Posted November 13th, 2007 at 9:45 am by Ben Baker,
4 Comments » / Filed in: Working at Yahoo!, Yahoo! For Good
What motivates people to give? It’s something that we at the Yahoo! Employee Foundation (YEF) think about a lot. YEF was started in 1999 by our founders, Jerry and David, along with a few other motivated Yahoos who wanted to create a unique program designed to help Yahoos give back to their communities. They hatched a grassroots organization that has since contributed nearly $6 million to more than 250 non-profits in our surrounding communities, donated 2,500 holiday gifts to low-income children, held countless volunteer events, and has chapters in every U.S. office.
The most special and unique thing about YEF is that it’s 100% employee driven on an all-volunteer basis. All of the money is donated by Yahoo! employees (many allocate a portion of their paychecks), all grant recipients are championed by Yahoo! employees, and all YEF activities are run by a volunteer committee of Yahoo! employees. The coolest aspect of the foundation is that it can turn a modest contribution into a windfall for a favorite non-profit. A donation of at just $50 can turn into a grant of up to $40,000 for a charity you support. You do the math — that’s a good investment! The foundation focuses grants on the areas of Youth & Education, Family & Community Building, and Environment — causes that come directly from an annual employee survey to be sure we are properly aligned with what Yahoos feel is important. (Note that YEF doesn’t accept unsolicited requests, but you’re more than welcome to sidle up next to a committed Yahoo for grant championing.)
Every fall, we try to remind Yahoos about the power of YEF and increase our enrollment. This year we used a two-pronged approach. First, Jerry and David baited us with a $1 million donation if we were able to meet 25% participation among U.S. employees. Then many of our leaders upped the ante by promising to subject themselves to public humiliation, which turned out to be just as much (if not more!) of a motivation.
It did the trick. We beat our goal and raised a lot of money that will be given in future grant cycles. And now it’s time for Yahoos to cash in on the degradation of their leaders. Executives from our Search, Listings and Search Marketing groups have donned fantastic Mod Squad-era wigs and fed breakfast to an army of Yahoos in our Burbank office. 
Engineering leaders threw a beer and pizza party and volunteered to get submersed in a dunk tank — in jeans and sneakers, no less. (Nothing quite beats giving your manager a good soaking.) Up next, still more executives will host karaoke parties, invitation-only group dinners, hairnet-shielded pancake breakfasts, and raffles for choice parking spots (the only reserved parking at Yahoo! is won at our annual year-end auction, benefiting YEF… and it’s quite a sacrifice to give that up!).
I’m proud to say that the Yahoo! Employee Foundation is one of those things that distinguishes the experience here. It’s a collective effort showing that many of us Yahoos share a common gene. One that compels us to give back and make a difference.
Ben Baker
President, Yahoo! Employee Foundation Board
Director, Customer Care
Photos from Jeremy Johnstone
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Posted November 12th, 2007 at 6:49 am by Ron Brachman, Yahoo! Research
4 Comments » / Filed in: Trends & News
… for our new open academic research partnership
Today we’ve made a major announcement that gives us a lot to be proud of and a lot to be excited about. As the Yahoo! Academic Relations team traveled around to the many great universities we’ve been working with, one of the most frequent desires we’ve heard is the wish for access by faculty and students to the kind of Internet-scale computing environment that is our bread and butter, but which is almost impossible to find on a university campus.
Well, after several months of hard work and a huge “OneYahoo!” effort by multiple teams, we’ve been able to deliver exactly that. M45, as it’s called, is a 4,000-processor cluster supercomputer that runs Hadoop and other open-source distributed computing software. To put it in context, it’s one of the fifty most powerful computers in the world. Today we begin our journey to make it available to the academic research community.
To get the ball rolling, we’ve engaged in a significant partnership with Carnegie Mellon University, which will be the first to benefit from our cluster and our large-scale distributed systems expertise, complementing their own incredible expertise in the theory and practice of distributed computing. This a major first step for us on the road to facilitating a worldwide open-source software research program in real-world large-scale supercomputing environments. This is a first-of-its-kind effort in the industry. Instead of merely giving academics computers to run software applications for coursework, we will enable researchers to change the systems software that sits between the application and the hardware. By making the system open for experimentation and research at all levels, we will be helping the worldwide research community get to the next level in its understanding of large-scale computing systems.
As you may know, Yahoo! has been a leader in the open-source community with our contributions to Hadoop and now the incubation of the Pig parallel programming environment within the Apache Software Foundation. Given our interest in open collaboration, we can all engage in research on a common software base.
