As many of you are likely already aware, the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, kicked off this week.  WEF was created to serve as a catalyst for cooperation across business, government, the media, science, the arts, and civil society to address pressing challenges and future risks as one community.  Aligning with this mission, Yahoo! and other industry leaders today announced an initiative called GreenXchange (GX), a program designed to help address sustainability in the digital age.

As a founding member of the GreenXchange, Yahoo! is collaborating with Best Buy, Creative Commons, IDEO, Mountain Equipment Co-op, Nike and nGenera to create a web-based marketplace for sharing intellectual property which is intended to lead to new sustainability business models and innovation.  Businesses are in a unique position to use collaboration and open innovation as powerful tools for combating climate change.  The goal is to accelerate the learning curve for energy efficiency and sustainable business practices by making patented technologies for research and licensing available, in a manner that’s good for our individual businesses and the planet.

As an active participant, Yahoo! is planning to license patented technologies that we have developed to improve performance and increase efficiency in our data centers around the world.  Today, the members of the GreenXchange are hosting a CEO breakfast at WEF.  We are calling on other corporations to join the GlobalXchange commitment to fast track the development of innovative solutions to sustainability challenges.

The GreenXChange is part of Yahoo!’s 360 degree approach to advancing sustainability through internal commitments to drive change in cooperation with other institutions (including the Department of Energy) and work collaboratively with other influencers setting sustainability as a priority.

David Dibble, EVP of Service Engineering & Operations, Yahoo! Inc.

When disaster strikes, people want to help, but they often don’t have the resources at their fingertips.  At Yahoo!, we’ve implemented a number of ways people can stay up to date in the aftermath of the devastating Haiti earthquake and find ways to help with disaster relief efforts.

I am very fortunate to work in Yahoo! for Good, a team at Yahoo! whose focus is to empower people around the world to make a positive impact.  To support relief efforts in Haiti, Yahoo! is collaborating with non-profit organizations, leveraging our global network of services to raise awareness, and offering much-needed funding for the millions of people who have been affected by this natural disaster.

Here are the ways we are helping.

• The homepages of Yahoo.com, Yahoo! UK, Yahoo! Italy, Yahoo! Canada, and Yahoo! Mobile are connecting people to the latest news and ways to donate.
• Yahoo! News is providing ‘How to Help’ links in related stories and created a Topic page about the earthquake with donation resources.
• The Yahoo! Employee Foundation approved a $100,000 emergency grant to UNICEF and Partners in Health.
• US Yahoo!s have donated more than $80,000 to the cause in the last 48 hours, including corporate matches for those donations.

It doesn’t stop there.  We are scheduling banner ads across the Yahoo! network to support organizations like the American Red Cross and UNICEF who are providing relief efforts in Haiti.  We are also providing prominent placements on Yahoo! Sports and OMG to encourage people to donate. And there is more to come.

In the last 48 hours, I’ve been so inspired and humbled by fellow Yahoos who have stepped up to make all of this happen at lightning speed.  It’s times like these that remind me once again of the amazing power of the Yahoo! network to encourage people to take action. Join us in this important cause by making a donation to one of the charities listed here.

By Connie Chan, Yahoo! for Good

By Connie Chan, Manager, Yahoo! for Good

In December, Yahoo! launched our You In? program at kindness.yahoo.com to encourage people around the world to spread happiness by doing random acts of kindness.  Thanks to you, our big-hearted Yahoo! community who helped spread the word, over 315,000 people from 11 countries updated their Yahoo! status with good deeds, and more than 500 stories were posted to the You In? Flickr Group.

Check out some of our favorites –

Padmaja bought books for students in a rural government school in Bangalore, India

Kastle handed out reusable shopping bags and included a handwritten holiday card and $5 bill at a Farmer’s Market in Santa Monica, California

Edgar bought a set of books for a complete stranger in Brooklyn, New York

Inspired by amazing stories like these, Yahoo! also did some of our own random acts of kindness.

When we heard that Bill anonymously paid for a family’s overdue water bills , Yahoo! paid the heating bills for 12 families from a small town in Kentucky who were at risk of having their heat turned off in the winter.

Yahoos hand delivered  50 hot meals to farm labor families who didn’t have transportation to get to the food bank in Quincy, Washington. 

And on the busiest travel day of the year, Yahoo! went to the San Jose and San Francisco International Airports to pay for people’s baggage fees.

But the kindness didn’t stop there!  We also sent 50 kids from a Boys & Girls Club in Washington D.C. to the Nutcracker Ballet, took low income seniors in elderly care facilities on holiday shopping sprees in San Diego and Miami, gave DVD collections to children’s hospitals in Portland and Cincinnati, and more.

