All Women Team Takes Yahoo Hack Day Top Prize
Michael Arrington
74 comments »
Yahoo opened its corporate headquarters to hordes of hackers, press and others on Friday and Saturday for its open Hack Day. After 24 hours of hacking (with a break for a private Beck concert in the Yahoo courtyard the first evening), 54 projects were demo’d to the crowd of about 400 people. Over 3,000 pictures from the event (tagged “HackDay06″) are on Flickr here.
A handful of teams were awarded prizes in categories ranging from “Too Useful” and “Best Schtick” to “Overall Winner”. The overall winner, determined by a quick huddle of judges after the demos (David Filo, Jeff Weiner, Ash Patel, Bradley Horowitz, Chad Dickerson, David Hornik, Peter Fenton, Gina Trapani, Salim Ismail and me) was a hardware/software combination device stashed inside a woman’s handbag.
The winning project, called Blogging In Motion, combined a camera, a handbag, a pedometer and the Flickr API to create a device that takes a picture after every few steps and then automatically blogs those pictures. The device was created by Diana Eng, Emily Albinski and Audrey Roy, pictured to the right along with the device.
The other 53 projects weren’t bad, either. And I had a wonderful time emcee’ing the event. Something special happened at Yahoo this week, and I was very lucky to be part of it. Thank you to Yahoo, and especially Chad Dickerson (head of Yahoo Developer Network) and Bradley Horowitz (VP Product Strategy at Yahoo) for organizing this and inviting me to participate. This needs to become a regular event.
Our previous coverage of Hack Day is here and here.
I could be wrong, but the girl on the left looks a lot like Diana from season 2 of Project Runway… It’s her, right?
Yes it is! Handbags and technology - of course it’s Diana!
Hopefully, all these projects will be posted on the Yhoo blog as it will be interesting to see what actually came out of this event.
Overall, great idea from Yahoo and hopefully this will be an annual rite. Quite frankly its finally good to hear some good buzz from the community and the press for Yahoo as the last couple months have been pretty tough for them and shareholders (me included).
If it had been an all-male team, I wonder what the title of this blog post might have been. Perhaps: Photo Blogging Hack Takes Top Yahoo Prize.
Hmm, nice nice nice…
Is Yahoo maybe going to release some cool & innovative products anytime soon? Or was this supposed to be a morale booster for their shareholders, employees & users…
Sounds a lot like Waymarker. http://waymarkr.com/faqs/
Fran - if it had been an all-male team, there would have been questions about why they are hacking purses. Just kidding
As technologists, we’re not doing a good job inviting women in - to schools, jobs or conferences. I hope we can recognize more women doing cool stuff like this.
Hi Techcrunch folks: please fix the subscription mechanism. I’m subscribed to TechCrunch U.S. For the last two days I have gotten U.S. Techcrunch content with the subject line “TechCrunch UK”.
An app no normal woman would EVER use. Brilliant!!!
Looks like another bone being thrown to Shelley Powers.
It’s Audrey Roy from Sharpcast!
This was a brilliant idea by Yahoo! to bring together the developer community while also generating innovative solutions using their APIs. I wish I could have been there! I hope Yahoo! makes this a regular, annual event and I look forward to seeing some of the solutions that were developed during the contest.
Other tech companies (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Adobe, etc) should really look at this idea and try to capture some of the momentum for themselves.
Yes, it is Diana Eng (from Project Runway Season 2) and Emily Albinski. They have a site at blackboxnation.com
Who would possibly use this device, though?
Here’s the pic with Audrey’s last name.
http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.g.....amp;size=o
Thanks everyone for helping me track down last names.
It’s 5:55 PM, EST.
I just noticed 2 new ads: YONO, and Fonpods.com.
My assumption is that you just made $40,000 today.
Anyway, Yahoo seems to making some grand investments and great strides within the industry. Do you think they have the funding or even the vision to compete against MySpace’s, the Googles’ (Top Dawgs). I say this as, I don’t see Yahoo hiring steadily, however, I’ve just noticed a lot of investments. Is this something that can be handled w/ their current workforce? For example, not only is Google consistently hiring but also bringing on new & innovative technologies. Just something to think about as these companies grow, or leverage themselves.
It’s 6:04 pm - EST, did you pay taxes on the ads or was that passed on in VAT?
Yahoo is not hiring? Try a hotjobs search for “yahoo” and you get thousands of results…
I prefer using Google for search, looking at satellite images and (sometimes for) maps, but the rest of their products have failed to impress me or seriously gain any significant marketshare. Yahoo’s recent updates to their mail and finance products are innovative, their developer netowork and events like hack day show their commitment to openly sharing ideas and encouraging creativity within the industry.
YHOO’s biggest problem is that they are too honest, and are thinking longer term than Wall Street would like. Meanwhile, GOOG can’t keep blowing out numbers indefinitely. They’re getting too big for that, no matter what Cramer or anybody else says. And when this happens, YHOO will go down with them. So I would not be a buyer of Yahoo stock right now, but I have complete faith they will still be around long after the next bump on the ride…
What project did these girls make? What were the other projects that were proposed?
I am curious, and I couldn’t find anything online…
ABCota if a GPS had been throw in, and the thing put into a backpack for back country hiking, in order to annotate a hike for a travel magazine, would it have been manly enough for you, then? We could put it into a shiny plastic shell and added a glowing white apple if this helps.
As for this being a bone for me, you grant me far more power than I have, but I thank you for the compliment.
