More than 400 women from across the leading tech companies will meet, network and share their wealth of tech experience, including diverse perspectives from women at different stages of their careers. Guests can participate in an informal Yahoo! panel discussion on ensuring the success of women in technology in the future, as well as a host of other fun events that will run throughout the night. There will be two photo booths, a “Women in History” Jeopardy game and an anagram puzzle station. Attendees will also be able to experience Yahoo! products, such as Livestand, Connected TV, Hadoop and YSlow – all of which have had major contributions from Yahoo!’s female technologists.

So you may be asking, what is a girl geek?  We define girl geeks as women who are passionate about technology and are making a difference in their field each and every day.  The organization behind the dinner, Yahoo! Women in Tech, touts more than 600 members across the globe and focuses on empowering female tech professionals to succeed, as well as encouraging K-12 girls to pursue technical careers.  The group is thrilled to host this event again and showcase the incredible contributions and achievements of both women at Yahoo! and the wider industry.

We hope you can join us for an informative and enjoyable evening that celebrates your efforts and achievements in tech!

Several hundred lucky Yahoos got the chance to take a picture with the trophy under the watchful eye of Giants representatives and security.  Yahoo! employees used the photo opportunity to get creative, bringing bats and gloves as props and doing their best crossed-arms gestures to honor Giants closer Brian Wilson–truly a once in a lifetime experience for Yahoos and die-hard Giants fans alike.

A few interesting trophy tidbits: affectionately nicknamed “Tiffany” in honor of manufacturer Tiffany & Co., the Commissioner’s Trophy weighs in at almost 30 pounds of sterling silver and gold, has a special branded pick-up truck that transports it,  and is valued at more than $15,000.

Given that more than 400 Yahoos turned out for the event sporting “Fear the Beard” and other Giants gear, our hometown heroes can expect to have a solid Yahoo fan base heading into the 2011 season.  Go Giants!

Check out the photos of all the festivities on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/corporateevents/sets/72157625823085657/

The four winners, who shared the top Gold prize are; Colenso BBDO Auckland, New Zealand for Yellow Pages, Taproot, Mumbai India for The Times of India, McCann WORLDGROUP Hong Kong, for Metro Publishing and Clemenger Proximity Melbourne Australia for Yellow Pages.

At the Spikes Asia event this week, Yahoo! also invited some of the judges, speakers and delegates to take a seat in our BIG IDEA CHAIR and share with us what they think are the key ingredients to making an idea big.

Hear what they say on this video clip:

We are also very excited to have the opportunity to talk to some of the industry’s most creative minds, including Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO, WPP Worldwide, legendary author and ex-creative director, Bryce Courtenay and Bob Greenberg, Chairman, CEO, Global Chief Creative Officer, R/GA to get their thoughts on trends, creativity and the future of digital.

We want to take this opportunity to thank all the guests who shared their creative insights with us in our Big Idea Chair and a big congratulations to all the winners at Spikes Asia this year.

Watch event highlights on video:

Christopher Harris
Head of B2B Marketing, Asia Pacific

Partnering TNS (Kantar Media), Nielsen and Synovate, Net Index 2010 sets Internet media currency for the coming year. The research offered strategic insights for industry decision makers and tapped into the massive Internet opportunities available in the country of study and throughout Southeast Asia.

Top line trends from the country studies were presented at the recent ad:Tech Media and Advertising industry conference held in Singapore on 3 June, where Yahoo! Southeast Asia hosted the launch of the Yahoo! Regional Net Index insights.

Highlights from the research were presented to gathered media, industry advertising executives, marketers and media planners from around the region.

Some key findings:

• Indonesia, the largest and fastest growing online market in Southeast Asia, has recorded a jump from 22% (2009) to 48% (2010)
• Internet cafés in Indonesia are gradually losing ground to Mobile as dominant Internet access point. A decline of 19% has been recorded in Internet access through cafes; 83% in 2009 to 64% in 2010
• In Vietnam, mobile Internet access is picking up fast, nearly doubling year-to-year, from 10% (2008) to 19% (2009). Popular activities are searching for information and listening to music
• User generated content and community building is driving this trend in some markets like Vietnam, where it occupies the largest share (47%) among social media activities.
• Search, in the Philippines has grown significantly from 58% to 76% to become the dominant online activity, surpassing email and instant messaging
• Social media in the Philippines is primarily used to stay in touch with friends and family (66%), send emails (64%) and for online chats (63%)
• Spread of digital media is changing the way Malaysians are consuming information, particularly news. Key news sources are; online newspapers (53%), Internet portals (47%) and local news sites (46%)
• In Malaysia, online music and video has attracted significant interest with 51% uploading/downloading music files online and 54 % watching video clips online. Over a third of users also play games online – dominated by younger males.

To capture the fast moving changes in mobile use in Indonesia, a Mobile Index study was also conducted.  The Mobile Index provided  a broader study on internet trends in Indonesia which indicated the explosive growth of mobile internet in Indonesia primarily driven by cheap and unlimited data plans with bundled offerings, improved mobile user interfaces, and industry wide marketing, mobile internet penetration has expanded by 26% points from 22% (2009) to 48% (2010).

Key findings of Mobile Index 2010 Indonesia include:

• More than half of mobile internet users belonging to SES A (social economic status-A) or in the age group of 15-24 years use mobile internet everyday
• Mobile Internet usage is predominantly from a mobile phone with advanced features rather than a smartphone as only 11% own a smartphone
• 41% of people surveyed have looked up content or searched for information in the past month; out of those who searched for content, News (54%) and Facts / Trivia (47%) were the most common searches
• Social networking is the key activity with 89% of mobile internet users accessing it in the past one month; 47% access social networking sites at least once a day

Together, the five comprehensive Net Index research studies, sponsored by Yahoo!  have provided the Southeast Asian media, advertising and marketing industries with essentials tools to value the power of the Internet in Southeast Asia.

Stay tuned for more insights and studies that we’ll be releasing in upcoming months!

Ken Mandel
Regional VP Advertising Marketplace, Yahoo! Asia Pacific

First launched in 2002, the awards encourage internet users to vote online and give recognition to their favourite local and international brands. An independent market research firm was engaged to conduct interviews with advertisers and brands to come up with the nomination list.

After six weeks, we gathered two million votes.

The Yahoo! Emotive Brand Awards ceremony in Hong Kong was held on 19 May 2010 at the Four Seasons Hotel and was attended by more than 200 advertisers, brand representatives, luminaries and media.

The top three winning brands are: Canon, Cathay Pacific Airlines and the Hong Kong Ocean Park.

Following the great success of the initiative in Hong Kong, this year, Yahoo! Kimo in Taiwan launched the same awards in the market and introduced a new category – ‘Yahoo! Asia Emotive Brand Award’ to find the brands consumers in both Hong Kong and Taiwan love. The top three winners for this category include 7-Eleven, Sony and Sony Ericsson.

