by Jessica Roland

Yahoo! CPG Cloud Services attracted an excellent turnout for an open-house Demos and Drinks evening on March 29, at our Sunnyvale headquarters. Pizza, beer, raffle prizes and great technology were the draw. A full crowd of both Yahoos and external guests were on hand as intro videos rolled, intermixing vignettes of product leaders and Yahoo!'s flash mob dancers.

Yahoo's technical women had a big part in the evening's success! Shobana Radhakrishnan, Yahoo! Cloud Services Director of Program Management and Engineering Excellence, welcomed the attendees to the event and introduced Elissa Murphy, VP of Cloud Services, whose team hosted this event as a showcase of the cloud technology that powers all the Yahoo! applications users know and love…and also as an event to attract new recruits to Yahoo!'s most creative and fast-paced development groups. "Enjoy yourselves tonight," Elissa concluded; "We have food, drinks - and JOBS!".

Participants were ready for a good time, as they circulated among technology stations placed around the fabulously architected URL's Café, surrounded by all the legendary trademarks of Yahoo!'s campus - the gourmet cafeteria, free-flowing espresso bar, gym and games tables. Cameron Johnson, Product Director, was showing off IntoNow on the big screen, demonstrating how it listens to the TV program you're watching, serves you up related content on your iPad, and lets you interact with friends who are watching the same program. "My team is small," Cameron said, "but we are working on a fun, exciting application that is having a lot of impact in the market. It's a great team."

Christine Ying, Senior Product Manager and Johanna Hoadley, Product Director showed us how their beautiful Livestand application turns your iPad into an easy to use, natural gesture-based media reader with over 230 great titles available. "Our developers created this application on top of Yahoo!'s innovative Cocktails technology.” We also spoke with Lie Yang, Director of Engineering for Cocktails, Yahoo!'s technology stack designed to work across all devices. Lie said, "We have ambitious goals, and we are looking for developers with high standards who share our vision." Nellian Solaiappan, a Quality Engineering Manager in Yahoo! Cloud Services, echoed the cutting edge theme. "All requests to Yahoo! from the outside world go through our Cloud Services platform. The scale at which we serve up content is incredible. We're looking for people who want to be having that kind of big impact."

Thanks to all who attended - we had a wonderful time talking and making new contacts. For more information about opportunities at Yahoo! please check out Yahoo! Careers.

Editor: please visit our Yahoo! Women in Tech blog for the original article and more!

Hello, world! We’d like to give a big welcome to our new Yahoo! Mail markets and languages around the world.
Yes, that’s right – today we’re announcing the international expansion of Yahoo! Mail to 27 new markets and 22 new languages. 700 million of you have already come to know and love Yahoo!, Yahoo! Mail and all of the different experiences we have to offer, but we have been focused on extending Yahoo! to even more of you worldwide.
With today’s news, Yahoo! Mail is now in more than 70 markets and 46 languages worldwide. Moreover, by adding these languages and markets today, we’re now able to reach a potential 226 million new people across every single continent.  Or to put it another way, with a push of a button (or two) approximately 90% of the world’s Internet population can now use Yahoo! Mail in their native language.
Some of the new languages and markets coming on board:

• Ten new languages in Asia, including eight new languages in India alone.
• Twelve new languages in Europe, including Serbian, Hungarian, Bulgarian and Croatian.
• Several new markets around the globe, including South Africa, Belgium, Austria and Portugal.

Since launching Yahoo! Mail earlier this year in May, we’ve been continuously focused on delivering a faster, safer and easier online communications experience, expanding into markets like Arabic with our Maktoob launch, and now we’re delighted to offer it to all these new countries. Check it out, have fun, and let us know what you think!

James Carroll, SVP Global Products Development

Since the launch of our personalized, living magazine for the iPad, Livestand, savvy early adopters have downloaded the free app from the Apple Store and given it rave reviews.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~“I’m really impressed Yahoo!. This app looks cool and runs really smooth on my iPad 2. Lot’s of free but quality content. I especially like the reading experience. Keep rolling Livestand team.” – Der Dunn. (From the Livestand by Yahoo! reviews at the Apple Store.)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Livestand pulls together content from premium publishers and Yahoo!’s global network to offer a visual, tour de force content experience tailored to each user’s interests and passions.

“Cool,” you’re thinking. “So what’s in for me, the advertiser?”
Toyota Prius premiers Living Ads by Yahoo! on Livestand
Living Ads from Yahoo! is an innovative new format that offers advertisers a whole new way to surround their audiences in an immersive and interactive brand experience. This means that your audience and potential customers will surprised and delighted by an eye-popping and effectively engaging brand experience.
First up is a Living Ad for Toyota Prius (shown above).  To see a video of Living Ads in action click here for the original article.

Working with the client and Yahoo!, this Living Ad was designed with the help of award-winning designer Alexx Henry Studios, whose denizens really know how to put the life into advertising. As you can see, this brilliant experience moves and is interactive in ways that have never been seen on screen before. It’s the first time that HTML5 has been used in a commercial tablet advertisement, taking advantage of the tablet’s unique capabilities, such as accelerometer and physics.

“Living Ads offer an opportunity to set higher standards in digital advertising with brand experiences that are impactful, personalized and actionable,” says Henry. “They’re the only ad solution designed to use the power of the tablet as a lean-back and interactive experience.”

