Whew — how times flies. Wasn’t it just yesterday that a computer beat World Champion Garry Kasparov in just six rounds of chess? For more battles between man and machine, read this week’s update:

• Pack your bags: Yahoo! Travel’s new Trip Recommendations tool is your one-stop-find-book-and-relax resource for your summer vacation! “Today’s Picks” automatically pulls up your top ten destinations (based on your recent online activity and preferences) with direct links to weather reports, hotels and air deals, and art and nightlife options. You’ll even find personalized travel deals throughout 45,000 travel guides to match your budget as well as customized mapping options to help plot your walk around town (see example at the bottom of this page). More is merrier, so don’t forget to try the Yahoo! Messenger plug-in to research and book flights in real-time with your pals and kin.
• Show off: The new Flickr slideshow rocks. Now we’ve got larger photos, cool title overlays and descriptions, and a dramatic black background. Check out an example of cuteness here or get started on your own.
• Robot-astic: Another goodie for webmasters everywhere — the new robots-nocontent tag. Just like you use HTML titles to tell search engines what your web page is all about, you can use this tag to pull out your web page’s unique content and block whatever isn’t relevant in search results. What does this mean for the rest of us? More relevant results on your next Yahoo! Search. Read more here.
• Slicker-looking flicks: To celebrate everything warm and sunny, we’ve done some spring cleaning on Yahoo! Video. It now sports a fresher, cleaner look and we’ve added some new features, like modules for most popular videos and best channels (because who doesn’t need a good series of hamster shenanigans to break up a long conference call?). Read more here.
• Lyrical genius?: We sang about Yahoo! Music’s new lyrics site last week, but now we’ve made it even easier for you to sing your heart out (eyes closed for dramatic effect) at karaoke night. Go to Yahoo! Search type in “Beastie Boys lyrics” or “Nelly Furtado Say it Right lyrics” and see shortcuts to their top songs and latest news about your fave diva.

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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.

In a few short weeks it will officially be summer, and that can only mean one thing — interns! As the manager of the intern program, I am really looking forward to welcoming this year’s group. They hail from USC to Kellogg to MIT, range from high school to graduate student, and represent such countries as India, China, Canada, and Italy.

When you hear about the corporate culture here in Silicon Valley, it’s often described as foosball and free lunch. At Yahoo! we have plenty of perks, but the single best thing we offer our interns is the chance to work on a real-world project that will be seen by millions of users. Our program is themed around Big Thinkers, and you’d have to meet our interns to see how true that is.

You won’t find our interns fetching coffee or slaving over a copy machine. Over the past few years, our interns have done amazing things to contribute to our business. Past projects include:

• Developing a global AIDS awareness campaign to raise money and awareness with Yahoo! for Good.
• Conducting applied machine learning research at Yahoo! Research Labs, focusing on novel algorithms which scale to and exploit massive data sets.
• Managing creative design and execution of in-product ad-served modules for Yahoo! Answers.
• Getting Yodel Anecdotal off the ground.

My favorite aspect of the program is the Executive Speaker Series. I love seeing our interns put faces to products as they hear from the leaders behind the business and those responsible for Mail, Research, Music, and Flickr, to name just a few. And even the most stalwart MBA student never fails to be taken with Jerry and David’s story of how it all began in a trailer 12 years ago. These talks have been one of the cornerstones of our program since its inception and continue to be the summer’s highlight for many students.

Of course, Yahoo! has never been one for all work and no play. Besides the great work our students do, we manage to throw in a lot of fun throughout the summer. In recent years, our program has included hippity hop races, belly dancers, baseball games, water balloon fights, community service, and product expos. All of these things make for an incredible summer while supporting two of our corporate values: fun and community. It’s no wonder that so many full-time Yahoos have what we call “intern envy.”

Our interns tend to be an opinionated bunch. Catch lively perspectives from some of last year’s group on things like social media here and the Internet and academics here, and stay tuned for more podcasts this summer.

It’s been fantastic building up this program, and every summer I am reminded of why I am so lucky to have this job. It wasn’t so long ago that I was a college student and my sister was running this program (hi, sis!). Back then, there were only about 25 students. Now there’s virtually 10 times that number, my sister’s a director in Customer Care, and I manage all that the program has become.

