Today brings the official announcement of Yahoo! Research Labs Berkeley, an experiment in which we’ll see what happens when we take the mobile media and social media research we’ve been doing at Garage Cinema and supercharge it with Yahoo! brains and backing.

This is really exciting: it means that great ideas from Garage Cinema, unmediated, and elsewhere will have a chance to be implemented and deployed to hundreds of millions of people around the world. Even better, Yahoo! is committed to making the Berkeley Lab a place for open, collaborative research–meaning we can publish and exchange ideas with colleagues at Berkeley and everywhere else. It’s a fantastic opportunity, and I feel lucky to be a part of it.

So next time you’re in Berkeley, stop by the Lab and say hi!