We invite you to join the Yahoo! Connected TV team in Sunnyvale, to learn about some exciting new capabilities we are making available at the event. We will show you how to leverage your existing mobile and tablet apps to create 2nd screen interactive TV experiences that are engaging and monetizable.

Learn how to enable your current mobile apps to communicate with Yahoo! Connected TV using our Device Communication protocol. This communication platform supports two-way message-passing between tablets, smart phones and Yahoo! Connected TV. Content sharing, keyboard, navigation, and application-specific messages can be communicated through our protocol over a local network.

• Share videos from a mobile device to the TV

• Send web page URLs from the TV to your phone’s web browser

• Utilize gestures and touch to accelerate discovery, launch and navigation of TV Apps

• Create 2nd screen Interactive apps for entertainment, games, social, sports and shopping

For more info go to the event registration page: http://yahooconnectedtv.eventbrite.com/

The event was inaugurated by Prof. Krishna Sivalingam of IIT Madras. Jeyandran Venugopal and Sudhir Anandrao from the Cloud Platforms Group, delivered an interesting keynote and talked about some of the key issues on the web where deep science and research can add a lot of value. Prof.P.Sreenivasa Kumar was so impressed by the session that he talked Jeyandran into providing a guest lecture on the semantic web and information / knowledge extraction to his students.

This followed by talks on various Yahoo! technologies and a primer on some basics to get the students started. We were surprised at a low turnout of students for some of the talks. But later realized that thanks to frequent visits to the campus, most of the students had a good understanding of the technologies and were already busy planning for their hacks.

The 24 hour countdown began at 1:00pm on 31st and the labs were buzzing with action. We also had a few teams from the nearby College of Engineering, Guindy and a few teams traveling all the way from IIT Hyderabad to participate in the event.

The hacks were judged by Prof. Ranjani Parthasarathy of CEG, Prof. Ravindran of IITM and Yahoos Thiru and Rajiv. Overall, there were 25 hacks that were demoed and the following took the top honours:

• Andro-Remote - For its X-factor / coolnes in controlling a system remotely using it as a keyboard / mouse for easy accessibility and as a game controller.

• Find Me Jars - A Developer Hack using an eclipse plugin to automatically identify dependencies during development.

• Android P2P Collaborator - Campus Cost Saver, where users can switch seamlessly between SIP / telecom networks.

• Heaven on Earth - Using virtual data to provide real recommendations on a place to live.

• Bloggezzia - A Science Hack that recommends tags for a blog post based on text similarity.

• Remind Me - The Crew's favorite use of Yahoo! technologies.

• Event Lost - Honorable mention for the herculean effort by this one man team.

The list of hacks are available on the hack tracker. Photos from the events are on Flickr. Slides from the various talks are on Slide Share.

A shout to the crew comprising of Anshu, Arun, Chelliah, Pradeep, Jayasurian, Siju, Sudhir, Sunil, for their all around help. Until the next event, Adieu.

We just wrapped up another great Hack U at IIT Kharagpur. Yahoos were out there from March 22nd to 25th. HackU kicked off on Thursday evening with an inauguration from Prof. Jayantha Mukhopadhya, IIT Kharagpur - Head, CSE Department. It was then followed by an introduction to hacking and tech talks on YQL, a front-end web primer, YUI, BOSS, geo technologies and PHP over two days.

Hacking officially began at 9 am on Saturday. Around 100 hackers stayed up all night producing some amazing hacks! Overall 40 ideas were submitted. On Sunday afternoon, Prof. Pabitra Mitra and Prof. Animesh Mukherjee joined us for judging. There were a number of impressive hacks which got our attention.

The winners

• YouPlayer by Kaushik, Anjani, Saurabh and Sumit: Play the music you like with YouPlayer. It automatically creates playlists for you based on your likes and interests. Recommended music and videos are played via the Yahoo! web player.
• RailConnect by Rahul, Subhro, Sanket and Amit: Find connecting trains between any two stations in India. You can set the min and max amount of buffer time and more.
• QuickTweet-n-Mail by Vishwas, Tabassum, Debajit and Amit: Tweeting and mailing a piece of text or a picture is just a right click away with this extension! Grab it here.
• HackingFood by Mogili, Mahesh, Maila and Bipin: Find recipes based on the food ingredients you have!

