india.next*

[Copied from Hacker's Lounge]

Yahoo! is the Hack Partner for Great Indian Developer Summit the week of April 21st and will have a Developer Lounge at the event. There is a plan to have a HackLite Demo Day at the event. Spread the word! Looking for cool & unique hacks from the hacker community. Also you'll be able to interact with the Yahoo! developers for your queries.

Also Open Hack Day London has been announced. It's May 9th-10th. If any of you from India Hackers are thinking of being there let me know. I am going to be there. Hope to see some of you as well.

Popularity: 33% [?]

[Copied from Hacker's Lounge]

So you thought that we just fell of the end of the earth after the Open Hack Day was over? Wrong! Certainly we have been feeling the post-hack-day blues like many of you but wanted to share some good news with you.

Just heard of the first hack going "live". The "Slideshare on Mobile" winning hack was just made live by the Slideshare team. Congrats to Slideshare for being persistent in taking their hack concept out to their customer. More details on this can be found on here & their slides. Try it out! (Also thanks to the Y! Mobile team in helping the hackers take their hack live.)

Also on TechCrunch!

Are you interested in taking your hack live?

Wanted to also communicate to other hackers who have pinged me earlier and those who are interested in taking their hacks live. We have gone through several hacks that we believe could be readied very quickly and made live by the hackers. What we would like to know from you is which hack you would like to take public and what support would you need from us to enable it. Are you facing any constraints in this process? Let us know and we'll try to help you as much as we can or point you in the right direction.

Popularity: 34% [?]

[Copied from Hacker's Lounge]

Now that the Hack Day is over do we all go back to our usual routine?
Well that's what we have done in the past but this time around we'd like to continue the engagement a bit longer. We have a small group of people who will be reaching out to the hackers who participated and help those who are interested in refining their hacks further and taking them live!

If you are one of those hackers who is interested in taking their hack out live please standby for some details on this post-hack-day activities.
Some of you have also asked for feedback on your hacks (as in concept and potential). We will go through and reach out with any feedback we can provide that you find valuable.

Some Recaps!

I'll post a few recaps from the hackers who were there. Thanks for all your inputs.

• http://ujjwalgrover.blogspot.com/2009/02/24-magic-hours-to-search-spin.html
• http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2009/02/openhack_bangalore.html
• http://ycorpblog.com/2009/02/16/bollywood-dancing-tech-info-and-hacks/

Popularity: 33% [?]

Hack Day India Winners

Here are the 9 winning hacks (& categories) listed in no ranking order (they were all top notch):

• 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 Navigation Bangalore Traffic - MyBus (by Parageeks: Pradeep BV, Akash Mahajan, Aashish Solanki & Rohit Talukdar)
• Best Built from Scratch - Search Engine with Hybrid (Human & Artificial) Intelligence (by API (Advancing Predictive Intelligence): Antano Solar John & Niranjan Prithviraj)

Hack Day Stats

We had a blast! Some simple stats from the data in hack.trackr (more to come later).

• 66 Hacks submitted (unique, also a handful did not demo )
• by 125 hackers (unique)
• 9 winning hacks by 19 hackers
• 26 hacks used BOSS (2 winners)
• 9 hacks used Blueprint (3 winners)
• 9 hacks used FireEagle (2 winners)
• 8 hacks used OpenMail (3 winners)
• 4 hacks used YAP
• 27 hacks used YQL (4 winners)
• 18 hacks used YUI (really only 18? & 1 winner)
• #hackdayindia on twitter reached #4 on trending (the first 3 were V-Day, Dollhouse & Valentine)
• 1020 tweets #hackdayindia since 8am on Sat morning!!!
• 202 photos on Flickr with hackdayindia tag taken after Feb 13th

Popularity: 39% [?]

I thought I would blog about the Open Hack Day in India here on next. But I've been so busy posting on the Open Hackers Lounge that I haven't been able to update anything here.

First of all we received 700+ registrations in a span of two weeks after we opened up the event. Its amazing how virality works. Without really doing any media promotions. We first listed the event on upcoming. Then on http://hackday.org and on the hackday blorg. This got picked up by several other aggregation and blogger sites. Then we also direct emailed our last open hack day registrants and several from those registered again this time. Having the experience of the first open hack day in India the value of this one got spread quickly and by 2 weeks were were at 700 and several more email requests post that. Given the logistics of the venue we had to do a quick screen to identify the most likely to hack hackers and filtered down to 300+ final invites. I am sure we disappointed many who were deserving to be at the event and to be frank it really is our loss to not able to get all of them on board. So if you are one of those please accept our sincere apologies and hope you will definitely make it to the next one.

In any case this time around we decided to have a close relationship with the hackers before the event. This has allowed us to tune the event to the needs of the hackers. At the same time we have been able to send out information to the hackers early on. Also the hackers themselves are getting together both on and off the hacker lounge to form teams and discuss hacks. I hope all of this has been useful to the hackers and we are very excited to see some real cool hacks on Demo Day.