Check out the event videos:

As the leading online advertising platform in Asia, Yahoo! in Hong Kong and Taiwan continue to help brands leverage the online medium to better connect and interact with their consumers. Stay tuned for more exciting initiatives and campaigns from Yahoo! in Asia!

Jeff Han
Vice-President, Marketing, APAC Region

It’s true: as announced by TechCrunch, Carol Bartz will be on stage with Michael Arrington in New York this Monday at the first TechCrunch Disrupt event. The two will talk tech, discuss the future and banter about disruption. That’s not all; Yahoo! will be involved throughout the week at Disrupt.

For starters, everyone knows how much Yahoos love a good hack event. On Saturday and Sunday, a team of recent Yahoo! Hack Day winners will be heading to the Disrupt Hack Day to talk YQL and compete. And we’ll have a lot of opinions to share about the next great wave of startups. Yahoo! chief architect Raymie Stata will be an expert judge at the Startup Battlefield competition.

Follow Yahoo! on Twitter throughout the event for live tweets from Disrupt.

Let me explain: it’s cliché to compare the Internet to Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, but we forget that it took more than 200 years after the invention of the printing press until we experienced the rise of the novel as a popular art form. In other words, the Web we have now is not the Web we’ll have in the future. There’s a tremendous amount of innovation to come.

The question is: “What kind of innovation can we expect?”

At Yahoo! Labs, we believe that innovation in the Web experience of tomorrow will depend directly on the work being done behind the scenes today to create new scientific theories, models and disciplines for understanding the Internet. In fact, a core element of Yahoo! Labs’ charter is to invent the new sciences that will underlie the next generation Internet, from Green Computing, Privacy and Security, to Economics and Social Systems, Advertising, Web Information Management, and Machine Learning. And nowhere is that charter more evident than in our Key Scientific Challenges Program, which focuses on supporting the bright young minds at universities across the world who are thinking, researching and creating those new sciences.

Today we’re happy to announce that we have selected 23 students from 16 world-class universities as our 2010 Key Scientific Challenges winners. They were selected based on their research proposals into the 12 different scientific challenges we believe are critical to fueling innovation on the Web. Our outstanding 2010 winners are:

Computational Advertising

• Yuanhua Lv, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
• Nan Li, Carnegie Mellon University

Green Computing

• Hrishikesh Amur, Georgia Institute of Technology
• Vijay Vasudevan, Carnegie Mellon University

Machine Learning & Statistics

• Arthur Asuncion, University of California, Irvine
• Ryan Tibshirani, Stanford University
• Sameer Singh, University of Massachusetts
• Sebastien Bratieres, Cambridge University

Microeconomics and Social Systems

• Nikolay Archak, New York University
• Moira Burke, Carnegie Mellon University
• Ankur Mani, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Yaw Anokwa, University of Washington
• Scott Kominers, Harvard University
• Pranav Dandekar, Stanford University

Search Experiences

• Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Cornell
• Aditya Parameswaran, Stanford University

Security and Privacy

• Xin Hu, University of Michigan
• Kai Wang, University of California, San Diego

Web Information Management

• Yingyi Bu, University of Washington
• Oktie Hassanzadeh, University of Toronto
• Emanuele Coviello, University of California, San Diego
• Rares Vernica, University of California, Irvine
• Michael Wick, University of Massachusetts

Each of these students submitted to Yahoo! an idea and a research proposal that our scientists and leaders saw as a genuine contribution to their field and to an area we see as critical to laying a scientific foundation for future Web experiences. Over the next several months each of them will be able to learn from one of Yahoo!’s leading scientists in their specialized field, helping them take their research to the next level and learn what it’s like to crunch data, tackle technical hurdles and design experiments at true Internet scale, an opportunity rare in purely academic environments.

The 2010 winners, in addition to receiving $5,000 in unrestricted seed funding, will convene at Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale, California in September for the exclusive Key Scientific Challenges Graduate Student Summit where they will spend two days with Yahoo! Labs scientists presenting and discussing their work.

Congratulations and good luck to our Key Scientific Challenge winners for 2010.

-Jamie Lockwood, Academic Relations Yahoo! Labs

Speaking to the advertising industry group in San Francisco, Carol said, “We want Yahoo! to be the partner you turn to for answers and solutions, and most importantly—when you want results.” By providing science, art and scale, Yahoo can help advertisers and agencies master online advertising.

To read more about Carol’s  4A’s keynote and Yahoo’s value proposition to advertisers, please check out the original post on the Yahoo! Advertising Blog.

Crowds of starstruck pedestrians formed around a recording studio that we erected overnight in Times Square as yodels echoed through the canyons of the city. We invited anyone and everyone to come inside and give us their best interpretation of the Yahoo! yodel. What was at stake? The potential fame and bragging rights of having their yodel featured on the Yahoo! Homepage and in our new advertising campaign.

We camped out on Military Island for 12 hours in a brick building that included a dressing room with costume gear, a rehearsal room with gold records on the wall, and a state-of-the-art recording studio. Celebrities were on hand to mentor yodelers — Jewel, Pete Wentz, LeAnn Rimes, Randy Jackson, and Rob Cavallo, chief creative officer of Warner Music Group and one of the world’s most highly acclaimed music producers. (Jewel said her dad was so proud that all those years of coaching her to yodel had finally paid off.) Kimberly Caldwell of American Idol fame was our tireless emcee and we even had America’s Got Talent’s Manuela “The Yodeling Dominatrix” Horn to help rally brave souls. And house band musicians — with many Grammys among them — sat atop the marquee of the Hard Rock Cafe (Hollywood Squares-style), ready to give a live riff for each yodeler. We heard rap yodels, bluegrass yodels, punk yodels, funk yodels, hip hop yodels, the list goes on. We even had two Cirque du Soleil performers stop by for a rendition. And they were all projected on the Jumbotron for the crowd to enjoy (or, at least, be amused by).

The last time we sought the best new Yahoo! yodeler, back in 2003, we ended up launching the singing career of a 9-year-old girl named Taylor Ware. Yesterday, one lucky performer (pictured above) — a foot messenger whose boss told her she could come perform before she delivered her last package of the day — caught the eye of Pete Wentz and Rob Cavallo, who spent extra time coaching her and left with her MySpace info and email address. Remember the name Chanese Elife, people — she might have a bright future ahead!

We also held events in London and Mumbai because, you know, yodeling knows no geographic bounds. The top winners for each country will be crowned on November 15th, based on which videos receive the most views. So head over to the gallery and check out the contenders. You’ll help them find an audience of more than 500 million people.

For more on the event, read Lyndsey Parker’s Yahoo! Music blog posts, browse photos in our Flickr photostream (slideshow below), and watch video highlights from our NY, London, and Mumbai events:

Ya-hooooo!