Honorable mentions

• CompareHatke by Prashant, Shirkanth and Gaurav: A comparison shopping search enabling customers to find and discover products from various India online retailers.
• Ticket Reminder by Sri Krishna, Anuj, Bibhas and Kishen: Get reminder for booking tickets in Indian trains before seats are filled.
• FB Metro by Salil and Aakash: Your top facebook photos, videos and link feed in a shiny interface.
• Movie Buff by Anusha, Sonam and Sunandita: Get notified about latest bollywood music and movie releases.
• My Path by Shambhu and Shashwat: Find directions to your destination avoiding the joints you want to avoid.
• College Network by Devender, Vipul, Saurabh and Nadeem: Connects college students who are travelling for internships, entrance exams, fest, etc. It helps them save money by pooling accommodation, travel and more.

See the full list of hacks submitted.

Congrats to the winners and everyone else who attended the event. Special thanks to the professors and students for being fantastic hosts. A big shout out to Pradeep, Sumana, Durga, Tom and Rohit for delivering tech talks and helping students with the hacks. Also, huge props to Chelliah, Roopal and Cheryl for managing all the logistics. Not to forget Bimala Sweets for the sweet rôshogollas they served!

Check out more photos from the event on Flickr.

Student Organized Hack Events in Pennsylvania

Change is inevitable; with enough inspiration and passion these changes bring great results. This can be seen in two recent student-led hack events in Pennsylvania. Carnegie Mellon student groups created Tartan Hacks, an event for freshmen and sophomore students to learn new skills, start hacking, and inject the hacking/entrepreneurial spirit in the future class leaders. Mentors from Yahoo, Ideeli, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter gave the individual teams hands-on training with APIs and programming over the 24 hour period.

University of Pennsylvania students joined forces to create Hack the Change to harness students' passion and skills to solve problems around the globe. The event was inspired by Mahatma Gandhi's idea of change:

Be the change you want to see in the world.
Mahatma Gandhi

Hack the Change was supported by Venture F0rth, a shared workspace in Philadelphia, Yahoo, Random Hacks of Kindness, Twilio, and other local organizations. Teams worked tirelessly for 60 hours to create solutions about election monitoring safety, traumatic brain injury, SMS based local search, SMS based warning system for remote villages, and social activism. The Daily Pennsylvanian interviewed the two student orgnizers about the event:

Hack the Change co-organizers College and Engineering junior Pratham Mittal and Wharton junior Casey Rosengren had both competed in and won previous hackathons. They agreed the model would be a good way to serve PennSID’s mission, and decided to bring Hack the Change to Penn. Unlike other hackathons like PennApps, Hack the Change’s problem statements focused hackers’ potential ideas, Mittal said.

“This is our way of making the hacks more relevant and impactful,” he said. “They’re actually going to be used by the agencies presenting here.”

Students at Penn hack for social change - The Daily Pennsylvanian

I've Seen the Future...

I was fortunate enough to represent Yahoo at both of these events and recognized how students will be driving more and more of them in the future. Whether it's a student run hack event on campus or a collaboration with other organizations, such as Random Hacks of Kindness. I've seen the future and it's capably in the hands of talented students.

That's not to say Yahoo isn't going to be a part of it. We've got a full schedule of Yahoo Hack U events around the world. Rather we are looking forward to helping more student groups organize and host their own events. Perhaps Isaac Asimov stated it best:

The only constant is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.
Isaac Asimov

Watch for a Yahoo! HackU event at your college this year. Students can also start planning a local event with Random Hacks of Kindness in June.

San Jose Convention Center on on June 13-14, 2012

Hortonworks and Yahoo! are proud to host the 5th annual Hadoop Summit.