More to come.

MetaMix

Popularity: 40% [?]

Yahoo! is bringing the University Hack Days to India this week beginning with IIT-Delhi Jan 28th - Feb 1st 2009 and then following it up at IIT-Mumbai Feb 4th - Feb 8th.

This is going to be real fun interacting with all the students and seeing what kind of creativity they come up with. We will be presenting BOSS, Blueprint, Fire Eagle, Maps, YUI and other sessions in this tight packed event over the 4 days. It culminates with 36 hour of hacking bliss, hack demos and awards.

Rasmus Ledorf - Father of PHP & Top Hacker Guru at Yahoo! will be present with Christian Heilmann - Web Dev Guru, Internation Developer Evangelist at the IIT events (Chris is there only for Delhi though).

Looking forward to groundbreaking this in India for the first time.

You can see me there at the demos and awards.

MetaMix

Popularity: 39% [?]

2008 has been a very eventful year for Yahoo! as it has been for many others. Yahoo! has seen lot of activity in the news for various reasons good and bad. So what is the state of the incubation group at Yahoo! esp. in India.

As you all know the Yahoo! India Incubation "Cellar" began early 2008. The charter was to enable local innovation happening within Yahoo! Bangalore and provide them a path to market. These innovations came in many forms:

• Hacks, Biz plans, Idea submissions, dropped insights, deep-dive ideations...
• They were also of various levels of maturity from completely far-out, not conceived in reality, outside of domain of expertise...
• There were a few that were also very motivating, provided glimmer of potential, incited / excited people and demonstrated value.

So how does one deal with all of this?We setup creating an extremely small group that was passionate about building new products and getting them out in the Indian market (we see India as a playground for many such intrapreneur ventures). The next step was to harness the insights that has been floating around among the intrapreneurs.

As you all know Yahoo! pioneered the "Hack Day" several years back which has gained steam across several companies across the globe. This grassroots driven program needed to find the next level of maturity and we worked through the year building up the Hacking @ Yahoo! Bangalore program to produce reasonable levels of output.

Additionally we launched an internally incubated classifieds product for India Y! Listit - Social Classifieds. Unfortunately we did not have the bandwidth to take this out to market and build a strong community around it (yet). This is still in "our things to do" list.

We also engaged in deep-dive ideation sessions with many teams and helped build a strong value proposition around a couple of focus areas. The outcomes of these are work-in-progress with SpotM being one of the products we collaborated on during the defining stages.

In all of these activities we began to collect data on the state of innovation across the organization and bubbled this up to our Executive sponsors and Biz leaders. This data is now allowing us to rebuild our strategy for the upcoming year to make innovation a main stay for Yahoo! Bangalore that will provide a much needed impetus for the center here to make an even deeper impact for Yahoo! globally.

I'll end with some observations that I can share:

• Yahoos are deeply motivated to innovate. This is in our DNA and is spread into all of us even the new recruits very quickly.
• Many intrapreneurs (esp. new recruits) don't exhibit the passion and restlessness required to create successful solutions.
• Many innovations / hacks are built without awareness of ground reality. This is both good and bad. Good because it allows us to push the reality, bad because it presents a block on actually making live the innovation.
• While there are several forums to foster innovation there isn't much feedback on the idea, hack, biz plan. Intrapreneurs need real and real-time feedback on their efforts so that they can refine as necessary. This is something we are working on at least from the "Cellar" front. On the flip side with 300+ intrapreneurs in Bangalore it is a steep task to provide real-time feedback on all ideas and there will be many casualties.
• Many innovations cross silos and platforms. This is an increasingly strong trend and aligns with our Open Strategy to build strong customer value innovation.

Looking forward to many new initiatives in 2009 that will allow us to bring our internal innovations for public consumption very rapidly.

Thanks

Chintan MetaMix Mehta

Popularity: 45% [?]

How to enable a successful hack day? Well success is different for different people and we have hacked with our hacking model to achieve different outcomes - all positive.

Y! Bangalore has adopted a particular model for the last 3 hack days and it addresses several issues we have seen in the past. The model guidelines are particularly:

• No Theme for Hack  Days: Absolutely critical to allow hackers a free reign. Hackers don’t  hack on a platform but use the platform to enable their hacks. We have  explicitly messaged this on every hack day.
• Product & Platform  Team Sponsors: Our model is to get product and platform teams invested in  the hack day before hacking. This includes commitment to:
  • educate hackers on their  platform and apis
  • provide a hacking or  staging environment for hacks
  • provide a judge who is  able to evaluate and cherry pick hacks to be prioritized into their roadmap  pipeline
• Hack Tech Talks:  Over the last 3 hack days we have had several product teams give tech talks.  Mobile Blueprint, Glue, Buzz Index, Maps, Local, OpenMail, BOSS, YUI. This has  resulted in broad awareness of the various platforms from Yahoo!
• Hack to Products: As  a result of the product team investment (#2) 5-6 hacks have gone live on those  pipelines and several others have been adopted into the roadmap. We did not  knock on any doors post hack day for this.
• Detailed Hack  Tracker registration tool: An internal hack registration app that  collects info on the hack including which product / platform it might be  related to. This allows for other product teams & IP Council to review  hacks on their own.
• Hack Screencasts:  Screencasts and Video Recording of Hack Demos to archive for posterity the  hacks being built and evaluated

