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

Extending our leadership requires that we constantly tap into user and advertiser insights to understand their needs – which seem to change daily.

This pace of change demands constant innovation and focused execution. To make it all happen, you’ve got to have the best team — world-class engineers and scientists researching and delivering the technologies that define the next phase of the Internet consumer experience. That was a key draw to the job here at Yahoo! — working with a brilliant group of experts from a range of fields beyond traditional computer science that include data-driven analysis, high-quality search, algorithms, and economic models. For hardcore techies, this is tackling big problems with the latest toys. For you, this means the best and brightest working to improve your online experience.

And now we have even more. In the past week we’ve expanded our Research team and centers, with new locations in Israel and India. Today in Haifa, Israel, we opened a new Yahoo! Research Lab to focus on search technologies. We’ve tapped Dr. Ronny Lempel, who comes to us from IBM’s Haifa Research Lab, to lead the new center. He will be a great addition to the top-notch team we’ve pulled together to be at the leading edge and deliver even more compelling online search experiences. His expertise in search technologies, and ties to local academia, will help us draw on the best talent and knowledge from the region and strengthen our worldwide Research efforts.

Last week in India we launched Yahoo! Labs – Bangalore to create a center of excellence for next-generation search and advertising technologies. I’m proud to say we brought in eminent scientist Dr. Rajeev Rastogi, founding director of Bell Labs India, to lead this new lab. They will tackle some of the core computer science problems — specifically around data mining — and create solutions that in the long term will deliver a more relevant experience for users and advertisers. This is an important area to focus on now, as Internet content and data only continue to expand as more people and machines are connected.

Sound cool? That’s my team. That’s your team.

Ari Balogh
Chief Technology Officer