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Today, we’re giving the Yahoo! yodel back to the people with the launch of Yodel Studio, a global casting call for the world’s best yodels. Yodelers who take us up on this challenge will personalize and reinterpret our yodel, competing for a chance to be featured in Yahoo!’s new global advertising campaign and on one of the world’s largest stages: the Yahoo! homepage. Your yodel will also be heard through the donation Yahoo! will make to local and global charities of your choice for each yodel submitted (up to $130,000).

To kick this whole effort off in style, Yahoo! is hosting live Yodel Studio events today in New York’s Times Square, London’s Covent Garden and tomorrow at Mumbai’s High Street Phoenix Mall. Professional recording studios have been built in each location with celebrities on hand to coach yodelers. Jewel, Pete Wentz, LeAnn Rimes, and Randy Jackson will join us in New York with super producer Rob Cavallo; Pixie Lott and the X Factor’s Sinitta will be in London; and Bollywood singer Shankar Mahadevan and musical artists VJ Nikhil Chinappa and Shaa’ir + Func will mentor in Mumbai.

And if you need some yodel inspiration – might I suggest channeling your inner Jewel?

So get yodeling soon – the deadline to submit your yodel online is November 8! Read more here.

Brian Mullin
Senior Director, Buzz Marketing

First, a quick review. We have hosted Open Hack Days since 2006 to foster collaboration and innovation within the developer community. This was our ninth event, preceded by shindigs at our California headquarters as well as in Taiwan, London, Bangalore, and São Paulo. We provide the hands-on workshops, tech talks, food, beer, Red Bull, and various hackery diversions, and developers stay up all night long to deliver creative mashups that they demo before a panel of judges.

About 300 developers attended our inaugural NYC event (sporting a greater proportion of blazers and ties than we’re used to seeing), which kicked off Friday morning with a keynote by Clay Shirky, a New York University professor and social media guru (here’s a video interview we grabbed). After a day of workshops and training sessions, developers adjourned to a hacker lounge with a steampunk theme. Victorian bird cages dangled power cables above each hacker table. A bright red wall was hung with gilded portraits of various well-known innovators. A Victorian maiden was hacked with a monitor for a head, displaying the latest tweets with the #openhacknyc tag on her face. Chalk boards featured ornate steampunk-inspired drawings that would have impressed H.G. Wells. And, of course, there was the table of hacker snacks and a beanbag-filled corner dedicated to Guitar Hero.

Before the hacking began, we hosted a geek’s open mic event with Ignite NYC. For two hours, participants had five minutes on stage to talk through 20 slides that automatically rotated after 15 seconds. It was a bit like the everyman’s TED. We heard about Moby Dick written in Japanese Emoji, the violence of the media, how to save journalism, what “open” means, patents, surprisology, benefits of living in colonies at sea, the New York Times Index (yes, it’s still printed on paper), clothing made of scissors and agave leaves, and the tyranny of a flavored chewing-tobacco lover on YouTube. There was even a visit from the Spaceman from Outer Space (who apparently wasn’t a fan of Alien IV).

By Saturday afternoon, about 100 hackers persevered and submitted 40 hacks. Without further ado, our winners:

• Best Overall – InsiderTrade.org: You can sign up for instant alerts about insider trades for the various stocks you follow. It’s live – try it.
• Best Overall, Runner up – TVitter: If you’re a Mystery Science Theater 300 fan, you’ll love this one. The team hacked our Connected TV widget to produce an app that lets people watch TV together and throw out comments that others can see.
• Connected TV (1st place) – Recipe Finder: This app lets you find and display recipes and even includes a countdown timer so you don’t burn your cupcakes while you get engrossed in Glee.
• Connected TV 2nd prize – Fantasy Football Widget: Brings the #1 fantasy sports league to your TV.
• Connected TV 3rd prize – Couch Potato RSS: This app lets you follow your favorite RSS feeds while you’re surfing TV.
• Best UI – Inhabited Web 2.0: Brings a social filter to individual websites by letting you see where people are congregating on a web page – “perhaps next to a great deal, interesting news story, or funny video.”
• Best Mobile – Community Bulletin Boards: This app brings community bulletin boards to your iPhone so you can find, create and add to message boards based on location just like physical bulletin boards that one sometimes finds in parks, on streets, in shops etc.
• Accessibility – Audio Texter: An app that allows blind and visually-impaired people send and receive SMS messages.
• Best Food/Hardware Hack (tie) – The New York Toast: From Team MakerBot, we had a 3D printer that printed news, weather, and photos in peanut butter, jam, and frosting… on toast. News for breakfast.
• Best Food/Hardware Hack (tie) – Delicious Cake: Since Team MakerBot found cake mix in their grocery bag and an extra supply of wire and LEDs, they spawned another team that created a cake that showed sentiment (positive and negative) for del.icio.us URLs. It was not eaten. This team included Diana Eng, overall winner of our very first Open Hack.
• Hack for Good – Power Trends: A platform that helps consumers save on their energy bills and helps energy providers predict load but leveraging social media. It measures energy usage for participating towns, who compete for prizes for being below their power consumption baseline.

Here’s a quick video recap of the event:

For more of that just-like-being-there feeling, you can view our Flickr photoset, other photos from the event, and check out tweets here.

Up next? Taiwan. We’re coming to hack you. This weekend. Get ready.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Photos: 1. Hack maestros – Eric and Havi, 2. Winning hackers, 3. Best overall hack – insidertrading.org, 4. Judges, 5. YDN stickers, 6. Peanut butter printing, 7. Steampunked emcees, 8. Winning hackers, 9. Last minute hacking, 10. NYU’s Clay Shirky keynotes, 11. Hacking a nap, 12. Hacker heart, 13. Eli hacks the stickers, 14. Steampunked Twitter display, 15. Hacker lounge, 16. Creating the NY Toast

We kicked things off this morning with a keynote by New York University professor Clay Shirky, whose book “Here Comes Everybody” examines how Web 2.0 is revolutionizing the social order. He tackled the culture of online communities and what motivates people to participate in them. For example, why have more than 3,311 people built out incredible minutiae about Dr. Who on Wikipedia? Why does a guy build the Taj Mahal out of LEGOs and upload photos to a LEGO community site? What happens when a woman who normally blogs about fashion and her iPhone apps decides to post photos of a military coup?

We grabbed a few minutes with Clay after his talk to expand on his themes. Here’s the interview:

Our hackers now have bellies full of hot dogs, nachos, beer, and ice cream bars (nourishing hacker food) and are bedding down for a night of coding. We’ll see the fruits of their labor tomorrow afternoon when they each have 90 seconds to dazzle the judges with their wares. They probably won’t get much sleep, but we hope there will be Obama sandwiches for all.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

What is Open Hack Day? It’s what happens when clever web developers, a wireless connection, a host of web services, and massive quantities of caffeine, pizza and donuts come together for an all-night code-a-thon. After 24 hours, creative coders show off their mashup wares and clever apps, American Idol-style, before a panel of distinguished judges, who bestow awards, praise, and lots of geek cred.