Additional support we plan to enable for the future:

• Hack Gallery: CVS  repository (already exists) and Hack Servers to promote and evolve selected hacks open source style (internal & external)
• Internal Open Source Projects: support internal open source, staging and production pipeline  for a few high-value areas of focus with support from relevant product teams.
• Industry / Domain  Talks: To help hackers understand the state of the industry and challenges  and focus areas for hacking
• Hack storm sessions:  Ideate around few areas to enable hackers creativity

This may or may not be the right model for other companies but you are free to adopt anything from this that works for you. Let our hack statistics speak for themselves:

• The last 3 hack days the  hack team has not knocked on any product doors (no post-hack-day activities by  me)
• 121 hacks in Feb, 127 hacks  in Jun & 204 hacks in Oct
• 5-6 hacks have become live  from the first 2 hack days and few more have been put on the product roadmap
• handful of hacks have been  approved for patent filing and others being reviewed
• hackers now know which product groups to approach and contact within and approach them directly
• 20% of Oct hacks were on  OpenMail, similar numbers for mobile in Feb...
• We are building out an internal open source project pipeline with engineers / hackers driving it. These efforts will have a pipeline to production using a rapid alpha proto model.
• The trend I have seen is  moving from feature enhancement hacks (which still is the majority) to hacks  that are crossing our product / platform boundaries. Even internal tools. This  is a great trend when our engineers / hackers can cross the BU boundaries and  create value.

Feedback, Suggestions are all welcome

Popularity: 45% [?]

"The print page is dead". Put your hands together for in-context printing.
Yahoo! India Maps print page just became better, faster and a lot cleaner. Fancy this, you are new to Bangalore and are staying with a friend in Indiranagar. You have heard much about the new Lido Mall, and the Fabulous seating at the Fame Cinemas Multiplex. You are in a hurry to catch the movie. Now visit Yahoo! India Maps at http://in.maps.yahoo.com, search for "100 feet road indiranagar to lido mall" and click on the "print" link in the left hand corner.

A helpful pop up shows that your print will need 2 sheets. Now, click on Print and you are all set to enjoy pop corn at the movie. The Map is also in wide screen (landscape), so what you see is indeed what gets printed. The Printout also gives useful tips on the distance, approximate time taken and local auto rickshaw fare, all of which will aid you in making sure you pay only what you need to pay to that friendly Auto driver

Just that Simple

Subramanyan Murali
Yahoo! Maps Engineer

Popularity: 54% [?]

The Incubation team has launched a newly incubated classifieds product from the "cellar" called Y! Listit!

This was made live sometime back and the team was trying to bootstrap it with some minimal content before posting it on india.next*. The product is still under alpha, needs more iterations to be a mature classifieds contender. However our intent to release the product was to try to test a few of the concepts we were introducing in this space.

The product came about trying to understand how the classifieds space works in emerging markets. One of the observations came out was the need for social trust among people engaged in a classic trade. With this we came out with the concept of creating social circles within which people could buy, sell, swap their knick knacks.

Listit tries to bring about just that - buy, sell, swap among your trusted circles. In the first iteration this is limited to closed circles such as your company, workplace, school or college circles. This can allow each company or college to have their own classifieds board. Additionally a circle member can choose to post an ad either restricted to their circles or publicly accessible.

One can become a member of such a circle by providing the relevant company, work or college email address that can be verified. Generic emails such as hotmail.com or yahoo.com do not qualify, you need to provide a private domain email address that is identified to be the domain for that institution or workplace.

Currently circles exist for a few companies and colleges in Bangalore. You can try to login and provide your company email address to see if your company circle exists. If it doesn't we will try to create a new circle for your company or college.

While this product was originally crafted for South-East Asia, the product was dropped from the priority list. Since then the product was under incubation using purely volunteer engineering and product resources and built to the current level of capability. We hope to continue to test our volunteering capabilities in iterating this further based on our user inputs. So please do provide us your valuable feedback in the "Share your ideas" link at the bottom.

Try it out and let me know what you think.

Thanks

MetaMix

[Update:]

New Cities have been added (Mumbai, New Delhi, Kolkata & Chennai). The challenge has been to get a consolidated list of large neighborhood areas within each city. If you see any errors or omissions in the list of locations within the cities please do let us know. We hope to add more cities as we get more location data for each.

Thanks

Chintan

Popularity: 64% [?]