Given the growing popularity of Hadoop, Yahoo! and Carnegie Mellon also plan to co-host a Hadoop Summit in the first half 2008, inviting major Hadoop users to participate in this open, collaborative community. Major companies such as Facebook and leading research universities such as the University of California, Berkeley, are heavy users of Hadoop. We would certainly like to invite them and others to participate in this open community.
We called our cluster “M45” after one of the best known open star clusters (the Pleiades). It’s up and running Hadoop jobs, and with its 3 terabytes of memory and 1.5 petabytes of disk, we hope it will provide a major boost to the worldwide university research community. We love being out there in front and supporting the open-source community, and we are eager to reach for the stars with Carnegie Mellon, and soon, the entire academic computing research community.
I want to offer my personal thanks and congratulations to the many Yahoos from our Engineering, Site Operations, Research, Legal, PR, and Academic Relations teams for incredible work in getting this going.
Ron Brachman
VP, Worldwide Research Operations, Yahoo! Research
Head, Yahoo! Academic Relations
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Posted November 9th, 2007 at 3:57 pm by Julie Han, Blog Team
1 Comment » / Filed in: Product Pulse
What’s the photoelectric effect? Well, we have the genius himself to thank for explaining this production and transformation of light when he won the Nobel Prize in Physics 86 years ago. After you’ve conjured up a visual of his crazy white hair, read on for our electrifying updates.
- Courtside seats all season: Now get all your NBA video highlights from every regular and post-season game on Yahoo! Sports (better than just the post-season action we had last year, eh?). We’ve even added on-demand access to expert analysis from our NBA analysts Kenny Smith, and game previews during post season. Get a comfy chair, you’ll need it.
- Of weather and money: My Yahoo! has improved two key tools, just in time for winter travels. The currency converter now features a customizable grid that lets you compare multiple currencies (from more than 150) at once so your head won’t hurt when you plan treks to many countries. And our new weather module lets you get the current climate report for your destination by letting you choose from three modes (full, classic or compact). You can also get detailed forecasts by mousing over your city, get more readable three-day forecast, and set up alerts. Making multiple stops? Search for additional locations right within the module.
- Calling all bloggers: Think you’ve got what it takes to show you’ve got the best blog community? If so, join the MyBlogBlog Problogger contest to win a bunch of prizes and tools to make your blog the best it can be. Blogger snacks for the grand-prize winner include a pro MyBlogLog subscription, a $500 Yahoo! Search Marketing credit, and a complete blog redesign. All you have to do is be the community that grows the most (that’s gross total from now to November 30, 2007). See the official rules here and read more about the contest here.
Subscribe to the RSS feed (or add it to My Yahoo!) to get this Product Pulse every week.
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Posted November 6th, 2007 at 2:08 pm by Jerry Yang, CEO & Chief Yahoo
55 Comments » / Filed in: Trends & News, Yahoo! Opinions
This morning, our General Counsel, Michael Callahan, and I testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in Washington, D.C. I wanted to share with all of you some of the thoughts I conveyed to the Committee today. You can read my full testimony here and Mike’s here.
On a personal level, the very serious human issues at stake cause me great concern. I’ve invested my professional life in this company, and I believe in the Internet and its incredible power. I also know that governments around the world have imprisoned people for simply speaking their minds online. That runs counter to all my personal and professional beliefs.
Our company is centered on empowering our customers. We never lose sight of the fact that our success as a business is built upon the trust we maintain with our community of global users, including citizens around the world, our advertisers, publishers, and business partners.
Today, despite broad limitations on discussion of sensitive political subjects, Chinese citizens know more than ever before about local public health issues, environmental causes, politics, corruption, consumer choice, job opportunities, and even foreign affairs. Much of this change is due to the Internet.
These markets also present companies like ours with challenges in the areas of free expression and privacy. This morning, I described some of the steps we’ve taken to address these challenges. I’ve personally met with senior State Department officials, Members of Congress, and others to discuss the issues. For the past year and a half, we have been actively engaged in a formal human rights dialogue to design an industry code of conduct. We’re working closely with a number of the most prominent human rights groups.
We have been and will continue to be actively engaged for the long-term. As a company in its teenage years, with hundreds of millions of users, and with the human stakes more challenging than ever, we know we must work collectively to find approaches that maintain engagement in markets like China and also put companies in the position to act responsibly.