So our new year’s resolution is to keep this warm fuzzy holiday spirit alive by spreading ripples of kindness through our year-round Purple Acts of Kindness program.  You In?

Over the years, Yahoo! Labs has partnered closely with many universities and colleges. As a company, we want to invent the sciences needed for the next-generation Internet. Working with the faculty, researchers, and students of the world’s great universities is one of the best ways to meet that goal.

Looking back, 2009 was our most successful year to date. Through a variety of programs, we brought together a lot of smart folks and important ideas. As we head into 2010, we want to share our excitement about these programs and events.

Hack U:
Our University Hack Day competitions (Hack U) brought Yahoo!’s open technology, top developers, and hack spirit to campuses for technical talks and a 24-hour student programming competition. Students from 11 universities in the U.S., Canada, and India built more than 300 hacks. Winners from each campus participated in the New York Open Hack Day, ultimately winning 6 of the 11 categories.

Yahoo! Big Thinkers Series:
As part of our Big Thinkers distinguished speaker series, Yahoo! brought the brightest minds in the academic community to our campus for talks, and we’ve made those lectures available on the Web for all to see and enjoy. We had talks on
 

• Global climate change with Kenneth Arrow, Nobel Laureate and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Stanford University
• The psychology of the Web with Sandy Pentland, MIT
• Getting around the “you don’t know what you don’t know” syndrome with Ion Stoica, University of California, Berkeley
• How computational thinking can transform education with Jeannette Wing of the National Science Foundation
• Calculating the largest prime number ever found with Ron Graham, University of California, San Diego
• How the Internet and the science of computing are on the verge of driving a revolution in medical and biological science with Leroy Hood, Institute of Systems Biology

 
Next year’s Big Thinkers series should be just as captivating — we’ve got a great lineup for 2010.

Webscope:
Our Webscope™ program offers a reference library of 24 interesting and scientifically useful datasets we’ve made available for noncommercial use by academics and other scientists. More than 880 academic researchers have used the datasets, resulting in 28 technical papers, journal articles and theses so far. Very few companies have the resources and global scale to help academics and students interact with the types of real-world datasets it takes to spark innovation, but Yahoo! is one of them and it’s really paid off.

Key Scientific Challenges (KSC):
Our Key Scientific Challenges program partnered with 21 graduate students in 2009. We gave them scholarships, plus the opportunity to work closely with Yahoo!’s scientists on solving some of the biggest challenges the Web offers. The winners attended the KSC Graduate Student Summit, where they presented the fruits of their labor to fellow students and other Yahoo! researchers. It was the first of what will surely be many peer-reviewed conferences for these talented folks.

Cloud Computing Research:
Our M45 Cloud Computing Cluster is a 4,000-processor testbed being used in academia for the advancement of cloud computing research and education. Faculty members at Carnegie Mellon University have written 40 technical publications based on research performed on M45, and the cluster is now being used by three additional universities. Yahoo! is also part of both the Open Cirrus testbed and the Open Cloud Consortium.

Global Impact – Yahoo! Days in Haifa:
In November we held two very successful “Yahoo! Days” at major Israeli universities – Tel Aviv University and Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology. Yahoo! scientists from around the world joined the event, which featured a keynote by Prabhakar Raghavan, the head of Yahoo! Labs. Pictures from the Tel Aviv and Technion events are available on Flickr.

Netflix Prize-winner Yehuda Koren’s Campus Tour:
Yehuda Koren, a research scientist with Yahoo! Labs in Israel, was part of a team that spanned countries, time zones, and companies, collaborating over a three-year period to win the Netflix Prize, one of the most well-publicized and interesting machine learning contests ever conceived. It’s a story with surprises, twists and turns, game-playing, late nights, and computational brute force. There’s also deep science behind it all — science that will drive future innovation on the Web. Naturally, Yahoo! thought it was the kind of story that students and faculty at some of the world’s best universities would like to hear in person. Yehuda has visited seven universities since the award was announced in September 2009, including MIT, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, Rutgers, Princeton, Penn, and GA Tech. And he’ll be back at in 2010.

Purple Footprints:
And, of course, we continued to sponsor our campus seminar series, leaving “purple footprints” at Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. All of those seminars have been recorded and are available online. Yahoos also presented more than 100 lectures, seminars, workshops and training sessions at campuses worldwide.

If you want to learn more about Yahoo! Academic Relations programs and how you can participate in 2010, please visit us.

Ron Brachman
Vice President
Yahoo! Labs