B. Mann Consulting

I'm currently at a Yahoo! Canada preview event at the Opus Hotel. I'm actually skipping out on the Vancouver Drupal User Group because it's taking longer than I expected (sorry, guys!).

Yahoo! is going to be focusing heavily on the Canadian market. I've long been convinced that focusing on the Canadian market is a great strategy. Obviously, it's not as large as the US market, but the 'search density' is very low: it's very easy to get top ranks for keywords that include Canadian place names.

Yahoo! Canada has grown from 12 people to over 100. Of course, most of those are based out east: there is a small sales ofice here in Vancouver. Next goal (for me): get an R&D lab in Vancouver. Of course, I still know more people out of SF Yahoo than here in Canada: most of the focus here is on sales rather than technology.

The Panama Search advertising demo was very interesting. Most of the presentation was focused on ad purchasers, rather than inventory providers. It seems to have a much more robust dashboard and great geo-location capabilities, visualization, analytics, etc. -- they actually mentioned 13 provinces and territories.