Did you know that it is possible for eight people to use seven iPhones and two Wii controllers to play the theme song of Dr.Who? Or that you can use Twitter to follow the progress of a new bill being discussed in Parliament? If you can’t say yes to any of these questions, then you have probably never been to a Hack Day.

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This last weekend, 270 internet developers, designers and other technical and creative folk came to London, England to spend 24 hours hacking. They came to build what ever struck their technical fancy – whether it was something that entertained the hacker crowd or whether they found creative solutions to problems that all web users face.

Yahoo!’s eighth Open Hack Day, the second in London, attracted people from 15 countries across Europe, including two from Nigeria! Together they played with our open tools and showed what is possible when geeks take center stage in changing how we all use the web.

And change they delivered. The hackers submitted a total of 51 hacks and each individual or team had two minutes to present their prototype to the hacker audience and a panel of expert judges.

The judges, amongst which were David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo; Daniel Ek, founder of the internet music service Spotify; Matt Biddulph, CTO of travel tracking service Dopplr; and Pascal Finette of Mozilla had a hard time picking winners from among the submissions.

A few highlights of the winners are Rob McKinnon’s BillTweets, which allows you to follow news about UK parliament bills on Twitter; Purple Pedal Power by Andrew Larcombe, a way to track the journey of the Flickr bicycles (we reported earlier about); and Open Freecycle, which made Freecycle available to everyone on the web, and not only to those who are members of the Yahoo groups that power Freecycle.

A special mention goes to Chris Brett, Laurence Hole and Matthew Ross from Dundee University in Scotland, who built a clever interface that allows people with disabilities who can’t use a keyboard or mouse to search the web with the blink of an eye.

We kept the hackers happy and full of energy by providing lots of traditional British food and plenty of caffeine – 3,420 cups of coffee to be exact. This included a dinner of Bangers & Mash made from 900 sausages and 60kg of mashed potatoes on day one and Steak and Ale Pie containing 60kg of steak, 10kg of carrots and 5kg of onions on day two.

In between the tech talks and hacking, we also provided entertainment with movies, games and music, including a live band performance. Pornophonique is a two-member band from Germany that make music with a guitar and a hacked Game Boy. In the true spirit of open source, the band offers their whole album for free on the web.

Having been at several hack days across the globe during my life as a Yahoo, I have to say I love coming back to London for these events. The creativity of the hackers had no limits. We saw people control web sites by driving scooters through the building, controlling a steel guitar with a mobile phone and literally reaching for the stars with Flickr photos positioned in space. It’s a good reminder that with a group of geeks, the right tools and a weekend devoted to innovation anything is possible.

See you next time hackers!

Christian Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network

Around 125 hackers answered our call and spent a few hours listening to Tech talks covering Yahoo!’s newest developer offers before going down to some serious hacking for a 24 hour period.

Even if you didn’t get the chance to come, you can get all the information of the event on the Open Hack 2009 Wiki, where you can also find the slide decks of the Tech Talks. Of course the real value of the Tech Talks is the face-to-face time with the experts, so be around next time to get the full experience.

After the information section with tech talks and the first refreshments break, Chief Yahoo David Filo introduced the hack day and started the 24 hour hack period.

Keeping things real and close to the host country, not all was numbers and algorithms though. We had a dance group performing and trying to teach both the hackers and the Yahoo! Hack team some Bollywood and — as it was Valentine’s Day — salsa dance moves. There’s some footage of these already on the Web and lots of pictures on flickr. Please try to overlook my awkward performance in the background should you stumble upon it.

All in all, the Open Hack day was a tremendous success. The hackers formed teams and delivered 66 Hacks, of which 9 were picked as overall winners. The range of technologies used in the hacks was impressive, with the open search technology BOSS being the most used, followed by our mobile platform BluePrint, the location brokerage service FireEagle, OpenMail, and the Yahoo! Application Platform.

The enthusiasm and thoroughness of the hackers was contagious and the helpers and Yahoo! experts stayed up the whole night to help out with advice, code and by pointing people to the right direction.

The main benefit of hack day for Yahoo! is to see how easy it is to use our developer products and where developers get stuck. In that respect the sleepless hours were of tremendous interest for me as it was great to see how fast developers can build something impressive by digging into the documentation of YUI, YQL and BluePrint and simply going for it.

I’ve learnt a lot myself during this period and know now where to alter documentation or provide new and easier-to-understand examples. Nothing beats meeting your audience face-to-face and, in the case of the Hack team and the Yahoo! Developer Network, our audience are the developers in the field.