Each year as June rolls around and our team’s a little worn down from all the planning and preparation, the interns arrive like a small army, raring to go with infectious enthusiasm. Inevitably it proves to be the best summer yet. I’m just fortunate enough to be along for the ride.

Our application process is drawing to a close, but it’s never too late to apply. Check out careers.yahoo.com and a virtual tour of our headquarters if you’re interested in joining the fun!

Alex Harte
University Relations

Every once in a while, we need a good excuse to get our CEO and cofounders to put on a sport coat. They did so yesterday in honor of the Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Hsien Loong, who visited our Sunnyvale campus. Over the past week, PM Lee has been on a tour of the U.S. that has included visits with President George Bush and presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. He’s now making his way home with a stop in Silicon Valley, and Yahoo! is the only Internet company on his itinerary.

It’s an important visit for me — as head of Emerging Markets, I spend a lot of time in Singapore (and am moving there later this month). Singapore is a critical gateway to countries like Vietnam and the Philippines, where Internet adoption is accelerating, and where Yahoo! has a strong and growing presence. It’s also the second-fastest growing economy in Southeast Asia after Vietnam.

While many Internet and social media companies are rushing to Singapore, Yahoo! has actually been there for 10 years. We worked early on with the Singaporean government to grow the Internet industry there through investment in training and infrastructure, understanding the unique needs of the market and developing locally relevant products. So, we were happy to host the prime minister today and continue this partnership.

Prior to the traditional gift exchange, Terry, Jerry, and I sat down with PM Lee to talk about three things: innovation in online and mobile technologies, education, and the evolving digital media industry in Singapore. Education is a top priority for the prime minister, as he sees its potential to drive his country’s continued development. And an increase in usage of online and mobile services naturally follows that development. In fact, emerging markets such as Indonesia and India are expected to make up 90% of new mobile subscribers this year. Mobile communications is part of daily life in Singapore and Yahoo! has been developing some cool search and Internet tools such as oneSearch and Yahoo! Go, which we’ll be bringing to Southeast Asia soon.

On a tour of the campus, we gave PM Lee a demo of many of these tools, including the new Web-based Yahoo! Instant Messenger that we released last week. Products like these are designed for users in developing markets like Vietnam, where not everyone owns a PC but they still have access to the Internet. Many people there have to share a PC at home or work, or rely on their local Internet café. The prime minister truly enjoyed his visit to Yahoo! as he was very interested in learning about new technologies and taking this Silicon Valley perspective back to his country.

After more technology demos and a stop at the Network Operations Center, the PM’s motorcade rolled off to its next destination and I went back to my plans for the emerging markets, even more energized. It was a great day and a great honor to have a head of state visiting Yahoo!.

I’d better start packing for my big move — look for future posts on the cool things we’ll be doing in Southeast Asia and India.

Keith Nilsson
Vice President of International Emerging Markets

Photo from Maximum Mitch

As promised, here’s a video of our beloved founders sumo wrestling as a reward for Yahoos being kind to the earth. Quick recap: Employees at our Sunnyvale headquarters were issued an Earth Day challenged to reduce non-renewable resource consumption by 20% over a week. In payment, Jerry Yang and David Filo donned appropriately ivy-laden sumo suits and went to the mat.

Watch those instant replays carefully and tell us who you think really won…

We’re packing light this week so you can start the fiesta early. Dos cervezas, por favor!

• Around the world in one day: Yes, it’s possible. Flickr is throwing a global community event to capture what you’re seeing, doing, hearing, and feeling in 24 Hours of Flickr. On May 5, grab your camera and whatever else you need to start snapping. (Only photos taken on May 5 will qualify, but you’ll have plenty of time to cherry-pick your faves and submit them before May 21). Not only do you get to share your day with other shutterbugs around the world, but your photos could be commemorated in a book capturing a day in the life of your Flickr peeps. Don’t forget to charge those batteries!
• So many movies, so little time: Summer doesn’t officially start for another month, but it’s never too early to start plotting your consumption of summer blockbusters with Yahoo!’s Summer Movie Guide. Our team is predicting the biggest box-office blowout ever. Consult a week-by-week calendar of releases, catch exclusive trailers and video clips, browse photo galleries of your fave stars, get detailed 411 on the cast and crew, and even vote for the best summer villain. Just make sure to install Flash to get the full experience!