The two-day event will feature many of the thought leaders from the Apache Hadoop community who will showcase successful Hadoop use cases, share development and administration tips and tricks and educate organizations about how to leverage Apache Hadoop as a key component of their enterprise data platform.

Hadoop Summit will also be an excellent network environment for developers, architects, administrators, data analysts and vendors interested in advancing, extending or implementing Apache Hadoop.

Hadoop Summit Tracks include:

1. The Future of Hadoop
2. Deployment and Operations
3. Enterprise Data Architecture
4. Applications and Data Science
5. Analytics and Business Intelligence
6. Hadoop in Action

Interested in Speaking at Hadoop Summit. Call for papers is now open. Deadline to submit an abstract is Feb 22, 2012.

Submit your abstract>

Want a crash course on Apache Hadoop? Attend one of the companion training courses. Choose from either a two-day technical course for Java programmers: “Developing Solutions Using Apache Hadoop – HDFS and MapReduce” or a one-day course for non-Java programmers: “How Apache Hadoop Works.”

Learn More About Training>>

There's no doubt that Jordan has one of the most thriving developer communities in the Middle East region. Just under one year ago, Yahoo! ran its first developer event in Amman - "A morning with YDN". At this event, local developers heard for the first time about some of Yahoo!'s great developer technologies, like YQL and YUI. Now, one a year later, the Yahoo! HackU program has made its Debut at the Princess Sumaya University for Technology - PSUT, one of the leading and most well known technological institutes in the region.

Tech Talks:

The event kicked off on Wednesday, 2nd of November with a cool introduction by Prof. Jalal Atoum, Dean of King Hussein School for Information Technology at PSUT. Following this, Anil Patel, YDN Marketing Manager, gave an overview of the HackU program, how it works, why students should participate and how to they can get the most out of the event.

Jeremy Hubert, Prototyper and one of the Yahoo! technology specialists stepped in to explain to the audience how to think like a hacker (and not a cracker). How hacks should be done? What should be focused on? How to use Magic to make the hack work in just 24 hours.

After appetizers, what should be next? The main dish for sure. Jeremy started a list of Tech Talks that covered YDN as an open platform for developers, with a lot of cool and very useful technologies and tools that makes our life -as developers- a lot easier. Yahoo! Query Language YQL allows developers to access and shape data across the Internet through one simple language, eliminating the need to learn multiple APIs. Students -and even teachers- were shocked with the flexibility, portability and open ended technology and functionality that YQL could provide, if it is used in proper way.

I'm pretty sure that most professional developers have already used -or at least- heard about YUI, a proven, scalable, fast, and robust JavaScript library with its latest version YUI 3 with a set of utilities and controls, written for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting and AJAX.

Following this, Y! Product Manager Adel Shehadeh gave an engaging overview of the products and achievements that have followed the Yahoo! Maktoob.com acquisition 2 years ago.

Information security is incredibly important for Yahoo!, and this was conveyed clearly by Ala'a Mubaied, a Yahoo! Security Specialist based in the Yahoo! Amman office. He presented some of the hot and top security threats & trends for web applications.

With a closing wrap up, everybody leaves the "Friendship Stadium", fully charged, waiting for the next day to start the competition.

The Competition:

Gathering at the Stadium, teams were prepared to start their Hacks. 14 teams show up with their hacks and the 24 hours timer started. During the competition, Yahoo! and wi-tribe teamed up! we had a full internet coverage during the event sponsored by wi-tribe, one of the well known internet service providers in the region. Not to forget to mention that wi-tribe also sponsored to serve all the food, coffees, cookies and energy drinks during the event which was cool!

The Results

After 24 hours of hacking, with many of the teams staying up all night to finish their projects, we closed the working session and prepared for the series of presentations. Each team was allowed 90 seconds to present their hack to a panel of judges, made up of three Yahoo! employees and two representatives from the university.

