Yahoo! India R&D announces successful completion of its first India Hack Day

Yahoo! India R&D announces successful completion of its first India Hack Day

Over 150 hackers come together for this 24-hr event

Over 30 interesting Hacks submitted

The first ever Open Hack Day in Bangalore organised by Yahoo! India R&D concluded on the 6th October, 2007. About 150 hackers from various parts of the country took on the challenge of using Yahoo! APIs (Application Programming Interface) and came up with interesting hacks within 24 hours. The end results were 31 new hacks. All teams and individual hackers got 90 seconds to present their hacks to a packed audience including 7 judges.

Following the tremendous success of Open Hack Day in the US and London, Yahoo! decided to bring this concept to Bangalore to attract some of the brightest minds in country. The 24-hour event started with hack-related presentations from some of the Web’s most respected developers.

The hacks began at 5pm on 5th Oct’07 and went right through the night. Some of the brightest programmers from India burned the midnight oil to come up with new hacks. Of course, they had bean-bags, rock music, lots of coffee and beverage for company. The event concluded at 5 pm on 6th Oct with a performance by a popular rock band.

David Filo, Co-founder & Chief Yahoo! said, “The most interesting aspect of this event was the collaboration between participants. They walked into the hall, met each other and decided to work on a common idea. Most hacks were ideas that were thought from scratch as opposed to building on existing products.”

According to Sharad Sharma, CEO of Yahoo! India Research & Development, “We are really delighted with the tremendous response and the overall outcome during India Hack Day in Bangalore. The level of enthusiasm shown by the participants was incredible. It only reaffirms our faith on the high quality talent pool in India.”

Some of the top awards presented to the hacks were

“Best in Show”: Maps Doodle (The best in Show hack is an implementation of Yahoo! Maps with a Canvas overlay.)

“Brainiest Hack”: YaHealer! (A tool that allows doctors to collaborate and connect/share medical files and photos online)

Best “Desktop Hack”: Desktop Wallpaper Love (a windows application that created a desktop wallpaper from images collected from flickr and filtered through the Yahoo! Buzz feeds)

For More Info on the hacks @
http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2007/10/results_of_the.html

Pictures of Hackday @ http://flickr.com/photos/tags/hackdayindia

List of other winning Hacks

Best “I wish I had a Mac” Hack: Third Tag (A del.icio.us file tagger that locates files on your hard drive, analyzes the text and offers a tag)

“Most Viral” Hack: Facebook Friend Folio (aggregates friend content on Facebook – Eg: photos, video – in one application).

“Best Self Expression” Hack: Smart Editor (pulls multi-media rich search results as you type; easily drag and drop search results into text box for instant sharing. Combines Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! news, Flickr and Amazon results)

“Most likely to arrive at next Hack Day on time”: Social Routing (Combines Maps, Weather, Traffic to plan travel routes)

Best “Non-Technical” Hack: Yahoo! Hindi Search (translates English into Hindi)

Best “Really Needs an Interface” Hack: Del.icio.us Tag Management (bundles tags and posts into a single tag).

“Most Parallel” Hack: Collaborative Browsing (allows multiple users to simultaneously browse the same web page)

About Hack Day

Hack Day is an event where Yahoo! opens its products, platforms and APIs to enable third-party developers to build on them and create their own unique mash-ups, products etc. The event is a grassroots research and innovation programme where Yahoo! empowers everyone to be a creator and an innovator. Hack Day is Yahoo!’s way to give something back to the community and make it even easier for them to build the next generation of the web.

About Yahoo! India Research and Development

Yahoo! India R&D (http://bangalore.yahoo.com) was established with a mission to deliver software solutions based on product and technology innovation to create a significant business impact for Yahoo! Inc. globally. The company’s operations are divided into Yahoo! R&D India and Yahoo! Engineering Services India. The R&D group creates technologies and products that cater to our everyday needs on the Internet and help achieve sustained visible impact on a global scale. The Engineering Services group provides quality assurance services, monitors and supports all the Yahoo! applications deployed worldwide.

About Yahoo!

Yahoo! Inc. is the No. 1 Internet brand globally and the most trafficked Internet destination worldwide. Yahoo! provides online products and services essential to consumers’ lives, and offers a full range of tools and marketing solutions for businesses to connect with Internet users around the world. Yahoo! is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif.
For details, please contact:

Shweta G
Yahoo! India
Tel: +91 80 30519740
shwetag {at} yahoo-inc(.)com

Brian Ammanna / Aparna Grover
Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, Bangalore
Tel: +91 80 44344354 / 44344359
brian.ammanna {at} ogilvy(.)com / aparna.grover {at} ogilvy(.)com