After 24 hours, the winners of the hack day were chosen by the team of judges (a mix of senior Yahoos of the US, UK and India and a director of an Indian VC company):

• Best Search Inside – Y! Grep (by pi: Ravi Bhushan Kumar & Ravi S. Math)
• Best Gone in 90 seconds – BOSS in 90 seconds (by The Flex Ninjas: Raghunath Rao Thricovil & Harish Sivaramakrishnan)
• Best Social Travel Helpdesk – Travel Assist (by Beanbag-Hackers: Nidhi Chaudhary & Anurag Jain)
• Best Keynote from a Traffic Jam – Slideshare for Mobile (& openMail by scriptease: Kapil Mohan, Sri Prasanna, Mani Kumar & Ciju Cherian)
• Best Crossing the Language Chasm – Translate This (by kroniks: sourabh behra)
• Best Confidential Messages – Redact Mail (by BabuSrithar)
• Best Socially Mobile – Kiva Mobile (by SocialSync.org: Akshay Surve)
• Best Navigation Bangalore Traffic – MyBus (by Parageeks: Pradeep BV, Akash Mahajan, Aashish Solanki & Rohit Talukdar)
• Best Built from Scratch – Search Engine with Hybrid (Human & Artificial) Intelligence (by API [Advancing Predictive Intelligence]: Antano Solar John & Niranjan Prithviraj)

I cannot end this without saying a big thank you to all involved in planning, executing and also taking part in the Open Hack Day Bangalore. It was a blast and I am very much looking forward to the next activities we’ll do in India.

Chris Heilmann
International Developer Evangelist, Yahoo! Developer Network

In 24 hours last weekend, around 150 developers took the open APIs Yahoo! and other companies have on offer and created a hack or mashup to show the other hackers and the jury.

We turned one of the ballrooms of the Taj Residency Hotel into a hack-garage: two very sturdy and fast wireless networks, a giant laptop stage showing the countdown, music, coffee, energy drinks and plenty of fresh food allowed for collaboration, necessary breaks, and, above all, smooth hacking.

To give people some ideas for what to use for their hacks, I gave the rundown of services Yahoo! offers developers in the Yahoo! for You presentation, while Raghu Rao of Adobe showed what Flash, Flex and Air can do. Bangalore Yahoo Shivku Ganesan introduced the new Yahoo! India Maps APIs.

One of my favourite parts was seeing people collaborating and seeking skills in other hackers in order to build a strong team. It was much less of a competition than working together to show what’s possible in 24 hours if you let developers loose without any product or management overhead and boundaries.

During the night, many Bangalore Yahoos stayed around to help out and the tech support team happily fixed technical issues that came up (including one complete re-install of a Windows machine). I hung around most of the night to help and was amazed by how many technologies people used to produce the final whopping 31 hacks.

Since Joe, our anchor for evening (and almost the entire event!), refused to let go of the purple chair, we had thrown in loads of beanbags and an entire room dedicated to rest and relaxation with an Xbox and a Wii .

The illustrious panel of judges (including co-founder David Filo… and me, as a last minute add-on) took their sweet time to determine who deserved prizes and to come up with names for the categories. Even those were unknown until the very end. The final scores were:

• Best in Show: Maps Doodle (An implementation of Yahoo! Maps with a Canvas overlay allowing you to highlight a way to travel by doodling over the map and sharing it with a contact.)
• Brainiest Hack: YaHealer! (A tool that allows doctors to collaborate and connect/share medical files and photos online with live annotations and no need to download all the images.)
• Best Desktop Hack: Desktop Wallpaper Love (a windows application that created a desktop wallpaper from images collected from Flickr and filtered through the Yahoo! Buzz feeds.)
• Best “I wish I had a Mac” Hack: Third Tag (A del.icio.us file tagger that locates files on your hard drive, analyzes the text and offers tags for it.)
• Most Viral Hack: Facebook Friend Folio (aggregates friend content on Facebook – Eg: photos, video – in one application.)
• Best Self-Expression Hack: Smart Editor (pulls multimedia-rich search results as you type; easily drag and drop search results into text box for instant sharing. Combines Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! News, Flickr and Amazon results.)
• “Most likely to arrive at next Hack Day on time”: Social Routing (Combines Maps, Weather, Traffic together with live messages via Twitter to plan travel routes.)
• Best Non-Technical Hack: Yahoo! Hindi Search (which simply asked to offer a live translation of English into Hindi inside the Yahoo! search box.)
• Best “Really Needs an Interface” Hack: Del.icio.us Tag Management (bundles tags automatically and removes and collaborates duplicate tags.)
• Most Parallel Hack: Collaborative Browsing (allows multiple users to simultaneously browse the same web page.)

It all ended with a party with a popular local band, Thermal and a Quarter, playing their version of rock-hacks for the rather exhausted bunch of hackers. Then a DJ offered some great Bollywood music “mashups” and live VJing to get everyone going till late into the night.

Have a look at the photos that just about capture the energy and enthusiasm that was India Hack Day! And here’s the PodTech podcast I did with Filo. I cannot wait to find out where and when Open Hack Day will strike next.

Christian Heilmann
Lead Interaction Architect
Yahoo! UK

Photos from code_martial