Up to now, it has been impolite to talk about gas emissions in a cafeteria. But we’re hoping to change that. At Yahoo!, I have the pleasure of working with an extremely motivated and vibrant volunteer group of 200-plus employees around the world who make up our Yahoo! Green Team. Our mission is simple – to take action, big and small, to help Yahoo! reduce its carbon footprint. As part of this effort, today we installed a new “Yahoo! Green Screen” – an interactive energy monitoring display (touch screen) that shows employees our energy usage in real-time at our Sunnyvale headquarters. The plan is to roll out other green screens to more Yahoo! campuses over time.

Empowering green actions through our employees and across our business is something we take very seriously (we launched a consumer-friendly resource for all things green called Yahoo! Green and pledged to be a carbon neutral company last year).

The Green Screen, which uses the Building Dashboard technology by Lucid Design Group presents energy usage in an easy to understand way and gives anyone who approaches the touch screen kiosk the ability to play with the information. Data can be viewed in megawatt hours, tons of carbon, or dollars. So, for example, you can see how many pounds of carbon have been emitted per person on the Sunnyvale campus from our energy usage that day. Employees will also be able to see energy consumption across buildings and compare trends viewed over time. We’re displaying dozens of “Green Tips” too – such as how to take advantage of our award-winning commute options, or where to shop for green products online. In addition to being available in our cafeteria, the Yahoo! Green Screen will be available to all employees worldwide on our corporate intranet to engage participation through suggestions, providing feedback, and just taking part in their local offices.

So now, when we lower the thermostat by 2 degrees in one of our buildings, we can immediately see the effect on energy consumption (and even carbon output).

Our hope is that this opens a healthy dialogue about our energy usage and empowers our employees to be more aware of our impact on the environment, and engages them to take action in their own way. This is one of the small pieces that helps us continue to reduce our carbon footprint and serves as a reminder that any action, no matter how big or how small, does make a difference.

Kate Gerwe
Senior Marketing Director, Corporate Partnerships and Yahoo! Green Team Leader

Photo from Jeremy Johnstone.

CES: 1.8 million square feet of booths and tents. 140,000 self-acclaimed geeks. 2,700 exhibitors. 30-minute taxi lines. And just 10 contenders for the annual Yahoo! Tech “Last Gadget Standing” contest.

After reviewing hundreds of the latest, cool, hip gizmos and contraptions, we’ve whittled them down to the Top Ten and are pitting them against each other tomorrow morning. Think “Survivor” meets “American Idol.”

Here’s how it works. Each of our ten finalists will have four minutes to make their spiel. Using a highly scientific applause-o-meter, we’ll ask a live audience of about 500 gadget hounds to help us pick our winner. We’re not looking for the latest flash in the pan — we want something with staying power. That thing that defines or redefines how we get things done… whether that’s cleaning our gutters, steering clear of traffic jams, improving our golf game, or getting photos off our cameras. Last year’s fast-paced demos were highly creative and entertaining — we were even graced by an Elvis appearance.

Here are the final contenders:

• Asus Eee PC 4G is a computer that costs only $399, has a tiny 7-inch screen, runs Linux, and comes with a suite of great software applications.
• Eye-Fi is a specially designed low-power wireless chip with a 2GB memory card that lets you automatically transfers photos from a camera to a Mac or PC or places like Flickr and other social networks.
• Dash Express is an Internet-connected GPS device that gives real-time traffic conditions based on data transmitted from other Dash users (think social networking meets traffic reports). It also taps into Yahoo! Local for up-to-the-minute info on everything from movies to gas prices.
• Electric~Spin’s Golf Launchpad Tour is a unique golf simulation input device that lets you play golf in the convenience of your home, with your own clubs.
• Fujitsu’s U810 WWAN is an ultra-mobile PC with state-of-the-art connectivity.
• iRobot’s iLooj is a robotic gutter cleaner that will clean a 60-foot stretch of gutter in ten minutes.
• The LG Voyager phone has a touch screen and beneath the flip is a QWERTY keyboard for easy typing.
• The Logitech DiNovo is a wireless keyboard that fits in the palm of your hand.
• Sansa TakeTV offers a simple and less expensive way to move downloaded TV programs around the house. Using a cradle with standard RCA and S-Video plugs, your TV media is stored on the USB memory stick.
• Toshiba’s TDP-EW25U wireless DLP projector can produce an image that casts 41 feet or 1.6 feet, create a 60-inch picture even when it’s positioned 2.4 feet away, and accommodates high-def video.

If you’re here in Vegas, my fellow Yahoo! Tech advisors and I invite you to come to the Convention Center’s North Hall (Room N255-257) at 10:30am tomorrow. If you can’t be here, we’ll be posting a video recap of the showdown later this week.