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Here’s something I have been waiting to say for a long time… Yahoo! Messenger: Fast, Easy, Beautiful, and now with no download!

Again, no download.

That’s right, today we launched the all-new Web-based Yahoo! Instant Messenger. In fact, it’s the first brand-new Messenger in over six years.

Yahoo! Messenger for the Web is live, and folks, it’s about to blow up. Feedback from initial users is so crazily positive, I expect this will become the primary IM service for millions. See for yourself at http://webmessenger.yahoo.com, or simply http://web.im.

By removing barriers for IMing, we’re about to witness a new and bigger life for Yahoo! Messenger. Chats will carry on from computer to computer, across campuses or cubes. Your friends will travel with you to Internet cafes around the globe. You no longer will need to maneuver around IT restrictions. And for the millions of Internet users who don’t own PCs, instant messaging is, with today’s launch, instantly available from any Internet-enabled computer. Wondering if this service is for you? Check out this quick demo to see it for yourself.

Hands down, the two most addictive features are message history (access and search archived conversations from anywhere!) and the emoticon picker. is my favorite, and if you can replicate this face in real life, I want to see it.

We went out of our way to support all the browsers — IE, Firefox, Netscape, Safari (I’ve been a Mac guy since 1984, so this was really important to me), and Opera (because we have a soft spot for Norwegians). I think this just might be the fastest, most refined Web IM app out there. And through our interoperability agreement with Windows Live Messenger, Web messaging users are able to connect with the largest community of IM users — 350 million user accounts!

I love the new Messenger so much that I went on my honeymoon in Southeast Asia without my laptop (for the first time in 15 years), knowing I could walk into any Internet cafe or jump on any airport computer and reach all my friends and family.

And since I am in Southeast Asia, I should mention that, for the first time, we are introducing localized versions of Messenger in Malaysia, Philippines and Vietnam with this service.

I want to congratulate the whole team behind Project Pico, who did a fantastic job on this Web app. Our goal was to give the right experience to the right person at the right time. I know I speak for the over 12,000 Yahoo! employees around world, when I say, “Thanks for your great work.” Really, thanks.

Some code name trivia: Pico is smaller than Nano or Micro. Yahoo! Messenger for the Web is less than one-tenth the size of the downloaded client. It doesn’t have all the client features (like voice and webcam), but offers all the key communications and self-expressive features you need to be a messenger.

This isn’t the last you will hear from either the new Web Messenger team or the Messenger client team this year, so stay tuned … we’re just getting warmed up.

In closing, here’s one word that sums up how I feel about this new product, this whole new direction… Yahoo!

Jeff Bonforte
VP of Product Development, Yahoo! Messenger

Somewhere in Asia.

What sort of incentive do you provide employees to encourage them to reduce their use of non-renewable resources by 20%? A chance to watch your founders sumo wrestle each other.

For the week prior to Earth Day, Yahoos at our Sunnyvale headquarters were challenged to do their part to reduce our impact on the environment. They rose to the challenge and turned off lights in conference rooms, took the stairs, made do with less air conditioning, avoided printing or went double-sided, used mugs, ditched their commutes for public transportation or carpools, and ate a little less meat. And today, we collected our payment.

Why sumo wrestling, you might ask? It goes back to our roots. Co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo were graduate exchange students together in Kyoto in 1992 while at Stanford and got addicted to sumo wrestling. They named their first servers after sumo greats Akebono and Konishiki and Jerry’s first collection of web pages was dedicated to the sport. Jerry and David held their first match for employees in 1999 and, with some prodding, agreed to a rematch to mark this impressive achievement.

We’re busy editing the priceless video to post in the next few days. In the meantime, to figure out who won, check out the photos here and here.

UPDATE: As promised, here’s the video.

Jerry watches as David dons his protective wig helmet

Sumo Jerry, appropriately embellished with greenery

Sumo David, flanked by paparazzi