“This will be the biggest media event we’ll cover for the year, if not in the history of Yahoo,” said Ken Fuchs, VP of global media for Yahoo.

Also read: NBC’s Olympics authentication gives you a break

With 27 reporters on the ground in London — more than double Yahoo’s allotment for the 2010 Winter Games — and 25 regional sites covering the games in 12 languages in more than 200 countries, Yahoo is expecting a global audience of more than 700 million viewers over a two-week span.

Also read: Yahoo CEO – We must be clearer about what we won’t do

“This will showcase what you can do even though you don’t own the broadcast rights,” noted Fuchs. “If you look at past Olympics, there were more [viewing] minutes generated without the ability to live stream official events.”

Of course, Yahoo isn’t publicly revealing any revenue expectations for its coverage. But its business model seems to compare favorably to that of Comcast/NBCUniversal, which is paying $4.4 billion for U.S. Olympics broadcast rights through 2020 — and already reported a $200 million loss on the 2010 Winter Games.

Also read: Shazam to ply 2nd screen app to NBC’s Olympics coverage

Here’s how Yahoo’s major Olympic sponsors are getting involved:

>> Citi is sponsoring the Yahoo Olympic Medal Count, which will be available to nationalist-minded, “USA!”-chanting medal trackers on PC and mobile platforms. Citi is also backing Sportacular, an app that allows users to get updates, stats and news on specific events.

>> Visa will back some of Yahoo’s social media elements tied to the games. (Yahoo, for example, plans to amply employ its IntoNow social TV division.)

>> Transamerica will team with Yahoo to produce a video series, Tomorrow Makers, which will offer preview coverage of the next day’s events, profiles of the participating athletes, medal predictions and other content.

>> Procter & Gamble will sponsor a wide swath of Yahoo Olympics programming at both the corporate level and for its individual brands.

Citi expects a mid-range smartphone that costs Amazon around $150 to $170 to manufacture, but think Amazon will sell the phone at cost or below, as they are reportedly doing with the Kindle Fire and Kindle 4.

The analysts believe Foxconn International Holdings is currently developing the phone with Amazon, but that the device itself will be manufactured by Hon Hai’s TMS business group, which makes Kindle e-readers and Amazon’s rumored 9-inch tablet.

Mahaney is Citi’s internet research analyst and correctly predicted in May that Amazon would release a sub-$100 Kindle e-reader by the end of 2011. “With the clear success of the Kindle e-Reader over the past 3 years, and Kindle Fire possibly succeeding in the low-priced Tablet market, we view [a smartphone] as the next logical step for Amazon,” he writes.

The last-minute decision of Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and Samsung to move their launch event for Ice Cream Sandwich and the Nexus Prime from the first day of CTIA to next week in Hong Kong really took all the air out of this show, which is all you need to know about the current state of business-oriented mobile technology: a consumer-oriented launch would have been the talk of the town. Attendees were treated to very few new developments in mobile, with perhaps the most buzz centered around mobile payments and the concept of connected mobile devices, both of which have been talked about for years.

The ennui is pretty easy to understand: enterprise technology managers controlled the pace and adoption of technology for decades but starting with the launch of the iPhone in 2007, non-technology executives and employees have been demanding the right to use the devices they find so palatable in their regular lives for work purposes. As a result, “enterprise mobile technology” is kind of a misnomer; the dollars, talent, and hype in mobile are going toward companies that are building things for consumers.

Just look at the three startups the CTIA chose to feature during its closing keynote address on Thursday. Two of them: Shopkick and Jumio, are working on ways for retailers to provide a more pleasant shopping experience for consumers through apps for daily deals and payments-processing via the mobile device, respectively. And the other, Tango, has built a video-calling application that certainly has ramifications for business use but is not pitched that way on the company’s Web site.

Much of the problem stems from the fact that mobile platforms are still very much in flux: there’s Android and iOS, and perhaps a few others, but standardizing across a platform is still a very perilous decision given how quickly the mobile world changes. In the PC era, companies could deploy internal applications without having to worry about platform conflicts, especially as Web applications became popular.

But mobile is much more dynamic. Take the BlackBerry, the mobile device of choice for corporations for several years: app development on the BlackBerry is anemic compared to what’s happening on Android and iOS, where all the talented mobile developers flock first.

