Yahoo! Hack Day Pictures

Yahoo! sponsored an event called “Hack Day” this weekend. Approximately 500 developers showed up and created fifty-four prototypes in a twenty-four hour period. Blip.tv has the demos here and here. The winner was called Blogging in Motion.

Yahoo! even brought in Beck to entertain the crowd on Friday night. (To be honest, I had never heard of Beck—why, I wondered, would Yahoo! bring in the CEO of a beer company to sing?)

Hack Day was well conceived and executed. The only thing that I found lacking was syrup in the soda fountains. :-) No one appreciates good marketing more than I do, and other companies could learn a lot from this event because it garnered:

• Press coverage including television reports (ABC, CBS).

• Blog coverage. (It cost me $140 to go to HackDay because my kids and their friends played at a nearby Laser Quest while I went to the event. But I did get a free t-shirt with the underwhelming Hack Day logo.)

• Talent—perhaps some engineers to hire.

• Products—perhaps some goodies to enhance Yahoo!’s products and services

• Buzz—perhaps most important of all, the implicit message that Yahoo! is cool and that Google isn’t the only game in town.

To get a feeling for the event, click here to see pictures.

---

Comments

[Christian Ter]

Love the blog, even bought the book, keep up the good work.
The donuts look good and the pizza would have been nice. I agree that there's an attempt here to get back some of the cool factor Yahoo once had. Recently heard their radio ads about their new home page.

[jim Forbes]

hell, Guy, i even used your Post on Yahoo! as a reason to point out all the pretty Macintosh portables.
Dude,
jim Forbes

[alo]

i look attend webcrawler.com convention. most favorite for computer. do you know when?

[Jeff]

Talk about defeating stereotypes. "All woman team takes Yahoo hack day top prize". You go girls! Someone should send this to former Harvard prez Summers (http://tinyurl.com/pgnmp).

[Hans]

I love this new title, and the subtitle even more.

[Wilder]

The donuts look good and the pizza would have been nice. I agree that there's an attempt here to get back some of the cool factor Yahoo once had. Recently heard their radio ads about their new home page -- aka front door. Still looks old school to me. And design by committee.
Scott

[Innovation Zen]

I agree that Yahoo is trying to create a "cool" image under certain perspectives. Not sure if that is the best way to compete with Google though.

[John Koetsier]

Signal without noise? Whoa, that's a big promise:
Signal without noise, ego without limit

Oh, and btw: I suggest Akismet for spam blocking ... looks like you could use it.

*********************

Beats "noise without limit." :-)

Guy

[Miles Archer]

What happened to the latin, guy?

[Creative One]

I think this is an Apple's event....it seems like every developer is using An apple laptop. Why would they want to do that?

Are those pizzas and donuts FREE?????? I just love free food.

[Peter]

Is it me or does your link to pictures not work? Guess it could be McAfee blocking, but other pictures have worked for me.

Love the blog, even bought the book, keep up the good work.

***********

Are you using Safari on a Mac? It's flakey with Safari.

Thanks,

Guy

[DM]

Never heard of Beck? Wow! He's one of the more innovative musical/cultural artists today, and he is actually quite well-known... surprising, for an ex-Apple guy... at least you could admit to it! No shame brah!?

Perhaps, you need to re-immerse yourself in some adult culture (not counting business-related matters, of course ;-) ).