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Big boys

• Darren Waters
• 8 Jan 07, 09:39 PM

I've spent the morning with the big boys at CES - Microsoft and Yahoo.

Microsoft is giving more details on its internet TV plans, especially the ability to get TV over the net to your Xbox 360 games console.

I'll be writing more about that in a feature on the digital home for later in the week.

Yahoo was showing off a new service for mobile phones called Yahoo Go.

They want to improve the experience of using the internet on a mobile phone - which is generally a poor way to access information.

"Everyone knows that mobile internet sucks," Steve Boom, senior vice president for broadband and mobile at Yahoo, told me.

Yahoo Go is an application you can download to your phone - more than 400 phones will be able to run the software by the end of the year - and it acts as a gateway to the internet.

The idea is based around the widget approach - the little utilities that run on PCs or Macs in the background.

The interface is easy to navigate and you can choose the widgets you want to use - from news to sport, weather, maps, local information etc.

Yahoo is stressing that it's an open approach - anyone can build widgets for Yahoo Go and people can personalise their experience.

"This is about bringing the open internet to the mobile phone," Mr Boom said.

He also stressed that mobile operators needed to bring down the walled garden approach and let people surf freely on phones, if the mobile web was going to take off.

On a different note: I know I'm focusing on the bigger players so far at CES but it is only half way through day one officially. I hope to get a sense of what the smaller players, especially some British firms, are up to later in the week.

If there is anything in particular you want me to look at, please let me know.