I’d like to invite you to Next, a new Yahoo! blog focused on technology and the people who build it. You’ll meet tech innovators from all corners of Yahoo! — flash wizards, data visualizers, intra- and entrepreneurs, inventors, pundits, and mashup-makers. We’ll show winning hacks from our globe-spanning Hack Days (like MapMixer) and stuff from Brickhouse, where code sprints turn hacks into platforms and grassroots ideas take shape.

We’ll roll out new work from the Advanced Products team like the recently launched Kickstart, a professional network that connects college students with alumni and peers to kickstart their careers. We’ll introduce the work of scientists and researchers from our Berkeley-based Advanced Research group, like Zync, which began with some ideas about using community to understand content, and is now built into Yahoo! Messenger to let you sync and share online videos with a friend. On Next, we’ll serve up tasty previews and edgy ideas — early access to alpha and beta releases, widgets, doodads, and prototypes — stuff you can play with or ponder.

Brickhouse is a fifth-floor loft in San Francisco that’s a workplace for several teams and meeting space for Lunch 2.0 gatherings, casual talks with scientists and Web philosophers, Wii Wednesdays, and design installations. It’s one of many nodes where the future of Yahoo! is being imagined and engineered. On next.yahoo.com we’ll take a look at that future as it unfolds, from Brickhouse to Bangalore, Sunnyvale to Singapore to Sao Paolo, across the Yahoo! network and beyond.

The web is interactive, two-way, conversational, always changing. You know that. The next shiny new Flickr, Delicious , Upcoming, Twitter, Digg, or Facebook will emerge where a community of people discover something they love, and stick around to shape what’s growing there and show us where the value is.

I envision Next as a public forum where many voices contribute to a conversation about technology trends, disruptive innovation, the power of network effects and participatory media, the transformation and opening of corporate culture, all the surprising goodness that will define the next internet frontiers.

That’s what’s next. Hope to see you there.

Bradley Horowitz
VP, Advanced Development

* In some computer interfaces, the asterisk is the wildcard character and stands for any string of characters. This is also known as a wildcard symbol.

By now, hopefully you’re familiar with our Hack@Yahoo! program, where developers build cool tools or functionality on top of Yahoo! products. Maybe you attended or read about our “Open Hack Day” last September (does a free Beck concert on the Yahoo! lawn ring a bell?). Or perhaps you followed Hack Day London in July, “charming” weather and all.

These two “open” hack days were wildly successful, engaging many non-Yahoos throughout our developer community, but tonight I want to share with you some updates on innovations that have grown out of our internal hack days, which have been held quarterly in Yahoo! offices across the globe since 2005.

Internal Hack Days offer Yahoos a chance to take a break from their day-to-day to spend 24 hours hacking away at any creative idea that strikes their fancy. Thousands of Yahoos have joined in, creating thousands of hacks — some aimed at enhancing an existing product, some at introducing new concepts, and some just give us a good laugh.

During the events, engineers and non-engineers do more than just code the night away. They inevitably pick up tips and tricks from colleagues, collaborate across teams, and ingest an absurd amount of carbs.

While the main goal is to provide an outlet for people to express themselves, some hacks have made the journey from basic demo to product roadmap, and all the way to full-scale rollout. For example, Flight Planner for Messenger, Suggestion Board, and Car Finder all came out of Yahoo! Internal Hack Days.

And the list continues. Tonight, two more new products find their genesis from these hackathons:

• Shop by Color, developed by Hayro Kolukisaoglu and Sundeep Tirumalareddy from Yahoo! Shopping, lets shoppers find products in the color they want by using a color palette of 56 different hues. The palette scans more than 10 million products in the Yahoo! Shopping catalogue, including apparel, beauty, home and garden, and electronics categories. Now remembering if the sweater you wanted was “Indigo” or “Royal Blue” is no longer an issue.
• MapMixer, developed by Yahoo! Travel engineer Nimit Maru, allows other maps to be layered over a Yahoo! Map to show additional detail of a location Now you can mix together the detail of a point-of-interest map — such as airports, college campuses, sports arenas, historic maps — with the web functionality offered by Yahoo! Maps. For example, a National Park Service map showing details of the Grand Canyon could be overlaid on our northern Arizona map to enable you to pan and zoom the area, focusing on hiking trails, the visitor’s center, or scenic overlooks important to you.