May the best gadget win.

UPDATE: And the winner is…. the Eye-Fi! This new wireless memory card makes it a snap to move photos from your camera to your computer or upload them to your favorite website. They stole the show in spite of an appearance by the Verizon Wireless guy to promo the LG Voyager phone. Here’s to redefining how we make use of our photos. Congratulations to the Eye-Fi!

Robin Raskin
Yahoo! Tech Advisor – The Boomer

1 Across: _____and Grace
2 Down: The opposite of tall (and add z)

If you figured this out, you know that I’m talking about crossword extraordinaire Will Shortz, world-renowned puzzle editor for the New York Times. Over the past few weeks I’ve had the pleasure of partnering with Will and The Times to create a crossword puzzle for the Yahoo! community. We all know that the New York Times Crosswords are the ultimate, known for being friendlier on Monday (perfect for easing into the week) than on Sunday, the edition that can puzzle even the most seasoned puzzlers.

To share the fun of crosswords with an even broader audience and give a helping hand to folks who get stumped by various clues, we’ve integrated the all new Yahoo! Search with Search Assist into a special edition puzzle. If you find yourself staring blankly at one of Will’s clues (or haven’t yet enjoyed your daily caffeine fix to charge your brain), just click the “Search for Hint” link under the clue to populate the Yahoo! Search box. A dropdown window loaded with suggestions for finding your answer will appear to help you solve the clue.

Working with Will Shortz and the New York Times has been an incredible experience. Since gaining a glimpse into the world of a crossword sensei, I have a few insights to share:

• Words must be three letters or more.
• There are strict rules governing puzzle construction, which vary by country.
• The most common three-letter word is “era”, the most common four-letter word is “area” and the most common five-letter word is “erase.”
• More than 50 million Americans regularly do crosswords, myself included.

With this, I challenge you to the New York Times Crossword, created in collaboration with Yahoo!. Not only is it great fun, but with the integration of Yahoo! Search, you should have no trouble filling in that last square. And as an added bonus, once you complete the puzzle, you can enter to win one of five trips to Hawaii, where you will have all the time in the world to hone your crossword skills!

Now go on and get a clue.

Britton Glasser
Yahoo! Buzz Marketing

A little more than a week since we launched the first online Presidential debate (or mashup, as we like to call it), it’s time to announce the winner and share some additional “results.”

In our poll, which asked people who they’d vote for after watching the mashup, Barack Obama was the winner with 35% of the votes. Senator Obama squeaked by Hillary Clinton, who received 31% of the votes. To hear what Obama had to say about winning, check out our “People of the Web” story on the results, which includes an interview we conducted this morning.

But the votes don’t tell the entire story. We also looked at which clips the audience was actually watching and came away with some interesting findings:

• Hillary Clinton was by far the most watched candidate. Thirty-five percent of all clips watched were Clinton’s, while Obama came in second with 25%.
• The audience was most interested in the “wildcard” question, in which comedian Bill Maher surprised each candidate with personalized questions on a variety of topics. Forty-two percent of the clips watched were wildcard questions, followed by Iraq (34%), healthcare (15%), and education (9%).
• Women were more interested in education and healthcare, while men preferred the wildcard question.
• Older Americans were more likely to select questions on the topic of healthcare, while younger Americans were more interested in what the candidates had to say on education (that one didn’t surprise us much).
• The most popular clip among women in Iowa was Edwards on healthcare.
• Dennis Kucinich was one of the most viewed candidates in Seattle.

Part of what made the Presidential mashup so interesting to me was that we were putting control in Presidential forum like never before, and it was an exciting experiment to see what our users cared about most.

And speaking of users, you may be asking yourself how many people actually watched this debate. We had more than 1.1 million viewers, who streamed approximately 4.4 million video clips. Thirty-nine percent of the audience represented the 18-35 demographic. That means our debate attracted about 429,000 18- to 35-year-olds. That’s more from this demographic than any debate so far!

If you haven’t yet had an opportunity to check out the debate, you can do so here, or head over to Jumpcut to mash it up for your own site. We’re still in talks with the Republican candidates and hope to have an update on the next debate soon.

Neeraj Khemlani
VP, Programming & Development
Yahoo! News & Info

Avast, me proud beauties. Be not a scurvy dog. ‘Tis International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Get ye smartly to Flickr an’ use yer wee bilge rat to click on th’ Jolly Roger (or “skull and crossbones” for ye lubbers) staked upon th’ Flickr logo or click “Arrrr!” in ye language footer. Then all yer booty be talkin’ pirate. Upload yer treasures, feast yer eyes on booty from yer crew and o’er swabbies, arrrganize, and mark your plunder. An’ th’ Flickr scallywags have dug up th’ best buried treasure here.

