“Hellooooo, gorgeous!!!”

This larger than life greeting welcomed me to work one morning, as I shuffled in with a case of the Mondays. Quite startled, I looked over to our headquarters guard shack and out spilled the purplest, most enthusiastic human being I’d ever seen — waving energetically with a big infectious grin. Did she know me? Who cares – she said I was gorgeous! Suddenly, it felt more like a Friday.

The thing is, she tells everyone they’re gorgeous.

Meet Shewondia Mills, a Yahoo! security guard who has become a veritable campus celebrity since she joined the team less than a year ago. Her iconic personality cracks a smile on everyone’s face — you can’t even help it. Every morning, she douses herself in Yahoo! spirit, which she embodies like no one before her. She is literally purple from head to toe — her fingernails, her eyelids, her eyelashes, her lipstick, her hair, the lenses of her glasses. People walk and drive out of their way to get her signature greeting, which lifts the soul and rescues the brain from its PowerPoint-induced haze.

Shewondia consistently proves that a little extra pride goes a long way. She has collected more “Backyard Bravos” (online awards employees send to fellow Yahoos on our intranet) than anyone else at the company, including Carol Bartz, Jerry Yang, and David Filo. Just today, she snagged second prize in the Guardsmark Security Officer of the Year award, taking home $5,000. And visitors are quite taken with her welcome wagon, including a New York Times reporter who recently came to interview our CEO.

Here’s a video that takes you behind the scenes with Shewondia, giving you a sense of her inimitable style and why her pride so purple.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

What do you do if the world’s tallest building stands in your city? Try to run up its stairs as fast as you can!

A group of Yahoos from Taiwan recently banded together to run up the Taipei 101, which weighs in as the world’s tallest skyscraper at 101 stories with 2,046 steps. That’s 508 meters or one third of a mile… straight up. It was part of a masochistic race called the “Taipei 101 Run Up,” which pits teams against each other to see who can reach the top first. The 20 participating teams included major brands like Coca-Cola, Nike, and Bayer.

Sporting purple Yahoo! T-shirts, our team included a few senior Yahoo! executives, including Ari Balogh, our executive vice president of Products and chief technology officer (visiting from California); Rose Tsou, senior vice president of our Asia region; and Charlene Hung, general manager of Yahoo! Taiwan.

So, how’d they do in this ultimate Stairmaster challenge? They placed fifth, just a few spots behind last year’s second place finish (when they lost out to the fire department — the only team you really want passing you). And the fastest Yahoo? That would be Ari, whose addiction to energy bars clearly paid off. He scaled the building’s 101 stories in just 18:26.

Here are some photos from the race and sweet victory:

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Every year, thousands of creative people from around the world descend on Cannes, France, to mingle, learn, and celebrate great works of advertising genius. Inspired by the film festival that Cannes is most famous for, the 56th Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival is truly the meeting of the most creative minds in the business, with the goal of pushing the collective innovation envelope.

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

Another Open Hack has come and gone, leaving more than 300 exhausted developers, 400 pizza boxes, 1200+ donuts, and nearly 500 cans of Red Bull in its wake. We’ve hosted a few of these before, so we had some idea of what to expect, but the great thing about Hack Day is you never know what’s going to happen (including executives getting down on stage to Girl Talk).

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

At Yahoo!, we talk about Purple quite a bit. Some folks internally would say we’re obsessed with it, in fact. From our earliest days, Purple has been the official color of Yahoo!. You can see it in our offices –- our furniture, our building signs, even our sprinkler heads. You can also see it out in the world –- we’ve created Purple taxi cabs, Purple trains, even Purple brains. Every day, visitors to Yahoo! hear us talking about Thinking Purple and Bleeding Purple… Yes, we take it that seriously.

Why Purple? Back in 1996, our humble digs needed quite a bit of renovation so our co-founder, David Filo (notoriously frugal), went out to buy some paint at the store. Once everyone had painted most of one large wall under dim fluorescent lighting, they stepped back and realized Filo had bought light purple (it was probably on sale). From that day on, Purple stuck.

But Purple ’s not just about the paint on the wall. It’s not just the blend of blue and red. It’s not just the latest trend in gardening and fashion (though it is). Purple is the color of innovation and ingenuity. It’s fun and youthful, but also courageous and daring. It represents a spirit of individuality but also a sense of connectedness with others. For us, it represents the spirit of our company, our culture and our products –- Purple is Yahoo!.

As a resident brand marketing guy (though we often say that the Yahoo! brand is too important to be left in the hands of brand marketers), I’m pleased to share that we’re launching a variety of Purple projects over the next few days and weeks. We’re embracing our Purple and sharing the spirit and pride with hundreds of millions of users who, perhaps, feel a bit of that spirit and pride as well.

“Start Wearing Purple” is the theme (and theme song) of this effort to celebrate Purple. It’s not about selling Yahoo! clothing – though we do have some amazing new limited-edition gear coming in from partners like Pony, tokidoki, big wave surfing legend Jeff Clark, Mimoco, and more. “Start Wearing Purple” is about celebrating that unique, charmingly eccentric side of all of us. You’ll see and hear about Purple Picks, the best Purple content from across the web hand-picked by Yahoo!; Purple Photos on Flickr and omg!; Purple Pranks with our friend Charlie Todd from Improv Everywhere; Purple Bikes that take photos; and even some Purple Acts of Kindness. And you’ll meet the Pioneers of Purple, inspiring people who’ve changed the world by following their passions and pursuing their dreams. “Start Wearing Purple” is, quite simply, an invitation to embrace and share the Purple in you.

Check out what we’re up to at startwearingpurple.com. And may some of that Purple pride rub off on you.

