I also focus on our content platform. It's an extensive back-end content management, personalization and optimization system that we've been building over the past 18 months. It will power everything we do, on PCs, mobile [devices], tablets, across the board, and also all types of content. Bringing all our content together in a very powerful platform is a huge area of focus for us. This year you'll start to see a lot of innovation coming to market because we have that underneath us.

Another area of focus is cloud. We're on our second generation of cloud infrastructure here. Hadoop is part of the story but it's not all. There's a lot going on under the covers.

IDGNS: You've been on the job for about eight months. What's been your biggest challenge and your biggest accomplishment so far?

Stata: The last eight months haven't been business as usual in terms of my new role as CTO. With Blake and a lot of new talent coming on board at the executive level, we've spent a lot of time looking at the market, looking at our assets and strategizing.

When you do strategy, it's easy to get wrapped up in the grand and glorious three-year view. While we have a [long-term] view, we're also focused on how to connect that back to this quarter and next quarter so that we can advance user engagement. The number of users and top line [revenue] are critical focus points for the company in 2011, so that we can deliver against those important [goals] in the context of where we want to go as a company versus where we've been. The leadership team has not only articulated a strategy that makes a lot of sense for Yahoo but also thought really hard about how to execute against that strategy.