Ever since the first Open Hack Day back in 2006, we’ve made it a priority to be as open and accessible to developers as possible. Yahoo!’s audience is global – and so is the base of developers who value our open tools,technologies and vast user base. We’ve hosted Open Hack Days in the U.K., India, Brazil, and Taiwan; next month, we’ll meet with developers, designers, and entrepreneurs from New York’s vibrant Web technology and digital media scene.

We’ll kick off the weekend with a Friday morning keynote from Internet guru and NYU professor Clay Shirky. That’s followed by a full day of tech talks, panel conversations, and hands-on workshops that cover the latest Yahoo! developer tools and services. Yahoo!’s open platforms let developers build things that anyone can use on and off Yahoo!: Flickr toys, Connected TV Widgets, and open apps that you can install for Yahoo! Mail, My Yahoo!, and more. On Friday evening, we’ll kick off the hack contest and hold our breath to see what’s built by Saturday afternoon. And in-between, we’ll host a special Open Hack edition of Ignite NYC — a geek’s open mic.

What will take this year’s prize? A moblogging purse, a phenomenal way to share and organize your photos in Yahoo! Mail, an iPhone orchestra, or something we haven’t even thought of yet?

To get a better sense of the Open Hack Day showdown, check out Ricky Montalvo’s “Hackumentary,” a short film documentary shot during last year’s event in Sunnyvale. Here’s the trailer:

Hack Day – a hackumentary short film from ricky montalvo on Vimeo.

Head over to http://www.icanhaz.com/yahoohacknyc to register, check out the wiki, or follow us (@ydn) on Twitter for updates. Let the countdown to Open Hack Day 2009 begin!

Chris Yeh
Head of the Yahoo! Developer Network

Also, Carol and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer hosted a conference call together this morning on our campus to discuss the agreement with media and analysts. You can check out an archive on our investor relations site. And here are a few photos of them both from just after the call.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

This year, delegates from 90 countries gathered to hear distinguished speakers like the UN’s Kofi Annan, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, Twitter’s Biz Stone, Bob Geldof, and the heads of the world’s largest advertising agencies. And jury members judged more than 22,000 pieces of the most creative advertising from every corner of the globe. In short, it was the place to be for ad types.

Since advertising is one of our passions at Yahoo!, you can imagine we wanted to support the festival, Yahoo!-style. Our goal was to communicate that the world’s biggest ideas should live on the world’s biggest stage –- the online arena. So, Yahoo! had an innovative, local presence at the festival. Naturally, we placed ads in local media saluting the creatives, but we also deployed an awesome purple van and hit the streets with a giveaway that literally declared “Nothing Creative Happens in Penny Loafers.”

Our Mission: Project Flip Flop
How do you show the creative community that you really love them? You make them comfortable, of course! Members of Project Flip Flop canvassed the Croissette with pairs of purple Yahoo!-branded Havaianas flip flops, slipping them on the weary feet of anyone with a festival badge. Meanwhile, our purple van circled the streets and our own Purple Pedals bike rode the promenade to document the mission. By the end of the week, thousands of feet were happier.

The response was très fantastique!

• Fast Company wrote that the flip flops were the most sought after prize at Cannes;
• The Cannes Daily covered the campaign (page 12);
• A creative director from a global agency said to me, “Thanks for letting us be free!”;
• The head of marketing for one of the largest global brands in attendance asked for pairs for her children;
• Even the Twitterverse played along. One tweet suggested that we put this campaign up for a Lion next year. Another from halfway around the globe asked to add a pair to a Yahoo! footwear collection.

To see the mission in action, check out this short video (below), view our Flickr album, and see some of the images that our Purple Pedal picked up.

Creativity is the secret sauce in the best advertising and we want your Yahoo! experience to be well seasoned with it. For a look at the creativity that snagged the Lions, check out the official site at canneslions.com.

Elisa Steele
Chief Marketing Officer

The new Yahoo! Toolbar now offers greater customization and more immediate access to the information you care about most from across the entire web – not just Yahoo! sites. Currently available if you’re using Internet Explorer 6+ and now for Firefox (as a beta), too, our new toolbar also helps you do some really handy things, including:

• Preview and Go: Most of us have sites we check every day –- sometimes more than once. Now you can preview information from your favorite sites directly within your toolbar. Small previews drop down from your toolbar, giving you real-time information without ever having to leave the page you’re on. Customize your toolbar with dozens of apps from Yahoo! and across the rest of the web, so you can check on your multiple email inboxes (Yahoo! and AOL), your eBay listings, the latest news from People.com or USA Today, stock portfolios, and even your local weather or movie showtimes.
• Search Faster: One of the most popular features on toolbars is search. So, we’ve created a better, more efficient way for you to conduct web searches (with the help of some cool technology from Inquisitor). The search box in your Yahoo! Toolbar now offers query suggestions, recall of sites based on your recent search history, and the ability to directly search other web sites, like Flickr and Wikipedia — right from the search box. It’s a real time saver!

By bringing the best of the web together in one place, we want to make the web work better for you – right from within your toolbar. Get started by downloading the new Yahoo! Toolbar at http://toolbar.yahoo.com/.

Burke Culligan
Senior Director, Yahoo! Front Doors

The AllThingsD.com site has a liveblog recap of Carol’s interview. You might also head to the Twitterverse for a taste of how she was received. Some of our favorite tweets:

• Chris Anderson (@TEDchris): Yahoo’s new CEO Carol Bartz knocking ‘em dead at D7. Smart, focused, engaging, funny, persuasive. Memo to self: buy YHOO?
• Peter Kafka (@pkafka): I think this may be Carol Bartz’ first big public appearance since coming to Yahoo. IMHO she’s crushing it.
• Larry Magid (@LarryMagid): Yahoo’s Carol Bartz is one of the funniest speakers ever at D.
• Katie Boehret (@kabster728): Our stage manager says: I wanna see the sitcom w/these two (referring to @karaswisher and Carol Bartz, Yahoo CEO).

(UPDATE: The folks at D have taken down Carol’s video to replace it “with one that contains 100 percent more profanity. It’ll be up soon–we apologize for the inconvenience.” We’ll get it up when the link is available.)
UPDATE #2: And it’s back!

Here’s the video — uncensored:

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Photos by Asa Mathat, AllThingsD.com

If you want a recap of Carol’s D discussion, check out our Twitter stream — we’re attempting live updates. And check back here later today for photos and video highlights.

1. BrandonWIFI: Now that you have been on board long enough what was your biggest surprise in terms of what Yahoo! is good at and what was your biggest disappointment?

