By Lisa Karstetter

As part of Yahoo!’s “You in?” program to spread random acts of kindness, we headed out on Christmas Eve to make a positive impact on the Quincy, Washington community. We handed out 50 – (16 piece) boxes of chicken and jojo’s plus a box of fresh baked cookies to those standing in line at the local food bank. Then we loaded back up at the store with more chicken and cookies and went to the labor camps where the real need is. Most of these are located 5-10 miles out of town. We went house to house (trailer to trailer). Two ladies started crying…and one hugged my husband and me over and over. It was very touching.

Then today the guys went out with another van full of food and delivered it to some other areas we couldn’t get to on Christmas Eve. We also took bags of stuff we were told that most request at the food bank. Bread, cereal, peanut butter and beans. So we gave them a box of chicken, jojo’s and a bag with other necessities in it.

What we were so surprised to see is that many don’t have transportation to even get to the food bank in town. I think that is why they were so touched. We are going to go out and do it again tomorrow and target another area.

Also while we were waiting for chicken at Akins Deli we randomly walked around the busy store and eyed people shopping that looked like they could use a little help (monetary wise). We notified the sales clerks to charge their groceries at checkout to our account and hand them a kindness card that encourages them to “pay it forward” by doing something nice for someone else. We weren’t around to see but I heard there were 6 really happy and grateful families.

The surprising part to this whole story is that when I went up for communion on Christmas Eve at our church, our pastor said to me, “Lisa, I saw firsthand the way you and your company touched someone’s life today. Thank you for doing that. God Bless you.” I went back to my seat wondering what he was talking about. After church he told me that he was witness to one of the store charges and could see what a truly unexpected gift it was for a family that he could see desperately needed it and it touched him as well.

I wish my children could have seen the woman cry over being given chicken, jojo’s and cookies. It would have given them perspective as to how well they have it and how sometimes it’s not what or how much you give……it’s just the act of caring about those less fortunate and wanting to make a small difference in other people’s lives.

This was a truly moving experience, and I’m so thankful to be able to participate in this You In? campaign. I have NEVER been more proud to work at Yahoo!

I’m so touched to see that these random acts of kindness really are spreading around the world. Nearly 300,000 people have already added their kind acts to the map at kindness.yahoo.com. To add yours or find more inspiration, check out kindness.yahoo.com.

As part of Yahoo’s “You In?” campaign (kindness.yahoo.com), a few of us from Yahoo’s corporate communications team decided to pay a surprise visit to one of our local charities that could use some support during these tough economic times.  And as pet owners with a soft spot for our four-legged friends, we decided that the SF SPCA would be a great beneficiary of a little bit of money, some fun blankets and pet toys courtesy of our friends at the Yahoo! company store and most importantly our love and attention to the serious issue of finding homes for the pets at the SF SPCA.

If you live in the Bay Area or have visited San Francisco during the holiday season, odds are that you have seen some of the cute dogs and cats in the windows of Macy’s in Union Square, all part of the SPCA’s holiday adoption drive. With hundreds of dogs and cats in need of a home living at the shelter at any given moment and a goal to find homes for more than 4000 animals each year, the SF SPCA has a herculean task that is undertaken by hundreds of staff and volunteers at their SF HQ, which includes Maddie’s Pet Adoption Center and the Leanne B. Roberts Animal Care Center.  You can meet some of our new friends here:

When we came by to drop off our gifts, we were greeted warmly by SF SPCA President Jan McHugh-Smith and amazing employees like Susannah Dunlap.  Jan and Susannah gave us an all-access tour of their amazing new facility that offers potential pet owners the chance to see the dogs and cats in condo-like settings.  All of the cats even have their own TV sets!

We were also able to see their state-of-the-art veterinary care facility, where animals from all over the Bay Area come to get checked out and get ready for adoption.  The shelter is a no-kill facility and is often a literal safe-haven for pets from other shelters that do not have space, including the apparent overabundance of chihuahuas.

While the SF SPCA website is a great place to see all of the animals available for adoption, you can always come down to see the pets in person.  And for those of you who are socially-networked, you can also follow them on Twitter and Facebook.  For a preview of some of the pets you can adopt, we’d like to introduce you to our new friend Curtis the Cat:

And as a bonus, our new friends at the SF SPCA have given us the opportunity to let our followers on Facebook and Twitter name a kitten that will be up for adoption soon–so follow us and help give Mr. Pickles a new name!