Sure, you can still provision BlackBerrys for your workers in order to ensure secure e-mail transactions (when the service works) but they won’t like it. When they make their own spending decisions, U.S. consumers are fleeing the BlackBerry in favor of iPhones or Android devices.

“It’s almost impossible if you have more than 1,000 employees to standardize on one kind of (mobile technology) to support the use cases of all your employees,” said Aaron Levie, founder and CEO of Box.net, during a panel discussion at CTIA around mobile business technology. Therefore most businesses haven’t standardized on app-friendly mobile devices (a group to which the BlackBerry does not belong) because it’s simply too daunting.

“We standardized on Windows (PCs), and it took forever. And then the executives came in with iPhones and said, ‘you better make this work,’” said Robert Schlaff, vice president and global mobile product manager for Citi.

This is not to say that businesses aren’t aware of how mobile technology will transform the way people work.

AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph De La Vega told attendees during his keynote speech that mobile is growing as a percentage of the average company’s IT budget. Polycom announced new mobile applications that enable powerful video-conferencing collaboration a step above what consumer apps like Skype allow. And companies like Amgen have deployed thousands of iPads to their workers as part of an experiment in mobile working conditions, said Polycom CEO Andy Miller during his keynote address.

But there is little consensus: modern mobile technology offers so much more of a personal computing experience than the personal computer, which makes it much more difficult to find common ground across a big company.

That leaves the enterprise in the same position it has been in since the launch of the iPhone: struggling to fit the “bring-your-own-device” reality of today’s workplace into a mobile strategy that gives their workers the tools they need without having to double their IT budgets.

“You have to define what you’re going to control a little more precisely,” said Jennifer Rosales, executive director of Verizon’s business solutions group. For IT executives used to calling the shots, that can be a glum exercise.

Google has traditionally operated with a go-big-or-don’t-go-at-all strategy, and Thursday’s event in New York was no different, with Google executives painting a picture of wireless NFC-based mobile payments on Android phones as the most significant shift in transactional history since coins gave way to paper money. The basic plan is what we’ve been expecting since Google chairman Eric Schmidt started talking about NFC (near-field communications) technology last fall: Android partners will start producing NFC-capable phones (the Nexus S is the only phone that currently works with the technology) that users can swipe at cash registers to pay for goods or services. The new wrinkle was that Citi and Mastercard’s PayPass system will be involved, meaning that Google decided to tap into an existing network of 311,000 wireless payment terminals installed around the world in businesses like gas stations and coffee shops in order to get the ball rolling.

And for those who don’t have a Citi Mastercard that hooks into the PayPass system, Google will have its own prepaid card within Google Wallet that you can add money to through existing credit cards: with a free $10 gift courtesy of Google’s cash hoard already in your account upon signup. A familiar list of businesses is working with Google to eventually accept Google Wallet, including Duane Reade, Walgreens, Peet’s Coffee, Radioshack, Subway, and Jamba Juice.

The motivation for introducing mobile payments are pretty clear. According to Mastercard, people who have received the 88 million PayPass-enabled cards in circulation spend more per transaction than those without the technology and use their cards more frequently for smaller purchases, meaning Mastercard gets transaction volume that would ordinarily fall to cash. Adding purchasing power to the mobile phone could increase that volume even more: Mastercard will now theoretically be tapping into a broader segment of the population that doesn’t have a credit card through banks that offer PayPass or that doesn’t even use Mastercard, as Google Wallet can be funded through any credit card.

That also means that businesses that decide to work with Google and Mastercard could see increased transaction volume, more revenue per transaction, or both. One interesting tidbit from Thursday’s presentation was the absence of Google Checkout from the equation, suggesting that Google understood it needed to partner with an established payment processor rather than attempt to force-feed Google Checkout down merchants’ throats, as it does in the Android Market.

From Google’s point of view, the wealth of transaction-related data that it could compile from such a service would give it a clear window into local purchasing habits, which then could be sold to advertisers to target Google users. Google said in an FAQ that “Google Wallet does not currently receive data about what products you purchase with it,” but at minimum the app needs to know where the transaction is being placed and how much was spent in order to send that information back to the bank. Just because Google doesn’t know that you bought $35 worth of Reese’s Peanut-Butter Cups at Walgreens doesn’t mean they can’t glean enough information through Google Wallet from a $35 purchase at Walgreens at 5:24 p.m. on Thursday in order to learn more about how people are spending money at businesses to help partners plan targeted ad campaigns.