I’m most surprised by how good Yahoo! is at connecting people to their worlds. I hadn’t realized that half of the Net users in the world come to Yahoo! every month, and that more people spend time on our site every month than any other site in the US. That’s huge. And my biggest disappointment is that although we have all these wonderful sites – like being #1 in eleven categories – we really didn’t focus enough on what we were good at. The company was easily distracted – it’s really about focus.

2. Joe Lazarus (San Francisco): My Question: If you had to choose, what is the one specific thing that Yahoo! can and will do better than any other company in the world… the one thing that you would like consumers to instantly associate with the Yahoo! brand and the products you create… not something broad and all encompassing like “the starting point” or “excellence”, but rather one specific core competency. Some examples from other companies might include: Google = Search, eBay = Auctions, Facebook = Friend Connections, Amazon = Customer Service. All of these companies do many things well, but they each have clear strengths in one clearly defined area. What do you see as Yahoo!’s one thing either today or in the future?

I’m so glad you asked this question because it’s something we’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Yahoo! means a lot of things to a lot of people – whether you’re a student, a working mom, a business owner, what have you. We’ve essentially got something for everyone. And that’s made it tough to really define Yahoo! and what makes us unique. But as we see it, Yahoo! is the place where millions of people come every day to see what is happening with the people and the things that matter most to them. That could mean what’s happening in the world — like breaking news, sports scores, stock quotes, last night’s TV highlights — and your world — like your email, photos, groups, fantasy leagues. Based on what we know about you, we’re unique in how well we can bring you both those worlds. So I think our clear strength is “relevance” – whether that means knowing what weather to give you or serving up headlines you’ll be interested in. It’s all about really getting you and we have more work to do in that area.

3. AMS (United Kingdom): What job is Jerry Yang now doing within the company?

Jerry still has his sleeves rolled up. He spends a ton of time with our product teams and is fantastic with our advertising customers. In fact, he’s been spending a lot of time on the road in the last few months, meeting with clients and discussing how we can work better with them. And, of course, he’s got a really big brain, which is incredibly helpful to me personally. He was really supportive as I came on board and we talk regularly about the company’s future and what needs to change. Working with founders isn’t a new concept for me –- when I joined Autodesk, there were eight of them!

4. AMS (United Kingdom): What is Steve Ballmer really like to negotiate with?

Sorry, I’m not going to touch that one. Maybe you should ask the aQuantive guys.

5. AMS, United Kingdom: Do you think the economic downturn is still getting worst, and will drag on for long time yet. (There does seem to be more adverts on yahoo the last month or so that is am seeing as customer, so is good for your company).

I don’t think the downturn is getting worse. But it’s not getting better at this point.

6. Aaditya Bhatia (San José, CA): This is from one of the biggest fans of Yahoo!. Google is on its way to taking over the world. What is your killer plan to save our Yahoo! and our planet?

Bottom line is we have to make Yahoo! just a terrific site for people around the world to come to –- and come back to. What most people don’t realize is that only 5% of the time people spend on the Internet is spent searching. That means 95% of the time, people are doing something else … reading, sharing, connecting, researching, watching, discovering, having fun, killing time. The better our products are and the more they help you live your life, the more likely you are to visit us again and again. And that’s what we’re focused on. But I also want to point out that Yahoo! is already really strong company –- I think with the backdrop of the last year or so, that’s gotten lost in the shuffle. We’re number one or two in about 25 categories and we reach one in every two people who go online. Not to mention that we have billions in the bank, no debt, and enviable operating cash flow in a tough economy. I don’t think that describes a company in need of “being saved.” As for the planet, we all have to work together to save it.

7. David Smith (Portland, Oregon): What is the most important user experience factor for Yahoo’s future success and why (for example accessibility, deep personalization, open data, or real-time relevance like Twitter/Facebook)?

Like I said earlier, relevance is really our secret sauce… to what’s happening with people and things that matter to you most. That means we’re either letting you personalize what you see on Yahoo! (although we know no one wants to work too hard at doing that these days) or using what we know about to surface things that match what you care about.

8. bAbel: With the newspaper industry suffering, if newspapers go down, which would affect AP and the wires, would that affect Yahoo!? If so, how?

I’m not going to speculate on the future of newspapers, but we’re obviously focused on making the best, high-quality news content available to people wherever they want to access it. With people turning more often to the Internet for news, we know that journalism will thrive online, regardless of how business models ultimately evolve. On that note, our 800 newspaper partners in the Newspaper Consortium are focused on growth and innovation, vs the doom and gloom hanging over the industry. They’re seeing revenue grow online and that’s influencing a seminal shift in their cultures and how they do business.

9. Miramon: Revenues and profits have been decreasing. Regardless of the reasons for the downturn, what is your plan for making Yahoo a vital and profitable company?

Yahoo! is already a vital and profitable company. We’re all suffering from the downturn but, frankly, we less than many companies.

10. Jen: which yahoo products do you use the most and why?

I spend most of my time on our homepage to see what’s happening in the world, Yahoo! Mail for email, and Yahoo! Finance to keep an eye on the markets.

11. Kathy (San Francisco): It’s graduation season at high schools and universities….If you were delivering a graduation speech this year, what would your key messages be to the graduates?

For the kids graduating from high school and going on to college, I would tell them to study hard, play hard, and pick good friends. Don’t hang with losers. For college grads, I would remind them that they have, for the most part, at least 40 years ahead of them to work, so they have a long time to make their way. And in the environment their facing, they need to be creative because I will guarantee that after this downturn, there will be an upturn.

12. AMS (United Kingdom): What is favourite way to spend a weekend.

Family, gardening and golf.

13. Kathy (San Francisco): If this chapter of your leadership had a soundtrack, what would it be and why?

Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing.”

14. Miramon: Do you agree that Parmesan is truly the king of cheeses?

Yes. And by the way, pasta is just a carrier for Parmesan.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Breathing inspiration into anxiety-ridden and debt-addled college graduates in the worst economy since World War II is a tall order. But Jerry reminded them of the resilient human spirit and that great things often crawl from the wreckage in the worst of times. After all, he and David Filo created Yahoo! in a downturn in the early 90s. Jerry proffered six bits of advice — ranging from not letting the headlines get the grads down to taking advantage of the incredible tools (e.g. the Internet) at their disposal to being ready to take strange roads that might not be in their master plan.

You can read the full transcript here. Or enjoy the video (Part I, Part II), courtesy of BigIslandVideoNews.com.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Yahoo!’s tech gurus have just returned from quite the trip! Last week, the team packed their bags and headed to Bucharest, Romania to host Yahoo!’s 14th Open Hack. It was a huge hit with over 350 hackers and developers from 19 countries around Europe joining us for a day of technical sessions and presentations, followed by an all-night 24-hour hackathon.

Over the course of the weekend, hackers consumed..

1090 cans of Red Bull
115 liters of Pepsi
55 lbs of coffee

..to keep them energized and awake throughout the hackathon  event.

