During each of these hack events, Yahoo! developers teach passionate CS, HCI and engineering students about the latest and greatest open tools and technologies and web programming tips in a series of tech talks, then spend 24 hours with them to help them build their dream hack for the competition held at the end of the week. In true Yahoo! style, the all night contest is filled with fun, free food, schwag, prizes, Wii games and plenty of caffeine!

At the end of the season, the winners from each university will be flown by Yahoo! to our University Hack Showdown, which is normally held in conjunction with Yahoo!’s Open Hack Day, where they will hack it out for street cred, cool prizes and the opportunity to get their hack noticed by web industry judges, including VCs, web entrepreneurs, Yahoo! execs and technology gurus.

“The close of 2009 marked the third year of the Hack U™ program and it’s been amazing to watch the innovation, spirit and quality of the hacks continue to grow, said Jamie Lockwood, program manager for Hack U™. “The students used to just mash up as many open technologies as they could barely thinking about UI or what problem the hack solves, but today we see ideas and prototypes coming together that are more and more sophisticated and in some cases almost ready to go to market.”

The winning Hack U™ students from last season had no problem holding their own against the experienced developers that showed up at the Yahoo! Open Hack event in NYC, winning half of the categories including best overall hack.

The program has definitely caught the attention of Yahoo!’s internal open tech leaders, as well as the external web community. The Hack U™ winners from Toronto even snagged an interview at Y Combinator with their hack idea.

You can read more about the program and view some of the other hacks that have been developed at universities across the country and the world (we had our first India Hack U event at IIT earlier this year!) on the Yahoo! Developer Network site.

Hack U events have been held at some of the best engineering universities around the country including UC Berkeley, Stanford, Georgia Tech, Carnegie Mellon, University of Washington and University of Illinois and we’re always on the lookout for other universities that want to be part of the growing Hack U community We also want to keep the technology topics fresh, timely and up to speed with the latest web industry innovations so feel free to send us requests for specific speakers or ideas for suggested topics.

Check out the website for more information, updates and details about the upcoming 2010 schedule.

– Yahoo! Academic Relations and Hack U™ Team

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

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

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

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!

By 6:38pm, we have our first pizza shortage. There had been somewhere on the order of thirty boxes delivered in the initial shipment, proving the evolutionary link between hackers and piranhas. However, beer continues to flow copiously.

T-shirt logos speak to the diversity of the attendants at this Open Hack Day. Canada is well represented by those sporting the “HACKDAY IS BACK, EH” outfits. University of Miami shirts and University of Illinois hats are making the rounds. Other companies are out in force – at a glance, OpenDNS, CNET, Adobe, or my ex-co-blogger JR Conlin making his return in his new Netflix gear. The Splunk employee is dominating at Rock Band. And of course, you have the Yahoo! employees wandering around in their “Crew” shirts (or just whatever Yahoo!-branded clothing they could pull out of their closets), helping to troubleshoot API questions or to direct confused hackers around the building, or more likely to just mooch all of the free pizza and beer, geez.

Hackers continue to mill about as we get closer to the concert start time. No concrete word on the secret performer just yet, but I’ve heard that it’ll be “mashup music”, which is fitting for the occasion. EDIT: The band is Girl Talk! I know nothing about them, but I’m looking forward to the show. In the meantime, we’ve replenished the pizza and the Rock Band rockers continue to thrill the adoring crowd, which is just about all you need.

Who the heck is writing this post anyway? Sean Montgomery authors the Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day blog and is guest-posting over the weekend. He would love to play with you in Rock Band.

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