These are two excellent new functionalities that showcase the spirit of innovation that’s alive and well throughout the Yahoo! community. I am excited to see what people come up with at our next internal Hack Day. And if you happen to be in India next month, you’re invited to our Bangalore office’s inaugural Open Hack Day on October 5-6. Register today!

Bradley Horowitz
Vice President, Advanced Development Division

One of the things that inspires and excites me most about Yahoo! is the truly innovative research we are doing in the areas that matter to people using the Internet today, and what will matter to them tomorrow.

The seeds of Yahoo! Research were planted when Yahoo! acquired Overture (which included their research lab) in the fall of 2003. We eventually grew this into a world-class research organization that today focuses on creating and exploring groundbreaking technology that will improve the online experience of our users. Our research focuses on topics from machine learning to microeconomics to search & information retrieval.

All along, our goal has been to hire the best and brightest researchers, technologists and big thinkers to help us discover the scientific underpinnings of the Internet. We’ve brought together some of the most talented scientists in a grand total of six global locations, working together to answer the question, “What is the future of the Internet?”

Our approach to research is unique because of the sheer scope of information available to us. While a researcher at an academic institution can hope to study a group with tens of participants, Yahoo! Research can observe the behavior of hundreds of millions of users — tapping into some of the largest and richest data repositories in the world (while, of course, maintaining user privacy).

But that doesn’t mean we are turning our back on academia — to the contrary! We have partnered with some of the leading universities in these fields, including the University of California, Berkeley; Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain; and University of Chile in Santiago, with local arms of Yahoo! Research in each city. We’re tapping into some of the brightest professors and students in technology research, benefiting from their vertical expertise and fresh new ideas. And witnessing the giddiness of our academic partners in Yahoo!’s data playground is indescribable.

Today, I’d like to give you a behind-the-scenes look at our original joint academic facility — the one that’s in our backyard and falls into my world. Yahoo! Research Berkeley is focused on the ideas and developments that can make a short-term impact on our products, digging into the latest in social, context-aware and media research. This video will give you a sense of their research mandate and some of the prototypes they’ve created, from ZoneTag to TagMaps to Remix, a project that led to our acquisition of Jumpcut. You’ll also get a taste of that unmistakable Berkeley culture.

Enjoy the tour!

Bradley Horowitz
VP Advanced Development

Photo from flickmor

The social media phenomenon is fed by human needs for self-expression, feedback, generosity, and, to some degree, good old-fashioned voyeurism. Today, we add more food to Yahoo!’s social media menu: Bix, a budding social media service that almost anyone can use to create, enter, and judge a contest. If you’re an American Idol fan, think of it as an opportunity to play the role of a Fox producer, a contestant, and Simon Cowell.

Here’s how it works: Bix contests include karaoke, dance, comedy, beauty, photography, and writing. They are either initiated by Bix members or, in some cases, by sponsors. Contest organizers call the shots on criteria and set the deadlines. Interested contestants then scan the roster of active contests for something worthy of their submission. And winners are selected by the largest vote tally.

Bix provides really cool web-based video- and audio-recording tools to make it all easy. All you might need is a webcam or digital video camera. Most computers and webcam come with built-in microphones, or you can plug in an external mic. (After all, what’s lip-synching without the hand-held?)

Social media is a playground for emerging talent. Scanning the site, I found this terrific gender-bender karaoke, some great Ansel Adams wannabes, and a video that exemplified what comedy on the Web should be. I also came across some interesting sponsored contests. GigaOM, the popular tech blog, launched a guest blog contest that promised to publish the winning entry. And in this “other” category, Six Flags Great America asked people to submit their best impersonation of a roller-coaster scream. (If you’re at work, turning down your volume has never been more imperative.)