After a day and a half of crazy cramming and hacking (and piles of pizza!), hacks were judged on their originality and technical excellence by a panel of judges that included Yahoo!’s Chief Technology Officer, Raymie Stata; Todd Hay, who heads up the Yahoo! Developer Network, as well as notables from Romania’s tech community. Hackers then joined Raymie Stata for a keynote followed by the Open Hack Europe 2011 recognition ceremony.

Hack days are a great way to encourage innovation and share ideas across the developer community and this year’s event didn’t let us down – the buzz around Yahoo! products and APIs was huge!

Judgesrated the following as the top hacks:

TheBatMail
Best Product Enhancement
TheBatMail application integrates directly into Yahoo! Mail and features threaded discussions, social discovery and email editing.

Map of Deforested Areas in Romania
Hack for Social Good
Map of Deforested Areas in Romania works with satellite images to identify deforestation in Romania and can be used by the general public and NGOs to monitor and compile deforested areas in the country.

Take a Hike
Best Yahoo! Search BOSS Hack
Take a Hike tracks the popularity of political parties and current politicians, showing stats and other useful information about the local political climate.

Tourist Guide
Best Local Hack
Tourist Guide finds the most popular places for tourists to visit using the number of uploaded pictures on Flickr and Panoramio and check-ins with Foursquare and Gowalla.

The Yahoo Farm – “Cloud Data in Your Bedroom“
Hacker’s Choice
This crafty hardware hack gathers data about your local weather, incoming Yahoo! Mail, and Messenger buddies via Yahoo! APIs and presents it as ascale model diorama of a country farm, complete with yodeling sheep and a working windmill.

YMotion
Best Mashup
Ymotion helps you get an idea about the mood of your audience at a presentation or a popular tourist location by using facial expression recognition techniques.

Yahoo Social Programming
Best Messenger Hack
Yahoo! Social Programming is an Eclipse plug-in based on the Yahoo Messenger API that enables programmers around the world to share their code in real-time.

Top Hacker
Alexandru Badiu was also named Best in Show for contributing three hacks to the event (Playlist-O-Matic, Take a Hike and Quick Info), which is quite an accomplishment in itself and even more so considering the time constraint!

We’re all beat from the festivities, but thrilled that we got to meet such inspiring new members of our developer community.  We are already looking forward to our next Open Hack event, taking place in Bangalore in July – we hope to see you there!

Check out the @openhackday Twitter handle or the Facebook and Flickr sites for more buzz around the event.

In two weeks, Carol will sit in conversation with Kara Swisher at the annual D: All Things Digital conference. In honor of this first public appearance, she’s agreed to an exclusive Q&A with Yodel Anecdotal. We invite you, dear reader, to submit whatever questions you’d like us to ask. We’re squeezing into her calendar so we can’t get to all of them, but we’d love your input. Fair game might be topics like “Why did you take this job?,” “What do you think needs fixing at Yahoo!,” “What’s your favorite website?,” and “Why do you like cheese so much?.”

Please submit your questions via ycorpblog [at] yahoo-inc [dot] com no later than 5pm PT next Tuesday (May 19th). We’ll post her answers on May 27th. Please include your name, city, and whether you’d prefer to be anonymous. And make it good!

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

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.

Click to start

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

Yahoo!’s human right summit was kicked off by Ory Okolloh with an inspiring account of the role of new media during the post-election violence in Kenya, which she described as a story about the Internet and the possibilities around it, and a case against stanching information flows. The diverse and inspiring participants highlighted old friends like Global Voices, new friends, emerging platforms, and nascent projects. The crowd could not help but be reminded why we’ve waxed enthusiastic about the promise of Internet technologies as a catalyst for development, democracy and human rights.

In the face of this promise — perhaps due to it — the focus was actually on the tensions around freedom of expression and privacy. While a disconcerting theme emerged around the recent backsliding on these rights by early Internet adopters, the activists from Bahrain, Ethiopia, India, and Kenya made clear that the trends in the Global South were the overriding concern.

There was discussion throughout on the Global Network Initiative, of which Yahoo! is a co-founder, along with a host of great companies, NGOs, academics and investors, with a good measure of support, and no shortage of hard questions about global inclusion, progress to date, and what success looks like.

The substance of day was compelling, but not especially novel; indeed, Soul of the New Machine was going on simultaneously. Very much out of the ordinary, however, were the setting and the participants — ranging from dreaded competitors and other businesses, to some of Yahoo!’s toughest critics, and its own employees (who posed some of the most thoughtful questions). We converged at Yahoo! for a discussion of areas where they’ve admittedly learned some very painful and public lessons, something CEO Carol Bartz and General Counsel Mike Callahan both acknowledged in their remarks. What felt significant here, was the committed and open manner in which the company is moving ahead.

While welcoming critics was a valuable step, I believe the greatest impact will come from bringing Yahoo! employees together to consider both the threats to human rights and power of the Net, helping them to understand their (and our) importance in helping to change the world.

Colin Maclay
Managing Director, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society

While you’re thinking that over, I would love to introduce you to Gaurav Mishra, the Yahoo! Human Rights Fellow in International Values, Communications, Technology and Global Internet at Georgetown University.

As the Yahoo! Human Rights Fellow, Gaurav leads research on social media and mobile use in India and China and teaches a graduate course on “Social Media in Business, Development and Government.” Gaurav is on sabbatical from India’s Tata Motors, where he is Assistant General Manager with a focus on digital marketing. He also writes Gauravonomics, a popular blog on how social media and mobile technologies are changing media, business, development and government, particularly in emerging economies.

Gaurav recently came to campus to speak about his research. Some highlights:

• Even where Internet content is controlled, creative people find ways to communicate. In China, Internet users resort to images and code words to elude censorship. For example, “harmonized” was a euphemism for “my blog got censored.” When the term was banned, intrepid writers wrote about “river crab,” which sounds similar to harmonious in Mandarin. Later the meme became photos of a naked man doing pushups.
• The Internet can be a powerful tool to support free expression and social change. In India, four young women used the Internet to launch the “Pink Chaddi Campaign,” a peaceful protest against violent conservatives’ plans to disrupt Valentine’s Day by assaulting “pub-going, loose and forward” women. The campaign called for women to shame the would-be perpetrators by sending pink panties to their homes and offices. The overwhelming response resulted in more than 270 blog links; a Facebook group with more than 48,000 members, 350 discussion topics and more than 6,750 wall posts; and hundreds of pink panties sent. The campaign brought worldwide attention to the issue, mobilized thousands of young women, and the group threatening the violent action was preventively detained on Valentine’s Day.

