Tents are set up on the campus lawn. Several hundred pizzas have been consumed. Laptops everywhere have freshly-applied stickers. And our mysterious secret musical guest has been revealed.

Our first annual open Hack Day kicked off with an amazing 90-minute performance by Beck, who recently graced the cover of Wired Magazine for his passion for mashups and remixes. Who better to inspire cleverness and creativity among 500 developers for their all-night journey toward creating the coolest hack? Beck and his band put on quite a show.

To get everyone in the hacking mood, Beck put together this video just for the occasion. It’s too cool not to share.

A short and sweet Product Pulse to send you off into the weekend.

• Group hug!: Fresh out of beta, you can now use Yahoo! Messenger with Voice to ping friends who are on Windows Live Messenger. And don’t miss this backstage pass to how we got there.
• Videographers — mash up or shut up: Anybody hungry for a Jumpcut Yahoo! sandwich? Yahoo! just acquired Jumpcut, a video editing and remixing site. While full integration with Yahoo! is coming, Flickr members can already create photo slideshows set to music.
• “The Gadget Hound” joins Yahoo! Tech: Tom Samiljan, tech journalist and gadget guru since 1994, has joined the ranks of Yahoo!’s elite geek blogger family. Check out his recommendations for everything from “shagadelic iPod peripherals” to fish-shaped speakers to universal-fit earbuds.

And don’t forget to subscribe to an RSS feed for this Product Pulse category every week.

Ever since Jerry and I started Yahoo! 11 years ago, we’ve made it a priority to stay loyal to our developer roots — creating useful and significant products that make the Internet more relevant to the global community. Along the way we’ve met a lot of developers with the same goals.

This loose network of “hackers” has gelled into a large connected community that takes an untraditional approach to creating new applications, products and services, much as Yahoo! has done in the last decade. For this community, hacking is a good thing — yielding ideas and innovations that are clever, creative and original.

We don’t claim to have supreme knowledge to be able to come up with the best solutions. We look to Yahoo! developers and users to contribute their ideas, and to take to the next level the enormous scale and infrastructure that Yahoo! is proud to be able to provide.

And we don’t want to hog it — the spirit of openness that is pervasive at Yahoo! will prevail this weekend as 500 developers from as far away as Australia, Canada, Florida and Chicago (and as close as the next exit down the freeway) descend on our campus tomorrow for our first Open Hack Day.

This will be the first time we’ve opened up the Yahoo! campus to developers from outside the company. We’ll give them lots of coffee and lots of space to be creative, and just under 24 hours to demonstrate their creativity and originality. At the end, hack demos will be judged by a panel of luminaries, and special awards given for the coolest hacks. And we’re really excited about the amazing musical guest performing on campus Friday night, which should be a great start to the hack-a-thon and the perfect way to get our creative juices flowing.

The biggest thing that has made Yahoo! successful has been the community we’ve been able to build, and the developer community is one of the most passionate constituents I’ve seen. I can’t wait to see what they come up with this weekend!

It’s Advertising Week in New York City — a fiesta that has thousands of marketers from all over the world swarming Madison Avenue to hobnob and banter about the latest trends. Yahoo! sponsors the annual America’s Favorite Ad Icons and Slogans contest. Previous champions include Juan Valdez, the Geico gecko, Mr. Peanut, the Pillsbury Doughboy, and “Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t.” Be sure to get in your vote before 1:00pm ET tomorrow, when this year’s winners will be announced following the annual icon parade. As part of the week’s affairs, Yahoo! also disclosed the results of an interesting market research study on technology’s impact on families. Surprisingly, the family dinner and board games are on the rise in response to addictions to things like gadgets, DSL, instant messaging, etc.

All this talk about marketing inspired me to sit down with our own brand guru, Yahoo! Chief Marketing Officer Cammie Dunaway. I wanted to hear her views on the Yahoo! brand and how we approach marketing, her all-time favorite industry campaigns, the impact blogs and word-of-mouth have on marketing departments, and how controversial figures like Howard Stern can mesh with our brand. Here’s the transcript of our conversation.

Today I woke up, logged onto Yahoo! Messenger, and pinged my friend Blake Irving, head of Microsoft’s Windows Live Platform Group, to applaud him and his team. Congratulations are definitely in order, as today marks a true milestone in Internet history. For the first time ever, interoperability (a.k.a. interop) between consumer instant messaging (IM) services is possible.

In July, Microsoft and Yahoo! introduced interop on a limited basis and received an overwhelming response. In just two months more than 90 million messages were sent and received across our networks — a level of usage that is a dream for us Internet geeks. Of course, this response wasn’t too surprising as we know that the ability to connect with other IM services is our users’ number one request. In fact, in a recent survey we found one in four respondents said connecting IM services is the next best thing since the creation of the cell phone. Today, the feature becomes available to everyone. Our combined communities — approaching 350 million user accounts — will be able to connect with friends and family across our instant messaging services. That’s huge, my friends.

