to-own.

Privately, other senior tech industry executives I’ve spoken to in the last couple of days have been far more sceptical than him. According to one, all the heat surrounding the Blu-ray / HD-DVD format war shows that Hollywood is looking the wrong way: it should instead be rushing to build an online distribution business as fast as it can, before it is overtaken by the same fate that has befallen the record labels.

It seems fitting that the biggest buzz at this year’s show has surrounded Pansonic’s 150-inch TV and Sony’s ultra-thin OLED screen (the same model that went on sale in Japan late last year, though in only very limited numbers.) Perhaps you’re too cheap to pay $2,500 for an 11 inch TV, but these are still the dream screens that the consumer electronics industry believes you should be aspiring to. Only, don’t ask whether they come with a USB port on the back.

With high-definition images now available from the smallest cameras and even mobile phones, the High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) is being adapted to provide a link with HDTVs.

Silicon Image, the Silicon Valley company whose technology is behind HDMI, has come up with a proprietary solution for smaller devices that should eventually be adopted in some form by the standard.

Its Mobile High-Definition Link (MHL) reduces the pin-count of an HDMI connector from 19 to five to suit a smaller device and interface.

It plans to introduce this as a "dongle" converter or a docking station that will have a standard HDMI connection on the other end.

"This opens up a huge new set of segments," says Stevan Eidson, director of product marketing at Silicon Image.

While only the smartest smart phones will be able to take advantage of the new connection, the research company In-Stat estimates the inclusion of phones, point-and-shoot cameras and portable media players will grow the addressable market from less than 250m devices last year to 1bn in 2010.

The move by Silicon Image also gives it more breathing room ahead of the WirelessHD standard being developed by a Silicon Valley rival SiBeam and a consortium of consumer electronics manufacturers.

The consumer electronics industry’s big annual bash in Las Vegas got off to its usual start on Sunday evening - a speech from Bill Gates, boss of a company that still often seems to be struggling to locate its own consumer gene.

Gates’ CES speeches (this will be his last) are a useful reminder of just how many eggs Microsoft has in the consumer basket. No matter if HD-DVD has all but lost the next-gen DVD format war, Microsoft is also pushing ahead fast with Xbox Live Marketplace, a venue for selling downloadable video (some cynics, in fact, claim that this is where its real long-term interest lies and it only ever saw HD-DVD as a diversionary tactic to try to stall Sony’s Blu-ray.)

To coincide with CES, Microsoft issued a deluge of fresh data about its consumer businesses. But what do all the numbers really add up to?

Windows Vista. 100m licences in the first year. This compares with 67m licences in the first year of XP - but then, there are many more PCs around now. Consumers certainly didn’t take quickly to Vista. The new Aero interface was meant to produce a "wow" effect but that was quickly drowned out by problems with incompatible device drivers, insufficient machine memory, and other glitches. With a de-bugged service pack release due soon, though, Vista’s early bad press should eventually fade.

Xbox 360. 17.7m sold to date. A good headstart in the next-gen console race. But the Wii shows no signs of slowing down, and the apparent defeat of HD-DVD gives the (Blu-ray enabled) PS3 a much-needed boost.

Xbox games. 1.6m copies of Mass Effect sold in the first six weeks, and plenty of buzz among Xbox’s core users. Finally, a game to stand alongside Halo?

Zune Social. More than 1.5m registered users. That’s not a bad start for the social networking play that is meant to do for the Zune player what Xbox Live is starting to do for the console. That’s no replacement, though, for actually selling the hardware. Tellingly, there were no numbers on how many Zunes were sold over the holidays.

Beijing Olympics. 3,000 hours of exclusive online video from NBC will be powered by Microsoft’s Silverlight. That will be a great showcase for a technology that is fighting it out with Adobe’s Flash player. However, the joint NBC/ MSN site for the Olympics will carry adverts that are sold and served up by NBC, so no success here in extending Microsoft’s online advertising reach.

Things may never return to bubble-era levels. But as this chart (from data released by Dow Jones VentureSource) shows, there is something of a boom underway in cashing out VC investments.

Last year, the amount raised from IPOs jumped by 80 per cent to $6.7bn. The number of deals grew by a third and the average amount raised ballooned as Wall Street threw money at young tech companies.

Meanwhile, thanks to some big-ticket deals like Yahoo’s $812m purchase of Right Media and Google’s $625m splurge on Postini, $46bn worth of venture-backed companies changed hands in the M&A market, 45 per cent more than the year before.