Local business activity has been a huge priority for Google over the last several years, with Marissa Mayer heading up a new group focused specifically on local opportunities, and adoption of Google Wallet by those businesses further ingratiates the search giant into the local business market where companion products like Google listings and advertising can also be pitched. As growth in search advertising slows among established brands and companies, Google is targeting the hundreds of thousands of small businesses that don’t have much of an online presence. And it’s not alone: startups like Square are also hoping to convince businesses and users to use its mobile-payment technology in lieu of cash and credit cards.

Google Wallet also makes it easier for Google to enter the daily deals market, currently dominated by GroupOn and Living Social. Google Offers will provide Google with another outlet for local advertisers trying to draw traffic to their stores, and integrating it with Google Wallet could make it much easier to distribute and accept deal coupons at participating merchants.

Both Sprint (NYSE: S) and Google are betting that people will think Google Wallet is a reason to switch to Android devices. Only the Nexus S on Sprint will have the capability to use Google Wallet at launch, but Techcrunch reported after Thursday’s event that Google plans to distribute stickers that other phone users can affix to their devices should they want to get in on the NFC fun. As usual, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) hasn’t commented on its plans for mobile payments although it’s understood to be considering the notion, and while Research in Motion’s latest BlackBerry Bold phones support NFC, they won’t be available until this summer and it’s not clear whether RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) has lined up the partners needed to make mobile payments work on the back end. (Wireless-carrier mobile-payments supergroup Isis would be a likely candidate).

The only potential problem to Google Wallet is that it in many ways seems like a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist. It’s never been easier or more convenient for consumers to spend money as credit and debit card use becomes nearly ubiquitous in places like New York and San Francisco, where Google plans to first test Google Wallet. With people already a little concerned about the amount of personal information they can possibly share through their mobile phones, will they want to add account data to the list?

Sure, it’s kind of cool and futuristic to pay for things with a tap of a phone, but for the moment Google Wallet seems very much like something a consortium of corporations would really, really like you to use rather than a product the masses are clamoring for as to remove friction in the checkout line. With solid partners on board, Google has taken a good step toward making Google Wallet and mobile payments as easy to use as possible, but the transformation of the phone into the wallet won’t happen overnight.

– Better ad performance: Casual and in-game ads turn out higher engagement stats than standard banners — and they’re cheaper than search ads. A recent Kia campaign on Xbox Live, for example, netted ad click-through rates (CTRs) that were 840 percent higher than the company’s corresponding display ads — with average costs per click (CPCs) nearly 60 percent lower than search ads.

— Expanding (ad-friendly) demographics: Gamers aren’t just the 18-year-old guys playing World of Warcraft or Halo. The average game player is actually 35 — and a quarter of all games are played by people over 50. Meanwhile, 40 percent of all gamers are women. And it’s this “broad demographic appeal” that appears to be increasing marketers’ appetites for in-game ads, Mahaney wrote.

Photo Credit: RebeccaPollard

– US exposure: The report we mentioned earlier, from JPM’s Imran Khan, made the point that the big US internet names have been sharply reducing their dependency on the US economy. That’s not the case at IACI (NSDQ: IACI). In 2008, international revenue is expected to account for just 13 percent of the total. That compares to 35 percent at Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) and 52 percent at Google (NSDQ: GOOG), though arguably, the IAC division, once spun off, will make for a better comparison. In the meantime, the conglomerate IACI will not be protected against a US slowdown. Of course, one of the standalone divisions will be LendingTree, which is at the center of the storm.

– Lack of innovation: Mahaney doesn’t see the company creating new revenue streams, as Google and Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) have. He doesn’t deny that new products and services are being developed within IACI, just that few will contribute meaningfully to the business.

– Take out value: Seeing as IACI has already charted a course for the split-up, it’s highly unlikely that another company would try to make a play for the whole thing. Post-split, of course, various divisions could be in play. Liberty Media (NSDQ: LINTA) CEO Greg Maffei, for one, has already signaled interest in HSN and TicketMaster, at the right price.

– Bottom line: Despite the challenges, IACI isn’t doing terribly, which Mahaney acknowledges. Both revenues and margins are expected to grow in ’08. EBITDA is expected to rise by a respectable 21 percent for the year. But the report largely argues on a relative basis, and on this measure, the company’s peers are doing better.