New digs in San Francisco

Posted May 10th, 2007 at 10:37 am by Nicki Dugan, Blog Editor

 2 Comments / Filed in: Cool Stuff, Video

With demos, drums, and dancers, we recently christened a new space in San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood. Located in the former Organic Online headquarters, our new digs will be home to Brickhouse, a new group that allows Yahoo! “intrapreneurs” to turn great ideas into prototypes and products; the Design Innovation Team, which encourages design-driven innovation at Yahoo!; and the Jumpcut and Yahoo! Video teams.

Various teams had a chance to hawk their wares, offering demos of various prototypes and products. These ranged from a giant touchscreen globe that displayed Flickr images from around the world; a wall-sized Answers Cloud that featured the most-used words in questions and answers; and some of our more recent beta products, like the latest Yahoo! Widgets and Yahoo! Messenger integration with email. All this in a space with all the typical accoutrements of a start-up space — lack of traditional cubicles, no offices, rolling white boards, and lounges with funky furniture for jam sessions.

Speaking of prototypes, our Media Innovation Group just started letting me play with one of theirs. Below you’ll find a presentation that documents our Open House party using “StoryTellr,” an internal prototype written in Flash as a standalone Flickr-integrated photo-montage tool. It lets you marry Flickr images with an audio file and add pans and zooms. You can publish projects in an embeddable Flash player or as a video file. Yahoo! doesn’t intend to offer this as a product, but rather as an R&D proof of concept. The Media Innovation Group is an advanced development team within Yahoo! Media that creates prototypes to show users new ways to consume, product and interact with digital media. They’ve got some cool stuff cooking. Let us know what you think.

Rate: (Average: 5 out of 5)

 Loading ...

Post a Comment Bookmark This Digg This

2 Comments Add your own

Paul Stamatiou | May 14th, 2007 at 1:52 pm

This place looks awesome, great for people that thrive in the non-traditional startup environment.

Jacques Snyman | Website Design | June 7th, 2009 at 5:48 am

A brilliant example of Yahoo’s commitment to technology, and the extra effort they go to to provide stimulating environments for young geniuses to express themselves and
to ultimately become the leaders of tomorrow.

Post a Comment:

• Name (required)
• Mail (will not be published) (required)
• Website

Notes: Please note that Yahoo! may, in our sole discretion, reject comments for any reason we deem appropriate. Links of value to readers are welcome, but please use them sparingly - wield spam and you're banished forever.

This is a moderated site and comments will appear if and when they are approved. We will review the queue several times daily, so please don't resubmit if your comment doesn't appear immediately.