As always, the question is: How much of this cash will be recycled straight back into VC investments?

  The arrival of a former airline executive to run leading Linux distributor Red Hat looks like a sign of the times.

Matthew Szulik, who held the CEO job for nearly a decade, was a warrior of the software holy wars, a man with a strong philosophical belief in the importance of the GPL and a clear distate for proprietary software and the business tactics often used to entrench it.

By contrast, newcomer James Whitehurst comes across as a pragmatist (Szulik said just before Christmas that he was stepping down, but would remain chairman.)

When I spoke to Whitehurst on Thursday - his third day on the job - his defence of open source was on purely practical rather than philosophical grounds:

Fundamentally, it’s a better way to develop software. Would I describe myself as a zealot, and proprietary software as evil? No, definitely not.

That’s a big change. For good measure, he also struck a conciliatory tone when asked about arch-enemy Microsoft, saying that he would be willing to enter discussions with the software giant "if there’s any partner out there who wants to chat about things that would help customers."

Who knows if this signals a thaw ahead. But with Microsoft already cozying up to Novell and helping to sell support contracts for SuSe Linux, the software industry’s philosophical divide is starting to look much less pronounced.

HDMI has helped to reduce the clutter of connecting cables around the television and WirelessHD may remove them entirely now it is finally getting off the ground.

Its "special interest group" consortium - led by LG, NEC, Panasonic, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba - has just announced Version 1.0 of its wireless specification for high-definition baseband video transmission.

The specification arrives nine months later than expected, but WirelessHD’s backers have had to convince the Motion Picture Association of America that the technology offers content protection and can be restricted enough so as not to beam movies across an apartment complex.

Intel has joined the group, which now includes 40 "early adopter and promoter companies".

“With the completion of the WirelessHD specification, consumer electronics manufacturers can focus on their WirelessHD-based product development efforts,” said John Marshall, chairman of the group.

Mr Marshall is also co-founder of  SiBeam, the Silicon Valley company whose technology is at the centre of WirelessHD.

It is taking a similar position to Silicon Image, a Valley company that has developed HDMI.

"It will be interesting to see when WirelessHD comes out, how well it works," says Stevan Eidson, product marketing director at  Silicon Image.  He questions the quality of service of wireless and says HDMI is currently 10 times cheaper than WirelessHD.

The standard will also face challenges from other wireless technologies. While no WirelessHD products are yet available, Westinghouse will show off a television at the Consumer Electronics Show next week connected by Pulse-Link’s ultra-wideband (UWB) technology.

Data portability was always likely to become a major issue among the Web 2.0 crowd in 2008, but it has come to the fore sooner than most expected.

Arch blogger Robert Scoble has managed to get his Facebook account frozen by trying to export his contacts to another service.

Here’s the message he received from Facebook Customer Support:

“Our systems indicate that you’ve been highly active on Facebook lately and viewing pages at a quick enough rate that we suspect you may be running an automated script. This kind of Activity would be a violation of our Terms of Use and potentially of federal and state laws.

As a result, your account has been disabled. Please reply to this email with a description of your recent activity on Facebook. In addition, please confirm with us that in the future you will not scrape or otherwise attempt to obtain in any manner information from our website except as permitted by our Terms of Use, and that you will immediately delete and not use in any manner any such information you may have previously obtained.”

Mr Scoble was trying out a new feature of the Plaxo online address book that allows its users to import and merge Facebook contacts’ information with their other data.

John McCrea, Plaxo’s head of marketing, told me he at first suspected this was a deliberate Facebook policy to block data portability, but he now hopes it is just a malfunction of its system, which Facebook’s latest response seems to confirm.

Joseph Smarr, developer of Plaxo’s Facebook Import, said the feature is still in its “alpha” stage and Plaxo had not yet consulted Facebook on introducing it.

But he said he took recent pronouncements by Facebook that it wanted to make its service more open as a green light to proceed.

Facebook is certainly protective of the value of the contact information it holds on members.

I have used a Facebook application called FriendCSV to export all my contacts to a spreadsheet. However, this does not export their email addresses as Facebook shows them as image files rather than text. Plaxo has now got round this obstacle by using optical-character-recognition technology.

Mr Scoble seems to be the only one of Plaxo’s Alpha testers to have been fingered by Facebook, which is understandable. With his 5,000 Facebook friends, the importer would have been “highly active” indeed in pushing all of them into Plaxo.

Meanwhile, he has stirred up a storm on the blogosphere and is backing dataportability.org, as the movement for free movement of personal information on the web gathers momentum.