Jerry Yang
Chief Yahoo and CEO
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Posted November 6th, 2007 at 12:07 am by The Kickstart Team, Advanced Products Division
6 Comments » / Filed in: Trends & News
Today we began previewing Kickstart, a new service aimed at helping college students and recent grads connect with alumni, employers, and professionals. You may have seen some of the press coverage of the launch. Our first day live has been exciting, with the number of profiles in the system growing steadily by the hour.
Kickstart was inspired by research we did with college students who are experiencing first hand the biggest transition of their lives: their initial career choice and job/internship search. Students and recent grads kept saying, “I don’t know who to connect with to help me get a job.”
With this in mind, we came up with the idea of creating a community where students and alumni connect around finding internships, jobs, and career advice. Students, while active online socially and looking at job listings, don’t have a way to create and ultimately benefit from a truly “professional” network.
The existing options available to students are either too tailored towards seasoned professionals or too geared towards staying in touch with friends. This problem is compounded by the fact that finding that first job or internship is one of the most stressful parts of a student or recent grad’s life. After all, for every student whose parents helped him get an internship with an investment bank, thousands are left pounding the pavement and sending resumes into the black holes of company recruiting sites.
This “preview” release of Kickstart is intended as a first step towards creating a community for college students and alumni to connect. For this release, we’re focused on getting alums and professional signed up in advance of our rollout to schools in January. You’ll notice that, for now, the site is streamlined towards setting up profiles and basic connections and messaging.
Why would alumni sign up? An interesting thing we noticed is that a generic “help the students!” message sent to alumni generally gets resistance. However, if a junior at your school in the same major reaches out with a personal message for advice, we’ve found that most people are more than happy to help. It’s also a great way to source good candidates and to reconnect with fellow alums and old colleagues.
To help encourage people to join, we’re offering a $25,000 dollar grant for the U.S. college that has the most alumni signed up by the end of the year.
We expect Kickstart to evolve rapidly now that it’s public. We’re working on the next batch of features, and we’re putting them in front of our target users to ensure we keep addressing their needs. We’d love to hear any ideas to make this professional network the place for college students, recent grads and alums connect and meet their goals.
Cynthia Johanson, Dan Wascovich and the Kickstart Team
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Posted November 5th, 2007 at 12:14 pm by Nicki Dugan, Blog Editor
2 Comments » / Filed in: Yahoo! For Good
The competition was fierce. Bloggers promised to don tomato suits and dance at NYC’s Rockefeller Center. They pimped their cute kids for persuasive videos. They dangled free iPods and whatnot. They offered matching funds All in the name of doing right for the kids (and maybe having lunch with Chief Yahoo Jerry Yang.)
Ladies and gentlemen, the results of the DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge are in. The Yahoo! award, for the highest number of donors, goes to Tomato Nation’s Sarah Bunting, who raised more than $100,000 (blowing past her initial goal of $40,000) from 1,099 donors in support of programs and supplies for America’s public school children. Her reward was lunch with Jerry at URL’s Café at our Sunnyvale headquarters (because our food is that good). But selfless tomato that she is, Sarah will be offering this grand-prize dining experience to one of her loyal readers — stay tuned on her blog for more.
Sarah also made good on her promise to be transformed into a giant tomato while going about her work day. Her brother filmed it all last Friday and you can catch it below.
(You gotta love New York City, where a gum-chewing red orb with tights, leafy-green headgear, and a purse snatches nary a glance as it squeezes through subway turnstiles and into crowded elevators.)
We were so inspired by the nail-biting competition in the technology category, that we offered a second grand prize to the winner of the Technology Leaderboard. That honor was ultimately snaked by Fred Wilson of A VC, who raised more than $18,000 from 92 donors. Fred, too, threw some icing on the cake by offering his seat at Jerry’s table to a reader via an essay contest. Word has it the lucky diner will be a student selected from a tech workshop in urban Oakland, California.
Jerry’s hungry. He’s got the lunch trays all ready. And he thanks the many DonorsChoose contributors who paused their busy days to make a difference for the kids.
Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor
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Posted November 2nd, 2007 at 3:47 pm by Julie Han, Blog Team
3 Comments » / Filed in: Product Pulse
“…Curst be he that moves my bones.” Thought about what your tombstone will say? Well, today’s the day. After you’ve penned you’re parting words, read up on our not-so-morbid updates.