The presentations included a number of interesting ideas, but as always in a competition, the winners needed to be chosen. Once the presentations were done, the judges compared notes and determined the following three winning hacks:

• First Place: Opal, a service that can extract the musical chords from YouTube videos to help people learn how to play their favorite songs. By Ahmed Jolani, Husam Abu-Gharbieh, and Mohammad Mteir.
• Second Place: Home Automation and Control, a combination hardware and software hack that allowed you to control the lighting and heating in your house over the internet. By Alaa Abzakh, Lina Masarweh, and Nart A.Schinackow.
• Third Place: One world One Language, an extension to web based messenger that allows you to seamlessly translate your messages into the other person's preferred language; With full support for Arabic! By Ali Douglah, Khaled Maayeh, Yousef Saafin, Yazan Abu Hamideh, and Yousef Al Husainy.

Congratulations to all of the hackers who participated in the first ever Jordanian HackU event. We hope you all had a good time and learned something new. We will see you next time!

Judging was performed by Yahoo!’s Allen Rabinovich and Gopal Venkatesan and the UCLA faculty judge was Anke Audenaert, Professor of Internet Analytics at Anderson School of Management, and Yahoo! alumnus. Watch the final awards presentation.

The winning team, including Elison Chen, Rupen Dajee, Benjamin Lin and Sam Chuang, developed an app called ServU, a SMS-based services in which anyone with a text-messaging plan can get services like weather, maps, a dictionary, news and music billboards. Their innovative hack won all team members iPads and bragging rights.

Winning second place was the application MotionPoster. This app augments reality by adding buttons to static movie posters and allows the observer to watch trailers, find out more about the movie, and get nearby show times.

Third place went to the team building Linguipendence - a Chrome extension that adds an automatic translation service to Facebook to enable users to converse globally.

The Yahoo! Tech Award for the best use of Yahoo! Technology was a hack called Twitter Explorer - a tool that parses a user’s tweets to determine the news, videos, images and products that are most relevant to that user.

An honorable mention was given to Life Mixer - a humorous application that asks users how much free time they have and provides suggestions on what can be done during that time period.

The Yahoo! Hack U™ team would like to thank Dr. Alfonso Cardenas, Daniel Quach, Nima Rahnemoon, and Laurie Leyden for all of their support.

The full list of Hack Ideas from UCLA can be seen in the Hack U™ page.

About the Author

Pat Brogan is a Yahoo! Campus Relationship Manager

Students were joined by Yahoo Engineers, Ted Drake, Asad Sheth, and Simon Tunbridge, for 24 hours of hacking, trivia questions, fattening food, caffeine, and StarCraft. The weather was crisp and sunny while the programmers were jovial and focused.

Hack Trophies

Jake Schwartz, Jack Wink, and Jason Berlinsky won first place for their hack Mouse Trap Analytics. These three hackers created a tool that allows site owners to watch a user's mouse movements in real time. While the interaction itself was impressive, what impressed the judges most was their attention to the bigger picture. From the very beginning this team focused on how to make something that scaled beyond hack day.

Mouse Trap Analytics used HTML5 Websockets, Node.Js, and MongoDB. I interviewed them around 8:00 a.m. to see how their hack was developing.

Second Place went to TeachMe, a hack by Hari Govardhanam and Sunny Arora. TeachMe allows a student to ask the phone a word based math problem and not only get the result, but also how the problem was broken down into variables and values. Other than using Google's text to speech APIs the two engineers built everything from scratch. This includes an artificial intelligence engine.

I also interviewed these guys as they were wrapping up the finishing touches to the project.

While the first two prizes went to hacks that tried to solve complex problems, Avishay and Alexandra Livne won third place for putting a polished new spin on the Flickr Mosaic concept. They also submitted a second hack, NameIt, that used some clever word analysis to generate appropriate categorization of research papers using term analysis and Wikipedia.

We also had an award for the hack that best embraced the challenges Yahoo! engineers and scientists work on daily. Browser Wars by Max Seiden, Adam Williams, and Forest Darling used classic video games to let multi-players fight each other while browsing a web page. Flying Ninja kicks could be just the ticket for increasing user engagement on Yahoo!