Gaurav’s talk was particularly timely, as Yahoo! continues to explore how we promote free expression for our users around the world. Yahoo!’s Business & Human Rights Program will be hosting a Business & Human Rights Summit in Sunnyvale on May 5 (space is limited; RSVP required). The Summit will focus on how technology and the Internet facilitate freedom of expression, with a focus upon innovative approaches to addressing government challenges. Our keynote speaker is Ory Okolloh, the Exective Director of Ushahidi, the crowdsourcing platform for crisis situations developed in Kenya and used in the Congo, Gaza and the 2009 elections in India. We’ll have panels about citizen and cyber journalism (featuring journalists/bloggers from around the world) and about the Global Network Initiative, a global effort co-founded by Yahoo! to address threats to privacy and free expression in the Internet, communications and technology sector.

So… now that you know that even a pair of underwear can be a powerful tool for social change, what’s your big idea?

Here’s my interview with Gaurav from his recent visit:

Ebele Okobi-Harris
Director, Yahoo! Business & Human Rights

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

The winning hacks included creations like a mobile application built on Yahoo! Blueprint that lets you look up government information and laws that apply to the region you’re standing in at that moment, a BOSS hack that lets you find information about your favorite bands, a Flickr app that alerts you when the copyright status of a photo you are using has changed (to keep you out of trouble), a SearchMonkey hack that adds category links in Yahoo! search results for Wikipedia, and a great green hack that lets you track your fuel consumption and mileage via your mobile device.

And while hacking is serious business, there’s always time for comic relief (as fans of Mo Kakwan, hacker-cum-standup-comedian, can attest — he had our Sunnyvale crowd crying with laughter at two consecutive open hacks). For what little sleeping and relaxing there was, the Yahoo! Brazil team provided large purple beanbag “puffs.” And two opportunistic Brazilian hackers decided to make them the centerpiece of a video that showcased 18 highly-inventive uses for said puffs. This included turning them into kayaks, race cars, mechanical bulls, recycling bins, stone circles, TV sets, soccer goals, beer steins, and more. Their puff hackery won them a “”Using the Environment” award. Watch their video here:

Puff Hacking from fczuardi on Vimeo.

For that “just like being there” feeling, check out the brhackday08 Flickr tags and read about it on Twitter (Portuguese recommended). Till the next open hack!

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

As a technical developer, it’s a wonderful feeling to go where you are utterly out of your depth, and yet realize that you’re surrounded by people who not only understand the material, but also have intelligent questions to ask. For two days, we all chose from among more than 50 lectures and no less than 80 less formal poster sessions. There were experts in geographic intelligence, accessibility, mobile widgets, data center efficiency, the future of drag-and-drop. Everything we talked about will affect you in ways you see… and some you don’t. For more technical detail, head over to our developer blog next week.

The theory behind Tech Pulse is simple: By having the inventors of all these key technologies explain them to the other techies, we’re making it possible to implement more of them for your benefit. Yahoo! is at heart a technology company and the more technology we have at our disposal, the more we can use it to create fun, useful, interactive experiences. The best way to spread all these amazing discoveries through our own tech community is to bring everyone together to listen and discuss. I’m sure that when all the engineers went back to the mothership, they shared their new knowledge with co-workers and the cycle of innovation started over again.

If nothing else, Tech Pulse emphasized the amount of raw talent at Yahoo!. While I can’t give away any secret sauce, trust that there’s an astounding depth of knowledge here to take concepts from theory to reality. We’re doing incredible things to create better experiences for you.

Tom Hughes-Croucher
Technical Evangelist
Yahoo! Developer Network

We were blown away by amazing ideas and hacks. After 24-hours of working through the night on new creations, our hacker guests demoed more than 45 hacks to our panel of judges –- internal: David Filo (Chief Yahoo!), Ash Patel (EVP, Audience Products Division), Cheryl Ainoa (VP, Media Engineering); and external: Matt Mullenweg (Automattic/WordPress), Om Malik (GigaOm), Rashmi Sinha (SlideShare) and Jeff Clavier (SoftTech VC).

We saw some comedy, some shtick, and some basic crowd appeal, but the overall winner was truly a hack that will enhance a user’s experience on Yahoo!, taking advantage of the sneak preview of the Open Mail Development Platform that was in effect for the weekend. A few developers from Xoopit created a Yahoo! Mail application that enables users to more easily share multimedia within their inboxes.

Prizes were also awarded in other categories, including some that were invented on the spot by impressed judges. These ranged from Best Technical Hack (officially called “Filo’s Technical Merit”) to Best User Experience to Most Prolific to the Bleeding Purple Award, which went to the team that used an incredible number of Yahoo! services to power their hack. Om even created the GigaOm award – an invitation to the upcoming Mobilize conference – given to the creators of “Where are My Drivers?”, an application for small business owners to track location and communicate with their delivery vehicles. The full list of winners can be found here.

It was a blast to meet hackers from around the world and talk tech, get creative and code until our eyelids drooped. We had developers join us not just from Silicon Valley, but from Brazil, Canada, England, India, Israel, Korea, Spain, and Taiwan as well. Three hackers even won a contest to come from Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore to show their stuff.

And that’s just a taste of the buzz out there. If you’ve got time to kill, search for #hackday on Twitter or “openhack08” on Flickr – you’ll find a bonanza of more than 2000 photos and 400 tweets. Here’s a sampling of what people were twittering:

• #hackday was excellent.
• #hackday was awesome!!
• Had an awesome time at #hackday. Ate, danced, drank, met and talked to some awesomely smart people. Girl talk ROCKED.
• Totally enjoyed the reunion aspect of #hackday.
• This #hackday is off da hook.
• My cup runneth over of yahoo technologies #hackday.

The next Open Hack kicks off in Taiwan later this week – stay tuned to developer.yahoo.com for an Open Hack coming to a city or country near you!