- Fancy signatures: If you’ve got a MyBlogLog profile, you can now create an email signature that shows friends and colleagues all the Web 2.0 services you use and have profiles on (must be services you’ve entered into MyBlogLog). Think instant access for your friends to your del.icio.us, Jumpcut, Technorati, and Facebook profiles with a click of the icons in your email signature. Go to “edit profile” on your MyBlogLog account to create one.
- Don’t forget the popcorn!: As winter rolls in, our 2007 Holiday Movie Guide will become your one-stop-guide for your seat at the megaplex. The guide has a browse-able movie carousel, a user-ranked top movie list, video playlists of movie trailers and clips, photo galleries, and access to fun factoids like “Bet You Didn’t Know.” Make sure to vote on the Bix poll for your all time fave holiday flick!
- Healthier living: Yahoo! Health has a new look and feel, making it easier to find answers to your health questions on diet & fitness to conditions & diseases (there are 75 topics across five categories). With the improved search capabilities, you’ll also find both articles and videos to help you take charge of your health.
- That’s classic: For those who haven’t switched to the new Yahoo! Mail, you may have seen some of the updates we’ve made to Yahoo!’s Classic Mail. We’ve added auto-save to your email drafts, so no need to worry about computer malfunctions losing your work. With the new flag column, you can easily flag important messages with one click. And get more organized by renaming or deleting personal folders within the folder view. We’ve even deleted some of the features you told us were not as useful. For visually impaired users, we’ve enhanced our screenreader capabilities with easier navigation, html headings to help navigate the page, more shortcut keys, and hidden text that lets users know when there’s a picture or attachment in the email. Check out all the changes we made
and read about what else the team has been up to.
Subscribe to the RSS feed (or add it to My Yahoo!) to get this Product Pulse every week.
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Posted November 1st, 2007 at 7:27 pm by Jonathan Trevor, Yahoo! Pipes Team
1 Comment » / Filed in: Trends & News
It’s been eight months since we launched Pipes, a tool that lets people with limited technical expertise mash-up any data on the Internet and make it their own. It’s amazing to see the variety of Pipes that people have been building using the simple visual editor we provide. These range from translating text from one language to another, to searching for the best apartments near a park, to monitoring hundreds of RSS feeds for certain topics.
Here are some of our favorites:
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The “GeoAnnotated Reuters News” application takes an RSS feed from the Reuters news service, and “geocodes” each item, making it possible to show where that news item is happening on a world map!
- The “Hot Deals Search” scans many online deal-hunting sites for the best prices available. You can search for particular items or just let the pipe find the best of what’s available.
- The “Kiva Loans by Location” gathers a list of the micro-loans people are making through the Kiva site, and shows the amazing variety of people and places these loans are making an impact on.
- The “Yahoo Unanswered Questions” pipe searches Yahoo! Answers for questions that don’t currently have an answer, so you can show how smart you are and answer those tricky questions.
- The “My Flickr Contacts’ Faves” is a complicated set of pipes built on top of the Flickr API that pulls the last five photos that have been favorited by each of your friends in the Flickr network. Great for seeing what photos your friends find interesting at-a-glance.
We’ve gone mobile, too. Straight from our recent internal Yahoo! Hack Day, we now have an iPhone interface that lets you access mash-ups from your mobile – so you can find the nearby sushi joint with Yahoo! Local or answer the call of nature with the restroom locator.
We’ve also updated Pipes with a more powerful search mechanism. Now you can easily sort through the thousands of Pipes to find the ones that interest you — and then use them — or re-mash them to suit your needs. This feature is just one of many that we’ve released since launching, but many others come from our community of developers. Feedback on discussion forums and message boards really do help us prioritize features and fixes, so please tell us what you think or drop us a line! And we’re making updates to Pipes all the time, so it’s worth subscribing to our blog to keep up with what’s new.
We’ve seen some great Pipes created and used since we’ve launched, by developers and non-developers alike. And we’re just getting warmed up. Stay tuned as we continue to bring you more exciting new features and Pipes to test out.
Jonathan Trevor
Yahoo! Pipes Team
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Posted October 31st, 2007 at 4:41 pm by Stefania Bisharat Bauer, Yahoo! Search Marketing
5 Comments » / Filed in: Yahoo! For Good
Talking to my husband Robert on the phone on October 21st, I noticed he sounded worried. At first I didn’t pay much attention, figuring that it had just been a long day for his crew. After all, when you’re a Los Angeles County firefighter, your days can either be extremely hectic or slow — they’re very rarely anything in between. When he mentioned “all the fires,” it sounded like any other conversation we’d had. But when I turned on the news, I saw that this day was different. Ten fires were being pushed toward homes by Santa Ana winds, gusting to over 100 mph.