My hackday hack was a wallpaper rotator using Flickr images. You can download it at http://dotnetrush.blogspot.com
wait, did they actually have to BUILD these items or did they just have to come up with the concept?
Because there is zero chance that that team actually built a device that performs what they “won” for.
Sounds like nothing more than another bogus feel good “hey look, girls can come work at internet companies too” story.
“The winning project, called Blogging In Motion, combined a camera, a handbag, a pedometer and the Flickr API to create a device that takes a picture after every few steps and then automatically blogs those pictures.” - actually it’s very cool idea, which can be extended to other areas of human activity.
Anyway, that seems to be addressing demand of real-time shows like “Big Brother” etc, which is already got reflected in video sharing services like youtube.
Video-blogging is the next web x.0 wave.
Cute
I’m pretty sure they actually built the item that they conceptualized.
I don’t know much about blackboxnation.com, but anyone that has seen Project Runway knows that Diana Eng is pretty passionate about combining real technology with fashion. From a strictly logical standpoint, why would Yahoo even bother awarding a prize to a concept with no real, tangible backing?
I can see the handbag being used in a multitude of ways. Not only does it allow for easier photo-blogging, but considering that it’s on all the time, it can be a great tool for precarious instances where photographic evidence would be useful, but not readily available (like a mugging, or even God forbid, a rape).
That’s cool that chicks won. Here is a cool “hacker” documentary. Very informative.
http://virtualmagic.blogspot.c.....acker.html
Shelley, I said, NORMAL women. My, my aren’t we defensive? This has nothing to do with femininity vs masculinity, so put down the lighter and put your bra back on. Not sure about you, but the majority of women I know and hang out with, most of them in a broad array of professsions, hell, even the tech industry, have absolutely NO INTEREST in blogging their photos while on the go. They are more interested in enjoying the current activity and company they are keeping. Prove me wrong. Get out of Silcon Valley and stop 50 women on the street in say, I dunno, Cincinnatti, OH, and see how much interest you get in such an application.
What do you get for winning?
googsucks: hack day isn’t about concepts, it’s about building stuff! and the winning team definitely hacked it together that day since they didn’t even have the sacrificial phone before the day started.
The physical computing and sewing skills (they brought their own machines!) were 100% for reals. As for the photo uploading stuff, that’s the point of the whole point of throwing Open Hack Day (well, beyond getting Beck to give a private concert). You can do a heck of a lot [plug]when you can leverage Yahoo!’s open APIs and platforms to do the heavy lifting[/plug]. With ZoneTag, uploading the photos to Flickr is (literally) a snap (and Flickr to Wordpress integration is obviously also pretty simple). Creative as hell? Of course - which is why they won. Technically possible in a day? Sure, with enough Red Bull.
IMO, the biggest part of the soul of what makes a great “hack” is that intersection of technical sweetness/simplicity and that aha moment of creative/lateral thinking…
Anyway, enough of my rambling - just swing on by next time and check it out for yourself (and maybe surprise yourself by how productive you can be with the right environment, people, and tools). The “winning” is incidental. The point of hacking is the hacking!
Shelley: since the team leveraged ZoneTag, they actually get geotargetting for free, but if it’d make ABCota feel better, I’m sure he can pay blackboxnation to make something more fashionably acceptable for his taste.
(Don’t quote me but…) I believe the plan is for the wiki to be frozen and then published publicly, which should list all the hacks that were presented for those interested.
maybe we can get an all-women team to take over TechCrunch. Authors here have been slacking off lately. Get to work!
Maybe those gals can figure out this one, the Big Mystery found in Google Earth:
Mystery landscape in China
That’s that place in the desert where the Chinese Army has built a 1:500 scale-model of the entire region of Aksai Chin, occupied since the 1962 Sino-Indian War. It shows everything: rivers, lakes, snow-capped mountains.
The only thing is, the military ain’t saying what it’s for.
Don’t miss the video that Beck et al put together in honor of Hack Day as part of his performance. It’s quite hilarious and got hacker juices flowing. David Filo posted about it on our corporate blog (minus the PG-13 rating)
http://yodel.yahoo.com/2006/09.....s-are-here
Novel, innovative, but useless.
Congrats to the team! Diana and Emily obviously love tech and fashion and it shows. That’s what people respond to….and I think it’s a great way to bring tech to the female population. Too often companies just color something pink instead of thinking about what we really want. Besides that…this looks fun!
I just wanted to let everyone know about a great website with trendy handbags, cheap designer shoes and leather jackets. It is
http://www.safarashoeandpurseparadise.com
A wonderful new way to get those tough upskirt shots!
@34 See! Now THAT is useful!!!
Mo, the Hack Day comedian, wrote about his Yahoo experience at Pulse 2.0. Check it out if you get a chance.
“Hi” there, hows you doing now? and thanks for very inspired message, and hopefully that you’ve got any usefull idea in this site, to all “womans” “ladays” “student’s” this our time to know everything what is the advantage of 21st century, dont think some disadvantage, make a good life more powerfull person, what ever you want in your future if its yours but make sure that thoes of you are not getting mistake in your life, in this 21st century thers no men or woman in this business, as long as that we’ve doing good and fair to someone, we have a right to go on and look forward in this world, dont forget to make good things, for your self and to the others, all i asked this kind of business are making good things learn, unto change your life, thank you, for visit, this is your friend still waiting thoes to access,
windjpy,