This partnership really has all the makings of a marriage (humor me here). We went on dates, met each other’s parents, studied each other’s philosophies, and looked for habits that might drive us nuts. After our courtship rituals, we concluded that we really were compatible.

So what do two fierce competitors do before heading for the altar to make their products work together? Our first step was outlining joint guiding principles to ensure we were working against common goals throughout the negotiation process. They were simple and effective: Address our users’ number one request, get to market swiftly, make our interoperability easy to use, and grow the overall size of the IM market.

These touchstones played an integral role in a fundamental decision: establishing a server-to-server connection. Translation? Allowing consumers to sign into one IM service with one ID to connect across both services. (The Trillian service, in contrast, requires you to sign into multiple IM services with multiple IDs). This was not our initial approach as it was a huge technological undertaking. But our guiding principles set us straight as both teams agreed this was the only way to do right by consumers.

When I look at the competitive dynamics around IM, I get really jazzed. As the business guy, I’m obviously interested in seeing the IM market grow and I think today’s milestone will fuel that. It will also forever change the way IM services compete. Historically consumers chose their IM service based on where their friends were hanging out online. With interoperability, people will start choosing their service based on the features they want. This is analogous with how people choose e-mail services today, since they’re all compatible. Why should IM be any different? At the end of the day, the biggest winner of this trend is you, the consumer.

Since no back story is complete without a few insider insights:

• Because of the confidential nature of the project, Yahoo!’s internal code name was “Morpheus.” Clearly a business development guy was a fan of The Matrix — once people were in the know, there was no going back.
• To spice up negotiations, our business teams used “Larry,” “Mo” and “Curly” to help keep our players straight in hypothetical scenarios. You’re on your own as to who’s who.
• To celebrate interop going into beta, Blake Irving and I caught the final World Cup match in Germany. The picture you see below is Blake (left) and me standing in front of the Berlin Wall. Assign whatever irony you like.

Making this milestone possible was exciting, exhausting, stimulating, taxing, entertaining, but most importantly, it was rewarding. We hope you’ll agree.

Brad Garlinghouse
Senior Vice President
Communications, Community & Front Doors

News of the coup in Thailand broke on Tuesday morning, and toward the end of the day I started looking around on Flickr to see if people in Bangkok were uploading anything interesting. It was so soon after the coup that very few images were available. Still, they were interesting, and I thought I might have a chance to build a small slideshow of some sort. I sent notes via Flickr mail to the photographers asking if they would be willing to have their photos included in a special feature on Yahoo! News, and if they might be interested in being interviewed.

By 7 the next morning there were still relatively few images posted, but those few pictures were really fascinating — pictures of people posing beside tanks, soldiers with flowers… totally unexpected stuff in the context of a military takeover.

By mid-morning, half a dozen Flickr users had responded to my queries. I really struck pay dirt with a guy named Dan Caspersz. A transplanted Englishman working for the United Nations, he was literate and observant, and like me he was struck by the incongruity of the festive atmosphere amidst a coup d’etat. We recorded a five-minute telephone interview on a conference bridge, which spit out a .wav file. Multimedia producer Chris Strimbu and I then boiled the interview down to 90 seconds, Chris illustrated it with our small library of Flickr images.

We posted the feature on Wednesday afternoon, with news still breaking in Bangkok. Very cool!

This isn’t the first time we’ve used Flickr images in news, but it’s the most ambitious effort so far. More to come…

Ezra Palmer
Managing Editor, Yahoo! News

Big and small, here’s what kept us busy this week — the second weekly installment of product highlights to fuel your fancy.

• It’s Game Time!: Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Basketball launches for the upcoming NBA season with a fresh new look and game experience.
• 60 Minutes on Yahoo! News: If you missed that “60 Minutes” interview everyone’s talking about, fret no more. “60 Minutes” debuted this week on Yahoo! with highlights and exclusive outtakes from Howard Stern’s interview. Next up — Katie Couric’s interview with Condi Rice.
• Mail and IM on your Crackberry: Blackberry users who suffer withdrawal from Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger can stop twitching now. Get more done away from your desktop.
• Calling all Ruby and Flash hackers: The Yahoo! Developer Network just launched resource centers for Ruby and Flash to let developers mash up with Yahoo! services. And they’ve made it easy-peasy with how-to’s, downloads and community resources. Hack on.
• Yahoo! Messenger knows your ‘hood: Ok, you have to try this. Add “ylocalbot” to your Yahoo! Messenger friends list. Then send it a message with a local keyword and your zip code (ie, “dry cleaner 94107″) and it will reply with a list of joints, addresses and phone numbers. Add “ymapbot” and you can ask it for directions (ie, “701 First Ave Sunnyvale CA to San Francisco”). But the coolest thing? It now works on your mobile!