Purple reigns,
Nick Chavez
Senior Director, Brand Advertising

Outside of the Building C cafeteria and current Hack Central, the lawn was flickering red and blue from the oscillating banks of stage lights — laptops closed up and pizzas were scarfed down as the mass of hackers streamed out of the exits. Helpful volunteers handed out glowsticks that became so many headbands, necklaces, or the rare eyeglasses. There was a significant amount of confusion about the tarps that covered the dance floor — was there a splash zone? Was Shamu the opening act? — so the crowd mostly gathered around the edges and waited patiently.

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!

Two years ago, we opened our doors to the community of outside developers that had been “hacking” on Yahoo!, and invited them to show their stuff and create new products based on our technologies. Over the course of 24 hours, hundreds of developers attended workshops on Yahoo! technologies, pitched tents, watched a live performance by Beck, ate 400 pizzas, coded all night long, and presented 54 hacks to a judging panel of Yahoo! executives and Internet industry leaders.

Since then, we’ve taken Open Hack around the world, with hack days in London –- where lightening struck twice and it rained indoors — and in Bangalore.

This weekend, we’re getting ready to welcome hundreds more developers back to our campus in Sunnyvale for Open Hack 2008 –- including the winners from five university hack days we held last year. We’re eager for our guests to put their ingenuity and imagination to work as they poke and prod and hack away on our products and services – including some new platforms for developers. We thoroughly expect to be blown away again.

During the hack-a-thon, we’ll give developers a sneak preview of the first Y!OS components. Back in April, we announced the Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS), a set of tools and platforms that will fundamentally change how Yahoo! works, opening Yahoo! up to developers to take advantage of the social aspects of our most popular products. With Y!OS, developers can create applications and features (many we’ve never even thought of) for our network and our consumers.

The Y!OS sneak preview will include the ability for developers to check out what their new applications look like in Yahoo! Mail and My Yahoo! and take advantage of social connections on Yahoo!. These components will be available only for the weekend – giving developers a taste of what they will soon be able to build and share with the world. Stay tuned for their public debut in the coming months.

Our first Open Hack was described as “transformative,” “something special,” and “off the hook” but what struck me most was the creativity and camaraderie. The stuff of our roots. Jerry and I are dedicated to keeping that spirit of openness and innovation alive, but we know that we can’t come up with all the great ideas ourselves. We can’t wait to see what is created this weekend. Hackers, bring it on.

David Filo
Chief Yahoo

When you think Brazil, you might think large country, long river, giant rainforests, that huge statue (one of the Seven Wonders, in fact), major soccer stars, and colossal Carnival festivities. It seems like everything is big and bold.

When you operate in this country, the fifth largest in the world, you have to go big (and maybe even a little bit crazy) to get noticed. That’s why Yahoo! Brazil is producing a lunar eclipse. That’s right. This Saturday night, Brazilians will be treated to a partial eclipse of the moon, courtesy of Yahoo! Brazil.

The team down there is partnering with Celestial Marketing, an American company that has expertise in eclipse productions and cosmic phenomena, to pull the Earth ever so slightly to create a penumbral shadow on the moon. They’re also working with Brazilian astronaut Marcos Pontes to get Brazilians fired up about it. The eclipse will be broadcast on Yahoo! Brazil and those watching in the streets can download special viewing cards.

What’s this all about? We’re told it’s in honor of a new phase that Yahoo! Brazil will enter. I guess all will be revealed on Saturday. But as they say in Brazil, “Nao subestime o roxo”… or never underestimate the purple.

Check out how amped up they are in São Paolo (and brush up on your Portuguese):

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

On August 7, February Flowers, a lyrical first novel set in southern China was published in the United States, where its author, Fan Wu, makes her home. I know Fan as Cindy, the name she took 10 years ago when she arrived in California for graduate school. After earning a masters from Stanford in Mass Media Studies, Cindy took a job at Yahoo!, and that’s how we met.

In 2000, I was writing and editing Yahoo! Picks and Ask Yahoo!. Cindy wanted to know more about my work. We talked about writing — and reading — in English. Her appetite for literature was wide-ranging and eclectic. I remember a conversation about Raymond Carver’s short stories. At that time, she was attracted to Carver’s lean American prose. We also spoke about Joseph Conrad, the Polish-born storyteller who lived in Britain and wrote brilliant and prolific fiction in English, and Ha Jin, the award-winning contemporary Chinese-American writer.

By 2002, Cindy had begun to write fiction in English. She attended writers’ workshops and found mentors and peers. She read, she wrote — and she kept working. Work at Yahoo! paid the bills, and gave her the freedom to find her own way as a writer.

Fast forward to September 2006. February Flowers by Fan Wu debuts in Asia and Australia, where it receives exultant reviews. The story of two young women students in China in the early nineteen nineties, it explores a friendship that blossoms within the confines of a “restrained” traditional culture during a time of social change. China was beginning to prosper and open up to the west. In the self-reliant, independent-minded characters of the two friends, traditional China is remixed with the new. The girls grow up and drift apart. Years later, Ming, the narrator, recovers memories of their friendship in a new century, on her way to a new continent.

So, where’s Cindy now? Recently Fan Wu left her job at Yahoo! to focus on her second novel. This week, I emailed to ask her about life after Yahoo!. Cindy replied:

“Writing is a lonely pursuit. In my post-Yahoo! life, I, of course, miss getting paid every two weeks, but what I miss the most is not being able to see my Yahoo! friends often, to chat over lunch or coffee…”

In the coming months, you can find her around the Bay Area at a variety of book readings, signings and events. And catch her at Kepler’s bookstore in Menlo Park on Thursday, August 23 at 7:30 pm.

Tell her Yodel Anecdotal sent you!

Havi Hoffman
Influencer Marketing

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