india.next*

A hack built on Hackaholics hack day from one of our hackers (Kush B) from Connected Life India Team has gone live on the Yahoo! Widget Gallery. I downloaded it on my BlackBerry. Pretty neat and functional, esp. since I have been tracking the dollar going up lately - its at Rs.40+, 40.225 INR to be exact per the currency converter.

Congratulations Kush!

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Yahoos got together and had a lot of fun on Feb 21-22 @ the internal hack day.

This time around we tried to get all hackers together in one space and collaborate together - as opposed to earlier times when hacking was restricted to their desks. This did create a lot of positive energy and buzz as hackers and non-hackers mingled during the science fair style hack demos. There were ~176 Hackers with ~121 Hacks. This is an awesome display of the enterprising nature of our employees. There were several other hack concepts that were not introduced into this event but will be getting due attention in the incubation "cellar" pipeline.

Judging the best hacks was a phased process with floor judging and a final top 25 judging panel. Alok Mittal (Canaan Partners) part of our esteemed judging panel and got a chance to review our hackers' creativity at close range.

We had some hicups in the process but that is part of the "Live & Learn" philosophy. We will be posting some of the hacks on our hack gallery page (coming soon). Some of the awards we gave out and how the Hackers coveted them were:

Which award do you covet?

• Show me the Money! (19%)
• Crazy Maverick! (17%)
• BEST HACKAHOLIC! (9%)
• Coolest Cucumber! (9%)
• I"m da Boss! (9%)
• Viral Attack! (8%)
• Sinfully Delightful! (8%)
• Ready2Ship! (6%)
• The Missing Link (6%)
• Audience Favorite! (6%)
• None of the Above! (4%)

And now to name the winners (hackers)

• Rajagopalan
• Sudharan
• Bhaskar
• Manmada
• Smita
• Mahaboob
• Abhishek
• Amit
• Pawan
• Jayadev
• Rohit
• Balaji
• Mahesh
• Kalyan
• Thiyaneshwar
• Helena
• Monika
• Nilesh
• Parvesh
• Malakar
• Karteek
• Abijit
• Subramaniam
• Praveen (P)
• Anoop
• Manav
• Praveen (K)
• Ashwin

Congratulations to all the winners.

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Yahoo! was one of the sponsors of Proto.in conference at Chennai in Jan. It was really motivating to see so many participants who had flown in from across the country to be at the conference. It really is awesome to see firsthand the energy and motivation within our entrepreneurs to build a product ecosystem in India. We are currently at an early phase of building a sustainable and rapidly growing portfolio of product innovators in India.

At proto.in I presented Yahoo's perpectives and experience in innovating and incubation new product concepts (Deck Uploaded). But Harshil Karia from Watblog captured some of the key essence of my talk here.

I can't lay the stress enough on the key points. It applies universally to all product innovators (big or small). Good to keep in mind.

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India.Next* site is under active incubation. Stay tuned for more.

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