There were plenty of great hacks this week in Michigan. We also had great appreciation for BIG, wPath, and Four Color Words. These hacks concentrated on changing the browser, word association, and interpreting the art of Josef Albers.

HackU Events

The Fall HackU events have been quite an adventure. We went international with Madras, Delhi, and Jordan. Students from Carnegie Mellon won $10,000 at our Open Hack All Stars in New York. Join us next year when Yahoo! comes to your university(http://developer.yahoo.com/hacku/) with lots of food, caffeine, and hacking energy.

Hack U kicked off on Thursday evening with inauguration from Prof. Balakrishnan, IIT Delhi - Deputy director. Shovick Mukherejee, CEO - Yahoo! India R&D, delivered an inspiring keynote address talking about innovation in India and internet industry. The keynote was followed by tech talks on introduction to hacking, YQL, Web primer, Semantic web, YUI, BOSS and Geo technologies.

Hacking officially started at 9AM on Saturday. YQL, YUI and BOSS were the favorite Yahoo! technologies amongst the hackers. Around 150 hackers coded through the night to finish their hacks by Sunday morning. 54 hacks were registered! There were a number of impressive hacks which got our attention. Prof. Debjyoti Bera, Prof. Vikram Goyal and Dr. Souvik Mukerji joined us for judging the hacks.

The winners

• Idiot Box by Abhishek, Sudhanshu, Jatin and Ankush - Idiot box creates dazzling slideshow of photos from lyrics of the playing music.
• Hisab by Nikhil and Ankur - A social money management tool generating simplest balance settlement plan amongst friends.
• Toonatoes by Amritansu, Gaurav, Ankit and Amit - Generates comic strips from your facebook conversations.
• Lasagne by Raghav and Mayank - helps you understand the real value of online food deals from Indian group buying sites.
• Sharesoc by Sangeet and Nikunj - Easy drag and drop sharing between Facebook and twitter.

Honorable mentions

• Facebook2flickr by Vigya, Ankit, Gaurav, Agastya - Enables you to export your Facebook albums to Flickr.
• Mailscheduler by Rishi, Vibhav, Rohit and Akshay- Schedule sending of your mails with this app.
• Get_Directions by Srijan - Get directions from anywhere to everywhere on a phone call

See the full list of hacks submitted.

Congrats to the winners and everyone else who attended the event. Special thanks to the IIT Delhi ACM chapter, professors and students who helped us with the organization. A big shout out to Balaji, Hemant, Jai Santosh, Pradeep, Prashant and Sudar for delivering tech talks and helping students with the hacks. Also, huge props to Chelliah, Roopal, Priya and Cheryl for managing all the logistics.

Check out more photos from the event on Flickr.

The recent Hack U™ had somewhere close to 200 people starting out, easily filling the workspace and requiring students to find other work areas. The energy was high and the creativity running. Hundreds of pounds of food was consumed, and students were still hungry!

Thirty-three hacks were demonstrated to the panel of judges. The quality of work was so impressive that the judges also created several honorable mention awards. The winning hack was by the team with Rohan Varma and Samvit Ramadurgam. Their hack centered around a face recognition algorithm that employed a combination of machine learning techniques as well as some nifty image filtering. The hack reduced the problem to pattern matching as it matched faces to an existing data set of reasonable size with surprising levels of accuracy.

From winner Rohan, “The field of face and pattern recognition is one that has always intrigued us and one that we are passionate about. While we have made a great start, we feel that there still is a lot more that can be done as far as improving our algorithm and hack goes. As a result , we plan to work more on our hack in the near future and see where it takes us. The entire experience was very fulfilling and we are thankful to Yahoo! for giving us the opportunity to showcase our skills and creativity."

The Yahoo! Hack U™ team would like to thank all of the organizers and hackers at Berkeley for being wonderful hosts. To learn more about Hack U™ please visit the website.