Chris Yeh
Head of the Yahoo! Developer Network

• As 2pm rolls around, the chairs in the audience start filling up and the University Hack Day winners are ushered to the stage to kick off the presentations. It’s been an intense morning of quiet hacking and doughnut consumption to the soothing sounds of microphone checks and hack dress rehearsals.
• Our MCs are Neal Sample and Eric Wu, who provide witty banter along with the top prize categories: Filo’s Technical Merit Award; Most Unexpected; Best User Experience; and Best Overall Hack. There will also be a variety of small prizes offered by specific groups like Y!OS and Flickr. Our esteemed judges? Cheryl Ainoa, VP of Yahoo! Media Engineering; Ash Patel, head of our Audience division; Rashmi Sinha, CEO of SlideShare; David Filo, co-founder and Chief Yahoo; Jeff Clavier, investor extraordinaire; Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress; and Om Malik, CEO of GigaOm.
• Before the presentations began, the Georgia Tech hacker, Roger Pincombe, cozied up to the judges by handing them Xbox games and hardcover books for his hack, DialPrice. It’s a phone interface for comparative shopping that’ll spit back user ratings, price ranges, and local availability for items that you identify by their UPC code, and it comes with a fun map-based visualization to see which items people are looking at around the country. The Yahoo! Shopping API wasn’t mature enough to be used when the hack was initially developed, so all of the data is coming from Goo…er, I mean, “Oogle” Product Search.
• Demograph, by Mattt Thompson of CMU, maps out congressional districts for any given location and also provided the first of several Sarah Palin references throughout the day.
• In a rather bold move, Michael Fischer of Stanford “open-sourced” his FlickrFuse hack to the audience — any changes that the hackers in the audience submitted would immediately be reflected back in the actual application. The results were surprisingly non-disastrous.
• If you want to succeed, try adding “Yahoo!” to your hack name! Consequently, Will Duff of UIUC presented not just “Pages”, but instead the much classier “Yahoo! Pages”, a very polished inline WYSIWYG page editor layered on top of YUI components that he used to quickly throw together an extremely passable imitation of the one of the YUI documentation pages.
• Another thing to keep in mind is that you should always have a contingency plan in case something goes horribly wrong with your presentation. The Psychic Hotline hack, a voice-operated interface to the 20 Questions game put together by Ryan Luecke, Gabor Angeli, and Stewart He of Berkeley, ran into some technical difficulties early on and looked dead in the water. However, the guys quickly switched gears to their backup hack, a hand-made electric guitar on which you would play notes by completing circuits with a copper wire “pick”. While Ryan distracted the crowd with his rendition of “Seven Nation Army” and his unfamiliarity with “Freebird”, the other guys were able to sort out the issues with the Psychic Hotline and start the presentation over again. This time, it went off without a hitch in guessing that the audience had picked “robot” as their noun, except for when Neal was privately thinking about a Null Pointer Exception and they got that instead.
• One issue with the 90 second time limit for hack presentations is that good hacks can get cut short (by our “Girl Talk” cutoff music) and we’ll all miss out on hearing about a really cool idea. However, it does force hackers to really get to the essence of their project without all of the frill, and if the idea is powerful enough, it’ll still grab people.
• Ganzbot, a feed-reading robot hacked together by Jeremy Gillick, is perhaps the most disturbing way possible that I can imagine receiving my stock and weather information as I wake up in the morning.
• Usually, FireEagle is supposed to passively say where you are, once you’ve settled down there. Weather Sets, by Leah Culver and Ariel Waldman, does the opposite in using FireEagle to urge you to go somewhere else, by setting up a location-based game where you win by collecting sets of colored cards based on local weather and Flickr photos.
• Be careful when you solicit suggestions from the audience for, say, a pair of random search query terms. The first suggestion I heard shouted out in reponse — “bacon fiesta” — was strangely passed over in favor of “hack day”.
• Mo Kakwan, something of an Open Hack Day celebrity thanks to his hilarious presentation two years ago, hit it out of the park one more time with his Virtual Moshpit. It’s hard to describe this one without video, so hopefully that’ll be forthcoming shortly. The best I can say is that there was girlish screaming of “Girl Talk!”, physics-based stick figure animations, and Mo’s trademark delivery, all in one monumentally funny package.
• The trio of travel/location oriented hacks that followed really stood out to me. TripIt provided one of the coolest Open Mail integrations with an application that would allow you to drag over any flight/hotel confirmation email in your Inbox and automatically convert it into a detailed trip record in their system. Jesse Baird’s Cell Phone Signal Tracker and Where Are My Drivers, by Wilson Sheldon and Kelvin Ling, both used FireEagle to great effect, the former allowing you to wander around and map out your cell phone signal strength in a region and the latter letting a restaurant keep track of the location of any of their delivery folk to make it easier to reroute or redistribute resources.
• What’s warm and sleeps with you every night? For Mark Rosetta, it’s not his girlfriend, but rather his laptop. But, as he states, both seem to go from hot to cold entirely randomly. He can fix one of those, however, by using iHeater, which is a page of embedded fireplace videos from YouTube that’ll peg your CPU and subsequently overheat your laptop. Future plans include 3D rendering and further de-optimizations
• The final hack, Hack #47, was also one of the most amusing. Niels Joubert and Greg Schechter noticed at the last minute that no one had submitted a SearchMonkey hack, and saw an opportunity. So, Niels closed out the presentations with Speedhack: Writing a SearchMonkey Hack in 90 Seconds, where he spent his 90 seconds on stage actually creating a SearchMonkey enhanced result on the fly. It took two tries due to inaccurate clicking, network latency, missing semicolons, and misleading shouted suggestions from the audience, but we were eventually rewarded with a functional vCard-based enhanced result for YouTube videos. And Niels and Greg were also rewarded with prizes equal in value to the effort they put into their hack — two mint-condition Hack #48 signs.

Given such a high-quality and enjoyable round of presentations, it was inevitable that the judges would relent and offer up more prizes to compensate. Nonetheless, the fact that we handed out nearly 25 prizes altogether, from Flash documentation wall posters to hand-held video cameras, was surprising and gratifying. You can see the list of all of the winners here, and we’ll surely have some sort of grand recap when the official Yodel bloggers get back. For now, thank you again to everyone who came out and supported or participated in this great event, and keep on hacking!

Photo from Tim Trueman.

A roar went up as Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP and hardcore Yahoo) got up on stage and thanked all of the attendees, ingratiating himself by alluding to his many, many years of hacking, to which the crowd shouted, “Prove it!” (as well as a couple of other amusing comments that probably aren’t appropriate for a family blog). He also solved the tarp mystery — the grounds were damp due to the sprinklers (“Booo irrigation!”) — and passed the mic over to Cody Simms for the official band introduction. Cody then passed the mic over to the official band for the official band introduction, but not before expounding on how much this band/person exemplified the open and creative spirit of Open Hack Day, mashing up hundreds of songs in his albums and offering his music for whatever price users are willing to pay on his personal website.

After a confusing delay that the concert-goers filled with slow claps and yells for encores, the speakers blared out, “Girl talk! Girl talk girl talk girl talk!” So we knew we were at the right concert, at least. Girl Talk, fronted by and actually entirely composed of Gregg, bounded onto the stage and whipped the crowd into a frenzy with his phat beats and deftly mixed samples, using a classy Dell laptop that ended up with way more beer on it than when it started (in an interesting parallel, Gregg ended up with far less clothes on him than when he started). Confetti was distributed to key locations among the crowd and flung into the air along with a multitude of beach balls. Enterprising members of the front row stormed the stage and started an impromptu dance party behind Gregg, exhorting the crowd in front of them to the tunes of “Since You’ve Been Gone”, Beck (an homage to the last Open Hack Day?), and many others. Notable luminaries spotted on stage included the well-known, like David Filo, Ash Patel, and one of the cofounders of Pownce, but also newly-minted celebrities, like that guy with the awesome mustache and the Indian dude who kept flippin’ us The Bird.

It was a hugely enjoyable show that kept us dancing and rocking all night long, and hopefully we’ll have a video available soon. In the meantime, check out the some of the photos in our Flickr photostream. Wish you’d been here, and if you were, hope you had fun! Now get back to work!