Tell all yer mateys. Or walk th’ plank. An’ be quick about it. ‘Twill all be shippin’ out at midnight.

Nicki Dugan
Yer Bloggin’ Cap’n

I’m excited to say that nearly a full year after my team won for best overall hack at Yahoo! Hack Day 2006, our project, the photoblogging purse, is still breathing. And it’ll be mingling with the likes of Anna Sui, Vera Wang, Zac Posen, and Michael Kors near catwalks in Manhattan this week.

Ever since it was named Yahoo!’s winning hack, the purse has been the topic of many conversations in the fashion industry. As Fall Fashion Week kicks off this week here in New York, I’m proud say I’ll be escorting the accessory throughout the festivities, proving that fashion and technology are a keen match.

The hack, Blogging in Motion, was a design that used Flickr and Zonetag APIs to feed images taken from a purse fitted with a Nokia camera phone and Bluetooth GPS to our Flickr photostream in real time. Using a pedometer, the purse can be set to take pictures every 10 steps for a photoblog that doesn’t miss a thing.

I’ll be using the purse to provide an inside look at Fashion Week events from a very unusual perspective. In fact, tonight I’ll be hosting an event for fashion bloggers organized by my friends at Fashion Indie. If you can’t make it to the festivities, check out Fashion Indie’s Flickr photostream for some cool shots.

As for what’s next for me, I am writing a couple of books about fashion and technology that are tentatively scheduled to come out next year. In addition, I’ll be launching a few (more wearable) techie-fashions later this year using some cutting-edge new materials. I’m hoping that they’ll even be machine washable.

Diana Eng
Fashion Nerd
2006 Yahoo! Open Hack Day Winner

If there’s one thing Yahoo! employees strive for, it’s excellence in the area of innovation. We know this because we recently read the inspiring “Yahoo! We Value…” list, and it’s right there in purple and white: 1. Excellence; 2. Innovation. In fact, those two items beat Customer Fixation down to number 3, and that has the word “fixation” in it. So maybe we’d go so far as to say “obsessively striving for excellence in the area of innovation.”

Having gone to the trouble of writing the “Yahoo! We Value…” list, we’re sure upper management is heartened to see two of Yahoo!’s finest taking their ideas to heart. While some employees waste away their days refining dull search algorithms or trying to save the planet, we (John Allspaw and Dunstan Orchard) instead focused on something a little more real, a little more innovative, and a lot more excellent.

Behold the wonder that is Faceball:

More behind-the-scenes action here.

John Allspaw & Dunstan Orchard
Faceball Founders

Happy 1st Birthday, Yodel Anecdotal!

Twelve months ago, I stared nervously at the “publish” button on my virgin WordPress admin panel. It was just three weeks after Dell got a less-than-friendly reception to the launch of their corporate blog. Were we next in line for a good skewering? Would anyone care about “Yet another self-serving corporate blog?”

Inhale. Click. An hour later, I started to breathe easier as positive comments began rolling in, including from the likes of Mike Arrington and John Furrier. This gig was actually going to be worthwhile! A top 1,000 Technorati ranking and 79,465 spam-comments later and here we are.

To celebrate our first yodel year, I thought we’d take a quick jaunt down memory lane:

• Most popular video: The Yahoo! Headquarters Tour from our inaugural post. Ok, we were newbies — we thought 8 minutes was a fine length for a web video. (And would you believe we shot it in HD? Can you say compression hell?). But nearly more than 52,000 of you have since sat through it.
• Biggest angry mob: The Yahoo! Suggestion Board debut. Imagine my surprise when I checked the comment queue for this seemingly innocent post after date night to find hundreds of Digg fans ticked off at our new Digg-inspired community-based product feedback mechanism. Luckily, it also became a great example of a self-correcting comment-sphere.
• Best focus group in action: The Yahoo! TV redesign. Lots of you were unhappy with it and weren’t shy about telling us so (thick skin, thick skin). But our product team collected and analyzed your, ahem, constructive comments and baked your feedback into the product roadmap.
• Fastest ascent to top of Techmeme: Unlimited Yahoo! Mail storage. Yodel hit the big time when, in lieu of issuing a press release, Yahoo! Mail’s John Kremer stopped by to let you know we were nuking mail storage limits. In fact, we were the 5th most linked-to blog that day, according to BlogPulse.
• First use of the word “asinine”: Internet Radio Day of Silence. Yahoo! Music GM Ian Rogers took the gloves off when describing the Copyright Royalty Board’s web radio rates. Looks like it had the right effect.
• A little self-deprecation is good: Yahoo! is 404. If you can’t laugh at yourself…
• Most frequent executive contributor: Chief Yahoo David Filo. He’s posted on everything from our first open Hack Day to our commitment to the environment. But competitors that they are, I’d imagine Jerry will give him a run for his money. Which leads me to…
• Best evidence that our founders are good sports: Will wrestle for climate change. As reward for Yahoos reducing consumption of non-renewable resources by 20% during the week of Earth Day, Jerry & David were not only willing to don sumo suits and wrestle each other… they let us post the video.