And just a reminder that you can subscribe to an RSS feed for this Product Pulse category every week.

Yahoo! Maps has just added dirt roads to its navigation databases, or so it would seem from this cartoon, which recently ran in newspapers across the country. Special thanks to reader Brinke Guthrie for sending it in.

In case you’re wondering who the runner is, he’s Chipper Jones of the Atlanta Braves. “Brevity” co-creator Guy Endore-Kaiser explains, “As a die-hard Mets fan, it is my sworn duty to make fun of Chipper any chance I get.”

If you dig this kind of humor, get your hands on “Brevity: A Collection of Comics by Guy and Rodd” — it’s hot off the press.

In case you haven’t noticed, there’s some video playing on the Web these days. A lot of it, in fact.

Some clips offer exactly what you’d expect – snippets from TV shows and movies, news and sports, and high quality independent productions from film enthusiasts and animators. The big players are starting to jump onto this trend, and many studios are doing deals with companies like Apple and Amazon to provide full-length TV shows and films online. Some of the studios and networks are convinced that this time is different and their own websites will finally gain enough traction and audience to serve as valuable distribution points. We’ll see.

Other clips offer something a little more unexpected. For example, video blogs (or vlogs) covering everything from the surf conditions in Hawaii to how to properly taste a great California cabernet are cropping up all over the place. There’s footage depicting the lives of soldiers stationed in the Middle East, and the poignant ramblings of zefrank on The Show. Honestly, I’m not exactly sure what RocketBoom, one of the biggest vlogs out there, is all about. There are the caught-on-tape antics of the Star Wars Kid and the Crazy German Kid, the Numa Numa Kid, and the behind-the-tape viral marketing tale of lonelygirl15 and Creative Artists Agency. There are entire movies called machinima that are constructed using characters and sequences taken from video games. This is not to be confused with a whole other genre called Anime Music Videos (or AMV) which mixes Japanese anime with popular music.

Speaking of mixes, remixes, and mashups, there is absolutely no end to the creativity (and apparently, free time) of some of the people out there. This clip of George Bush doing his rendition of U2’s “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” is pretty impressive, but my personal favorite display of editing prowess features James Earl Jones as Darth Vader explaining his nervous breakdown in the Vader Sessions.

Why is this all happening now? There are some obvious reasons — broadband is getting faster and cheaper, and digital video cameras are cheaper and easier to use. There’s a good chance your cell phone even has a video camera. A little less obvious is that TiVo, and all DVRs, are stocked full of hundreds of hours of video practically crying out to be uploaded and set free on the Web (you know who you are).

And then there’s MySpace. Not just the actual social network, but the mindset — share with people we know and people we don’t. This phenomenon is behind an incredible amount of the activity and engagement online today, and we’d better not ignore it or pretend it isn’t there. MySpace itself drives over 50% of all usage of YouTube today, and if you’re a studio with a new movie, TV show, or song to release, you’ve got to be there.

The good news is we are there. Yahoo! is a big player in online video. Offering music videos to sports and news clips, movie trailers and TV previews to thousands of user-submitted videos, Yahoo! is one of the largest destinations for watching videos on the Web. We help you track down the videos you’re looking for, whether they’re on YouTube, independent sites, or our own network. But we’re not stopping there.

This week we joined with Doritos to offer users a chance to create their own commercial that could potentially air during the Super Bowl! And today, we launched the Yahoo! Current Network on Yahoo! Video. Together with Al Gore’s CurrentTV, we’ll be creating a truly unique network featuring video content from users alongside professionally produced segments in a range of cool categories. Check it out, and (sorry, I have to say it) stay tuned for even more!

Be sure to leave a comment letting us know what you think, or just tell us about some of your favorite videos.

Jason Zajac
VP/GM Social Media

Phil Anglin from Richland, Michigan, had quite a morning recently. His phone rang at 7:30 a.m., and at the other end of the line were “Good Morning America” anchors Diane Sawyer and Robin Roberts, as well as a live television audience. When his wife, Emily, joined him on the phone, she surprised him by wishing him a happy first anniversary. But it didn’t end there. Emily went on to reveal they were going to have a baby. Let’s go to the video tape!

This conspiracy was part of the GMA/Yahoo! Wake Up Call, a new daily segment that allows you to send a wake-up message from “Good Morning America” and the Yahoo! billboard in New York’s Times Square. Simply submit a short request and it could run as a text message on our billboard and get promoted on the air.

You could wish your aunt a happy birthday, tell your brother to clean up his room, congratulate your mom on her first scuba dive, or ask your boss for a raise. A few lucky sleepyheads might just get a wakeup call from Diane and Robin that they won’t soon forget. Tune in to “Good Morning America” every morning between 7:40 and 8:00 a.m.

Mandy Kirsten
Marketing Manager, Corporate Marketing