Please visit Yahoo’s You In? site to share your stories of kindness!

Happy Holidays!

Pamela Woon, Lucas Mast and Mariel Myers

Yahoo! Corporate Communications

Everyone is doing it – from New Orleans to Las Vegas, and even Hawaii is involved in the college bowl fever. It doesn’t matter if your team didn’t make the cut, you can still have fun by joining Yahoo! Sports College Bowl Pick’em. This is your last chance to earn college glory, and this is the only time it doesn’t matter if you’re a duck or a gator. You can have fun picking the winners, even if your team isn’t playing.
 
Don’t let the fact that you’ve never played stop you, the rules are easy:

1. Sign up at Yahoo! Sports College Bowl Pick’em   
2. Pick the teams you think will win – there is expert advice available or just go with your favorite mascot or team colors
3. Then watch the points stack up!

Sign up now because the players hit the field this weekend and that’s when the boys will be separated from the men! And a big college cheer to the Yahoo! Sports team that delivered the most exciting college fantasy game of the season.

It has been a stellar year at Yahoo! Labs, and before 2010 arrives, we want to share an overview of the great science that our colleagues have published in 2009. The Internet is changing as rapidly as ever – from what’s possible technologically to how people are interacting with technology and each other, and it’s part of Yahoo! Labs’ mission to help Yahoo! and the world understand that evolution. On that front, we made major progress during these past 12 months, and were thrilled that our work was recognized with seven Best Paper awards at top conferences in our industry, including:

• “Integration of News Content Into Web Results” by Fernando Diaz at Second ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM)
• The work Yehuda Koren described in his paper, “Collaborative Filtering with Temporal Dynamics,” was a crucial contribution to his team. It won the Netflix prize well as the Best Paper award at the 15^th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD)
• “Sources of Evidence for Vertical Selection,” by Jaime Arguello (a Yahoo! intern from Carnegie Mellon University), Fernando Diaz (Yahoo! Labs), Jamie Callan (Carnegie Mellon University), and Jean-Francois Crespo (Yahoo! Labs) at the 32^nd Annual ACM SIGIR Conference (SIGIR)
• “Generating Example Data for Dataflow Programs,” by Chris Olston, Shubham Chopra, and Utkarsh Srivastava at ACM SIGMOD/PODS Conference (SIGMOD)
• “From ‘dango’ to ‘japanese cakes’: Query Reformulation Models and Patterns,” by Francesco Bonchi and Carlos Castillo at the 2009 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence
• “On the Feasibility of Multi-Site Web Search Engines,” by Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Aris Gionis, Flavio Junqueira, Vassilis Plachouras, and Luca Telloli at the 18th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM)
• “Explore/Exploit Schemes for Web Content Optimization,” by Deepak Agarwal, Bee-Chung Chen and Pradheep Elango at IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM)

 
Yahoo! Labs also led the technical program at WSDM, ending up with a quarter of the total accepted papers at the event. And at the 18^th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW) in April 2009, Yahoo! Labs secured the most accepted papers from a single organization. Two of those papers — “Visual Diversification of Image Search Results,” by Reinier H. van Leuken (Universiteit Utrecht), Lluis Garcia (Yahoo! Labs), Ximena Olivares (Unversitat Pompeu Fabra), and Roelof van Zwol (Yahoo! Labs); and “Social Search in ‘Small-World’ Experiments,” by Sharad Goel, Roby Muhamad (Columbia University), and Duncan Watts — were nominated for the conference’s Best Paper award.

In addition, at SIGMOD, Bee-Chung Chen and Ashwin Machanavajjhala also earned Best Dissertation runner-up awards for their work on “Cube-Space Data Mining” and “Defining and Enforcing Privacy in Data Sharing,” respectively. 

Finally, wrapping up the year at CIKM, Yahoo! Labs topped 2008’s accomplishments and, in addition to the Best Paper award, received awards for Best Student Paper and runner-up Student Paper, and earned a record of 30 accepted papers. The awards for Best Student Paper and runner-up Student Paper went to Michalis Potamias, Francesco Bonchi, Carlos Castillo, and Aris Gionis for “Fast Shortest Path Distance Estimation in Large Networks;” and Matthijs van Leeuwen, Francesco Bonchi, Arno Siebes, and Borkur Sigurbjornsson for “Compressing Tags to Find Interesting Media Groups.” 