So how does Bix fit into Yahoo!’s strategy? Bix, which was founded in January, is a young startup — not unlike Flickr, del.icio.us, Upcoming.org, and Jumpcut when we acquired them. All represented emerging social media trends with great potential. Imagine where Bix’s creativity could go once we scale it to over half a billion people worldwide. For example, we’re currently looking into possible synergies with things like Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Video and our entertainment properties.

In the meantime, we’re psyched to welcome Bix founder Mike Speiser and his coworkers to the Yahoo! family. Once the deal closes, Mike, one of the founders of Epinions, will join the Communities, Communications, and Front Doors group as our new vice president of community, driving products like Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! 360°, Yahoo! Photos, and, of course, Bix.

If you need any encouragement to give Bix a try, Mike invites you to enter his contest.

Bradley Horowitz
VP of Product Strategy

We recently invited Reid Hoffman, founder and CEO of LinkedIn, to Yahoo!. Rather than asking Reid to give a talk at a podium, we opted for a “fireside chat” format, and I had the privilege of serving as the “chatter.”

Reid’s resume is almost absurd. In addition to having a lot of old school Web 1.0 cred (as an executive at PayPal), Reid is involved as an investor with just about every category-defining Web 2.0 company out there: Digg, Flickr, Facebook, Technorati. He also sits on the boards of Six Apart and Mozilla. When asked what a good investment strategy for Web 2.0 is, he responded “to invest in Web 2.0 in 2003.”

The first question I asked was of the audience: “How many of you are not registered members of LinkedIn?” Of the perhaps 125 people in attendance, maybe one or two sheepishly raised their hands. This kind of penetration is typical in high-tech companies, according to Reid. LinkedIn (for the two non-LinkedIn members reading this) is a social networking site where you use your business relationships and networking capabilities for hiring, relationship building, business development, reference checks, and so on.

Given that Reid and Flickr cofounder Stewart Butterfield hold philosophy degrees (from Oxford and Cambridge, respectively), I asked Reid whether he felt this contributed to his bent for social software. (Answer, paraphrased: Philosophy helps you think, thinking is good, so — yeah, sure — it probably helped.) One of Reid’s criteria for evaluating companies is asking, “Which of the seven deadly sins does it appeal to?” (For LinkedIn, it’s “greed.”)

One of Reid’s most interesting responses came when he was asked why, if LinkedIn was a social network, there weren’t photos of the users on the site. Great question! Photos, he said, were complex in the business world. They could even lead to discrimination based on age, sex, and race, and LinkedIn didn’t want to facilitate that. Reid thinks there’s a place for photos in a professional context, but LinkedIn is still figuring out the right social balance.

The event was part of a speaker series hosted by our TechDev (Technology Development) group, which is run by Caterina Fake, she of Flickr fame. The team has the broad charter of facilitating and harvesting “grass-roots innovation” within Yahoo! and the TechDev Speaker Series (one of many at Yahoo!) is designed to provoke new thinking. In addition to hosting entrepreneurs like Reid and Philip Rosedale, CEO of the company that produces the multiplayer online game Second Life, we’ve brought in pundits like Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and author of “The Long Tail”; information architect Thomas Vander Wal, who coined the term “folksonomy”; and leading academics like Judith Donath and John Maeda of MIT Media Lab. But perhaps the most fun and surprising speakers were industrial performance artist Mark Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories, renegade mashup pioneer Mark Hosler of Negativland, and Ken Waagner, who runs digital distribution for the band Wilco.

Now that we’ve whet your appetite with some unabashed name-dropping, we’ll try to get you in on the action by putting video footage of future speakers online. Whenever we get permission from these visitors, we’ll put the files up on Yahoo! Video. It will be way cool. Stay tuned.

Bradley Horowitz
Vice President of Product Strategy