In shock that so much was happening all at once, I immediately began to worry for all the firefighters. The week continued with reports of more wildfires, news of evacuations and massive firefighter deployments.
We got lucky. My husband never got sent out. He quite fortunately had the day off when his shift was deployed. He ended up working overtime locally to cover for the missing crews. The days continued and the intense winds kept the firefighters from getting the upper hand. Reports said that it could be a week before firefighters would return home, and I knew, from dealing with my husband, that firefighters only carry 3-4 days of supplies in their bag. The command centers would be stocked with water, food, and firefighting equipment, but items like toiletries, socks, and T-shirts came from each firefighter’s personal supply. It was clear they’d need some help.
I mentioned this to a co-worker, who suggested bringing it up to Yahoo! for Good to see if Yahoo! could help. Working with my husband to figure out what would be needed, I rallied some volunteers and worked with Yahoo! for Good to engineer a “Purple Act of Kindness” to donate the requested supplies. Yahoos from our Burbank and Carlsbad offices traveled to command posts this week to deliver everything directly to the firefighters.
Yahoo! has helped about 3,000 firefighters in just a matter of days. That we could play some part in bringing these brave men and women comfort and words of thanks at a time when they’re so focused on helping other people is amazing. I’m happy to know that I work for a company that was so willing to repay those who always risk their lives to protect others.
Stefania Bisharat Bauer
Senior Revelance Analyst, Marketplace Compliance
Yahoo! Search Marketing
Tagged: purple acts of kindness, Yahoo! For Good
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Posted October 29th, 2007 at 9:29 pm by Sabrina Ellis, Yahoo! Messenger
20 Comments » / Filed in: Trends & News
These days, it’s all about personalization and sharing. From your picture on a postage stamp to your Tivo lineup, it’s all about how you like it. From blogging every move to emailing that sneezing panda video, you have a propensity to share (maybe even over-share). You’ll see we kept that in mind with the newest version of Yahoo! Messenger, which I have the honor of unveiling today.
We’re not the only ones addicted to Yahoo! Messenger. With a growing user base of more than 94 million users worldwide, Yahoo! Messenger is often one of the first communication tools that most people see and use when they turn on their computers every day. And, on average, they spend nearly an hour a day on Yahoo! Messenger. Our team appreciates the magnitude there and making Yahoo! Messenger even more indispensable is what gets us out of bed every morning.
Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 Beta, designed for Windows, sports not only a new look, it lets you share videos, Flickr photos, and personalize your experience in all new ways. It also recognizes that you do more than IM your contacts and it’s now available in more countries than ever. Here’s a rundown of the new features:
- More contact options. When you hover over a friend in your contact list, you’ll see you can send an instant message, launch a voice call, or text message your friend’s mobile phone with one click. You’ll also note we’ve integrated Yahoo! Address Book so you can view, contact, and edit friends from your contact list. Got a lot of friends? We’ve added a search bar to help you track someone down quickly.
- Monitoring your mood. You can personalize your Messenger windows with the skin of your choice and include emoticons in your status message so that friends and family know your mood – good or bad – all the time.
- Get your media in-line. Sharing images, videos, maps and more is a whole new experience. Just send a link to a video and the in-line player will show it right in the conversation window for both you and your friend to see. So, when your friend asks for directions to the movie theater you’re meeting at that night, send a map that displays right in the IM window.
- More fun with Flickr. If you use Flickr, we know you love to share. So now you can easily share photos from your Flickr photostream right in the IM window.
- Express yourself. Remember our “Emoticontest” from June? Today’s new Messenger features our six attitude-filled emoticon winners: “thumbs up,” “thumbs down,” “rock on,” “it wasn’t me,” “don’t want to see it,” and “hurry up.”
- Global ties. It’s not just the features we’ve enhanced in this newest version of Yahoo! Messenger. We’ve also expanded into six new markets with localized versions for Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, India, and Vietnam..
In case we haven’t met, I’m the new VP for Yahoo! Messenger and I’m psyched to be part of this great team. Before joining the Messenger team, I’d spent six years working on Yahoo! Mail so I’ve been helping users communicate for quite awhile. I’m anxious for your feedback. Try out the new beta and let us know what you think. And head over to the Yahoo! Messenger blog for regular updates from our team.
Sabrina Ellis
VP, Yahoo! Messenger
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