Though the year isn’t quite over yet, we at Yahoo! Labs are proud of our colleagues’ accomplishments, and we’re gearing up for what lies ahead in 2010. 

Prabhakar Raghavan
Head of Yahoo! Labs

Come build a snowman that’s totally YOU! Have fun making your snowballs, choosing facial features and adding expressive arms. Then add your background theme—everything from holiday patterns to tropical islands—and top it off with props like a Yahoo! Pashmina, sombrero, cell phone or pet panda.

And once you have created your own winter wonderland, you can share it with friends and family by sending a link with Yahoo! Mail or Yahoo! Messenger, or you can post it on Facebook or Twitter.

Happy Holidays from your friends at Yahoo!

Build your own snowman at: snowman.yahoo.com

By Meg Garlinghouse, Senior Director of Yahoo! for Good

This Fall, one of Tiburon’s favorite residents, the Purple Lady, lost her house in a fire.  Barbara Meislin, aka the Purple Lady, is a local author, singer and healer and she is known for her dedication to everything purple.   Given that we are kindred spirits when it comes to the color purple, Yahoo! employees wanted to do something to help. Several community members we spoke to said that the Purple Lady would only accept gifts that benefitted the community. This made it the perfect fit for our Purple Acts of Kindness program!

The Purple Lady recently wrote a book called “No One Can Ever Steal Your Rainbow”, a children’s book about love and hope that speaks to people of all ages.   Yahoo! bought 250 copies of the book, donated 200 copies to Raising a Reader, a nonprofit organization in Silicon Valley that engages low-income parents in reading to their children, and donated 50 copies to Somos Mayfair, a community-based organization that works with over 200 immigrant families in the San Jose area.

Thanks Purple Lady for inspiring us – you have created one amazing ripple of kindness.

Do you want to create a ripple of kindness this holiday season?  Check out our “You In?” campaign at kindness.yahoo.com to get inspired.

Photo by: Tim Porter

Today, Yahoo! is proud to announce the donation of a supercomputing cluster with 2,000-processor-cores to the Open Cloud Consortium (OCC), a cloud computing testbed for research on large-scale data clouds. Yahoo! is a founding member of the OCC, and its participants include a diverse group of universities and research institutions which develop standards, benchmarks, and interoperability frameworks for cloud computing.

At Yahoo!, massive-scale data-crunching is our bread and butter. We are the leader in use and development of Apache Hadoop and other open-source cloud computing technology to process many petabytes of data, billions of Web images and objects, and hundreds of thousands of Web requests per second. With cloud computing and the careful analysis of data, we are able to deliver highly relevant content and improve the quality of online experiences across the Yahoo! network – from the homepage to Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Mail, and more.

Academic researchers exploring everything from astronomy to genomics have the same need to analyze massive amounts of data. Yahoo!’s cloud is intended to free up engineering resources to focus more on innovation by creating highly scalable applications. We hope that our technologies can be used in a similar way by research institutions, so that scientists can sift through massive amounts of data in a smart, scalable way and focus their energy on finding real breakthroughs.  The Yahoo!-donated cluster will be part of the OCC’s Open Science Data Cloud. It will be used by a variety of scientists, including world-renowned researchers such as Alex Szalay at Johns Hopkins University to study the birth of the universe and Kevin White at Chicago’s Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology to study the structure of the human genome.

This donation will enable OCC to scale their benchmarking and performance analysis efforts, significantly enhancing their capabilities to improve systems software for cloud computing.  The OCC plans to distribute the processing power between data centers at the University of Ilinois at Chicago and Johns Hopkins University.  The data centers are connected by a very high speed (10 Gigabit per second) network link, enabling researchers to test distributed virtualization technologies.

Our participation in the OCC is a continuation of the cloud computing research projects we began supporting a few years ago. Top research universities such as Carnegie Mellon, the University of California at Berkeley, Cornell University, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst use Hadoop on our M45 supercomputer for a broad range of computer science research, and are progressing with some ground breaking studies.  Similarly, we are a founding sponsor of the Open Cirrus™ Cloud Computing Testbed, along with HP and Intel, which is advancing cloud computing research on an international scale.