Been there. Got the T-Shirt.

And what’s a birthday without gifts? To score yourself a limited-edition Yodel Anecdotal first-anniversary T-shirt, be one of the first 75 people to email the correct answers to the following. Please include your mailing address and T-shirt size — we’ll do our best to accommodate you. And rest assured, we’ll shred all your personal info.

1. Who came up with the name Yodel Anecdotal?
2. What color is the Beck puppet’s hat in the video Beck’s band made for their concert finale at Hack Day ‘06?
3. What was the final score of the Yahoo! vs. Google “Battle over the Net” tournament?
4. What did our co-founders give to good little Yahoos as a holiday gift last December?
5. The Greenest City in America is also the birthplace of what?

(Hint: You’ll find all the answers by doing a blog search from the sidebar)

A big thankful yodel to you, dear reader, for being our raison d’etre. It’s been a great ride so far. We’ve learned a lot and there’s plenty we’ll do differently. Here’s to another year of insights, dialogue, and letting our hair down together.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

You’ve seen me dominate on the field with the Bengals. You’ve seen me celebrate in the end zone. No one can stop Ocho Cinco, and no one can compete with my end zone performances — but now you can try.

Yahoo! Sports and Ocho Cinco are hosting Chad Johnson’s Touchdown Celebration Showdown, where I want you to submit videos of your best touchdown dance moves, spikes, or flips to win an opportunity to meet Ocho Cinco in person. I’m sure you can talk about it, but can you be about it, too?

Through August 20, submit 30 seconds of your best end-zone dance moves. If your video is close to the quality of my signature moves, then your name might be announced on Sept. 6 as the winner Chad Johnson’s Touchdown Celebration Showdown.

You may think you have the best touchdown celebration, but going up against the best is the only way to know. And Ocho Cinco is the best. I’ve led the NFL’s American Football Conference in receiving yards each of the past four seasons. In six years with the Bengals, Ocho Cinco has gained 6925 yards on 466 receptions with 41 touchdowns. But you already knew all my stats because Ocho Cinco is the player everyone wants on their Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Football ’07 team. So draft me here.

It’s a guarantee that I have the best touchdown moves, but submit a clip, and we’ll see if you can compete with Ocho Cinco.

Chad Johnson
Receiver, Cincinnati Bengals

They did it again. Yahoo!’s annual Design Expo has surprised and delighted the senses all over again with student projects that ranged from moaning calla lilies to game platforms that encourage you to yell on your mobile phone. So, there weren’t any edible interfaces this year, but much in the spirit of the Design Expo, the student design projects provided great insight into the future of user desires and technology uses with a multi-sensory twist.

Design Expo mastermind Joy Mountford (vice president of User Experience Design at Yahoo!) has been gathering the brightest and most creative student designers, concepts, and community together for the past 18 years to foster “out of the box” thinking among the design and technology worlds. Over 2,000 students have participated in the program so far and have all helped to push the envelope on the future of product design.

Students from seven different universities around the world, including the Indian Institute of Technology, Academy of Media Arts (Germany), Royal College of Art (UK), UCLA, NYU, California College of Art, and University of Illinois, were tasked with designing prototypes that captured the physical, social and media experience. The best of the best were asked to present their projects in a big black tent at Yahoo!’s Sunnyvale campus this week, ranging from the inspiring to just plain bizarre.

Here are my faves:

• Cube it: The CubeBrowser is a 3D six-display cube that acts as a browser for Flickr photos. Turn the cube and discover new photosets on the computer screen.
• Incognito: The Identity Protection System allows you to hide or reveal your photo image by simply wearing a big green sticker. Wherever the sticker was placed, the image on the screen blurred out. James Bond anyone?
• Go go go!: MegaPhone allows you to play a game with random people using your mobile phone in a public space. Players call in to initiate and move their avatar through various keys and audio sounds. Perfect for downtime at the movies or airport.
• PG-13 flowers: Visually stunning Whisper generates a woman’s moan from below, which echoes through the calla lillies. What follows are a lot of embarrassed giggles and confused smiles.

That’s not all. Take a look for yourself (sorry, you can’t touch) as Joy gives you the grand tour. (This photomontage video was created using an internal prototype called Storytellr, created by our Media Innovation Group. Read more about it here.)

Julie Han
Blog Team