Analysing the past, present and future of Yahoo Labs By Katie Scott, WIRED.CO.UK The three R&D centres and seven labs worldwide that make up Yahoo Labs bring together sociologists, code writers, economists and editors to essentially make our online browsing experience as "happy" as possible. Dr Prabhakar Raghavan is Chief Strategy Officer, Executive Vice President and Head of Yahoo Labs. He started the operation six years ago. It now captures 50TB (51,200GB) of data per day and its work is believed to impact one out of every two people online. Raghavan says that the key to its success has been bringing together machine and human intelligence, and specifically, gathering minds from a wide range of disciplines. He explains: "The first thing that we did was hired a bunch of academic economists -- people who were teaching at places like Harvard and CalTech. What these people did was designed market places for advertising. "The thing that you don't want is someone with a computer and software background like myself writing a line of code that turns out to have immense economic consequences. The way that we have regimented this is by having the economists lay out what the marketplace is, what the pricing theory is; how you run the auctions; and then you have the computer people coming in and transcribing this into code." The next step, he adds, is to bring in sociologists to analyse the motives of shoppers. This, coupled with large-scale data-mining, could allow Yahoo Labs to analyse 30 million people in an hour. The advertising industry "is still extremely primitive", says Raghavan. "Advertisers just put pictures in front of people and hope they stare at them," he says. But tablet computers offer new opportunities. Yahoo has already rolled out a service called IntoNow Stateside (and promises a 2012 European release). This app is designed to make television watching a "more social experience". Says Raghavan: "One of the things that we have recognised through research at the labs is people who are looking at the same experience tend to be much more engaged with one another. This used to be the communal living room experience, but now the living room has got spread across globe. "With IntoNow, you can be watching a TV show and then turn on your tablet. By listening to the audio from the television, it figures out what you're watching because it is indexing in real time all of the shows that are being broadcast. It then starts to pull together related content and it also opens up your social network." While the television viewing experience is passive, the tablet offers more of a "lean in" experience, says Raghavan, therefore bringing the two together will help people engage more with their television. And this could help advertisers. In the not too distant future, Raghavan suggests that you could see an advert on television and then see a companion advert on your tablet that is tailored to your preferences. Yahoo Labs already has Living Ads, which are described as "immersive, interactive and adaptable", and designed specifically for tablets. And alongside Living Ads will run a free "personalised, living" magazine, specifically designed for the iPad, called Livestand. Like IntoNow, this is already available in the US. It essentially delivers content -- whether sports, TV listings, stocks or news -- from Yahoo's own network and third-party publishers based on your preferences. Read more here.