We’re excited to play an important role in this interesting intersection between technology and academic research, and we look forward to working with our counterparts as part of the Open Cloud Consortium.

- Shelton Shugar, senior vice president, cloud computing, Yahoo!.

Twitter was hot in 2009. Everyone and everything appears to be tweeting – four calling birds, three French hens, two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree, just to name a few.

Earlier this summer, we created a fun way to let you analyze your “social mojo.” And just in time for the holidays, the birds are back to share a seasonal analysis of your Twitter persona. Simply go to yahoo.holidaymojo.com, add in your Twitter handle (aka username) and through a (not) very scientific process you can determine exactly what kind of twitterer you are based on how you use Twitter (no private stuff!).

Depending on your social mojo persona, we’ll recommend a few apps you can instantly add to your new homepage to make it more personally relevant. So, if you’re a Twitter user, give it a whirl – you might be:

• Snowflake – Drifting from here to there, no one is better at following people than you!
• Regifter – You’re great at passing on the retweets.
• Toast Master – You have a lot to say and take advantage of your 140 characters to say it!
• Mistletoe Magnet – You like to bring people together with all those hashtags.
• Snowman – Based on how rarely you tweet, you’re clearly the strong, silent type.
• Nutcracker – You’re so good at uncovering the best URLs!
• Gingerbread Man – All those followers make it clear that you’re quite sweet.
• Noise Maker – You like to keep the conversation going with all those @replies.

Check it out (or check it twice) – follow us on Twitter — we’re a Nutcracker.

How big is your ripple of happiness?

It doesn’t take a lot of money or time to make someone’s day.  Smiling at a stranger can be contagious.  Paying the toll fee for the car behind you may inspire them to pay it forward.  Picking up a $207 grocery bill at Trader Joe’s can turn into $23,000 in donations for the local food bank.

These heartwarming stories inspired us to launch Yahoo!’s “You In?” campaign this holiday season because we believe that one small act of kindness can create a ripple of generosity.

Help Yahoo! create a ripple of happiness around the world with random acts of kindness.  Update your online status (on Yahoo!, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter) to share what you’re doing to spread holiday joy at kindness.yahoo.com. Then encourage others to join you by asking “You in?”.  Yahoo! will use our network to share your good deeds with our community. We’ll also be doing our own acts of kindness inspired by your status updates.  Whether your act of kindness is buying someone’s groceries or getting warm coats to people in need, your actions will encourage others around the world to join in.

It’s your world. And it is what you make it.

How big will your ripple of happiness be?

You in?

At Yahoo! we are committed to earning and maintaining our users’ trust each and every day.   That is why we are thrilled today to be announcing a new consumer tool called Ad Interest Manager,  which takes transparency in online advertising to a new level for building user trust.

Ad Interest Manager is a central place where Yahoo! visitors can see a concise summary of their online activity and make easy, constructive choices about their exposure to interest-based advertising. Ad Interest Manager is also a continuation of our ongoing commitment to helping consumers get the information they want while protecting their privacy at the same time.

At Yahoo!, we believe that ads tailored to users’ interests make online experiences more compelling and user-focused. The new tool Yahoo! is launching today will show users what interests we think they have, and also let them edit and change those interests to reflect the most up–to-date information. Importantly, users who don’t want interest-based ads can turn them off completely. With the introduction of Ad Interest Manager, users can not only get a better understanding of how interest-based advertising works, but they can also communicate better with Yahoo! and our advertisers about what most interests them.

Yahoo! Ad Interest Manager is currently online in the U.S. and will be made available to European users in the coming weeks. Planned future enhancements to the Ad Interest Manager will also let users add categories of interest that Yahoo! may have missed.

Yahoo! was one of the first companies to implement a layered Privacy Center model more than eight years ago, which provides people with a central place to understand and control their options when it comes to the use of personal data. This is coupled with an industry-leading data-retention policy which strives to ensure that Yahoo! retains data only long enough to serve our business and create the highest quality user experiences while maintaining the ability to fight fraud, secure systems, and meet legal obligations.

To read more about Ad Interest Manager, please click here.