February 15, '09; BANGALORE: As over 300 of India's best and brightest software geeks, pored over their laptops at Yahoo's 2nd annual hackathon in Bangalore, Saturday, Co-founder and Chief Yahoo David Filo threw open yet another of the
portal leader's prime properties to the independent developer community. Yahoo Mail would now be available for third parties to create compelling applications, he told the media.
Meanwhile in its core Search business, Yahoo was banking on its open search web services platform, BOSS ( Build Your Own Search Service), to foster more innovation by independent developers even as it promoted Hadoop, a free software framework that supports open source data- intensive distributed applications, Filo added.
Sharad Sharma, CEO of Yahoo's India-based R&D lab, said a lot of the Hadoop work was done in Bangalore while his research teams also contributed strongly to search monetization and advertisement products.
Yahoo Glue ( " all you need, all in one place") had its global tryout in India, Sharma reminded: the country had emerged as a useful crucible or sounding board before some Yahoo tools were unleashed on the rest of the world.
The 2-day hackathon concludes on Sunday. Watch this space for an update on the top ideas that emerge after the 48 hour 'manthan' or churning.
UPDATE:
Here are the 9 winning hacks (& categories) listed in no ranking order
Best Search Inside - Y! Grep - (by pi: Ravi Bhushan Kumar & Ravi S. Math)
Best Gone in 90 seconds - BOSS in 90 seconds (by The Flex Ninjas: Raghunath Rao Thricovil & Harish Sivaramakrishnan)
Best Social Travel Helpdesk - Travel Assist (by Beanbag-Hackers: Nidhi Chaudhary & Anurag Jain)
Best Keynote from a Traffic Jam - Slideshare for Mobile (& openMail by scriptease: Kapil Mohan, Sri Prasanna, Mani Kumar & Ciju Cherian)
Best Crossing the Language Chasm - Translate This (by kroniks: sourabh behra)
Best Confidential Messages - Redact Mail (by : BabuSrithar)
Best Socially Mobile - Kiva Mobile (by SocialSync.org: Akshay Surve)
Best Built from Scratch - Search Engine with Hybrid (Human & Artificial) Intelligence (by API (Advancing Predictive Intelligence): Antano Solar John & Niranjan Prithviraj)