This correspondent first glimpsed the Toyota Prius ad last Thursday, November 17. Reaction? “Holy (expletive)! That’s just about the slickest ad I’ve ever seen!” And I’m not alone. Others who were shown Living Ads in a recent Yahoo! study, to be released later, had similar responses.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“It was unique, not like anything I have seen before.” – Respondent in a recent study of Living Ads by Yahoo!~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To learn more about how your brand can engage your customers across screens with dynamic experiences such as these, at scale, visit Yahoo! Advertising or contact your Yahoo! representative.

-- Michael Mattis

Editor’s Note: This entry was reposted from the Yahoo! Advertising Blog. For more information, visit their site, or follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

A personalized living magazine just for you — Livestand for iPad is here: Livestand weaves together content from leading third-party publishers and Yahoo!’s global media network to create a visually stunning and deeply personalized digital experience tailored for you and your interests and passions. Whether it’s presenting the latest recipes, timely tweets, breaking news, or blog posts, Livestand brings you the content you care about like you’ve never seen before. Check out the video above, read more here, or better yet, visit the App Store and download Livestand for free today.

The perfect companion for your TV – IntoNow for iPad: IntoNow makes TV-watching more engaging, social, and fun with one touch of a button. Like magic, IntoNow automatically identifies what you’re watching – whether live or recorded – and displays related content and personalized recommendations on what to watch. It also lets you have conversations with friends who are watching the same shows, and follow Twitter feeds of actors and athletes on TV. It’s available today for free download in the App Store.

Livestand is now available! A personalized living magazine, Livestand weaves together content from leading third-party publishers and Yahoo!'s global media network to create a visually stunning and deeply personalized digital experience tailored to each people's interests and passions.

Visit Livestand on Facebook! 
Hear from one of the Livestand Engineers
Like most engineers, Daivak Shah likes building things from the ground up. So naturally, when presented with the opportunity to help create Livestand for Yahoo!, Daivak jumped at the chance. The Senior Engineering Manager for Livestand describes the initiative a “content eco-system,” weaving together the vast amount of content that Yahoo! has at its disposal into a rich, custom-tailored experience for consumers, advertisers and publishers. Being able to take an active role in building this game-changing user experience has kept Daivak invested in Yahoo! “I feel passionate about what I’m building and I’m enjoying what I’m working on.”

Ross Harmes, Front-end Manager, Flickr


My name is Ross Harmes, I'm the Front-end manager here at Flickr and I've been at Yahoo! almost 5 years now. I think Yahoo! right now has the best combination of amazing properties to work on and unbelievably talented engineers.  The people I work with here are some of the best I've ever worked with in the world.

We're in the process of speeding up the site as a whole. Especially getting Flickr faster to people internationally.  We actually took a page that takes 6 seconds to load on average and knocked it down to a about a second a half which is a big difference.

One of my favorite stories is.. we have have a photograph that was on the Flickr front page and it was up there for 5 years and we went back to that photographer 5 years later and asked how it changed his life.  And this guy went from being a cement layer to now a professional photographer just because of the publicity he got from that one photo.  I love that story.

Flickr's great, I mean right now we have around 6 billion photos and that's almost a photo for every man, woman, and child on earth.  We have people uploading photos from every single country in the world.  We're trying to get into more languages so we can have even more people around the world.  In terms of one photo site on the web that really brings everyone together, I think it's got to be Flickr.

Originally posted on the WIT blog.  By Karen Bruner.

Yahoo! has been hosting company-wide Hackdays two or three times a year now for several years, and while Yahoos in the Southern California offices were welcome to work on hacks, they didn't have the support of an organized local event. That changed for Summer Hackday 2011. The SoCal chapter of Yahoo!'s Women in Tech group, with funding from the Yahoo! Developer Network, put together a great environment for local hackers to collaborate and concentrate on their hacks.

Prospective hackers listen to pitches over pizza

A week before Hackday, potential hackers came together to pitch ideas and find interested hackers. Hacking wasn't limited to engineers who fit the traditional definition of computer hacking. The Southern California offices have a large proportion of people in the advertising and business side, but they still have many of the necessary hacking skills: ideas, aesthetic input, and enthusiasm.

By the time Hackday rolled around, 19 hackers worked on several local projects that had come together. Hacks ran the gamut from ideas that could someday appear on the front pages of Yahoo!'s sites to internal tools that would make the behind-the-scenes run better. While most hackers were local to the Burbank office, Yahoos from the Santa Monica office also came to join the hacks. WIT volunteers kept them energized with drinks, munchies, and pizza.

SoCal Summer 2011 Hackers

For another first, the teams in Burbank got to present their hacks in the Friday afternoon demos via teleconferencing with Hackday HQ in Sunnyvale. Several dozen people, hackers and supporters alike, crowded in a boardroom over pizza and beer to watch the local demos. The enthusiasm and excitement from everybody was tremendous. Second-time Burbank hacker Srikanth Bangalore said this was a big improvement over his first Hackday, when he worked from his desk and had to record his demo so it could be replayed in the Sunnyvale demo session. Doing the demo live and having an energetic audience made for a very different experience.

A first: Burbank Hackday demos teleconfereced live with Sunnyvale 

Mariena Quintanilla's hack was related to her day-to-day work, a monitoring tool she had been needing for awhile but hadn't had time to work on. Hackday gave her the perfect chance. She found another would-be hacker to help out, and her tool will have an immediate impact.

With one successful Southern California Hackday under WIT's belt, the plan is to make this a regular event, allowing local Yahoos to tap their hacking talent more easily, which can only benefit Yahoo! as a whole.