I was at Yahoo Southeast Asia office in Singapore for the Yahoo BOSS Hack Day on 20th November 2008, Thursday.
Which, by the way, was also the day for “Overview of Microsoft Azure”…
Like what I have told Jon, I choose Yahoo for the beer. 
Yup! Jeremy took a look into the tub for a confirmation and there they are. Tiger Beer! Plus some quick finger food/dinner.
They have a fantastic office which easily beats mine.
The place was geared for Geeks from what I can see, where technical skills rule and going all out to help any Customer succeed in the web is their mantra.
There were stickers and cool long sleeves T-Shirts, which I grab a few…
Laptop Stickers are the “in” thing.
Sau Sheong was there to give his talk on the overview of the projects before Bill, Ashim and Christian went deep into BOSS.
You can try it out in one of many ways…e.g.
4hourSearch [aka YUIL but CUIL got pissed and sent a cease and desist letter.]
hakia, Me.dium Search, Daylife, Cluuz, etc… hah ! Bet you didn’t know Hakia is powered by Yahoo!
The audience. Hmm… must show off the Macs !
There is a mix of people from mostly students to even a person with a title of “Domain Head, Business Modelling, Business IT Asia Pacific” !
There were even developers from many camps… Nice chatting with them!
Yes, there are things that even Google is not a complete solution to.
I was also asked a whole bunch of questions. What I find interesting was the fact that there was a general lack of knowledge of what Microsoft can provide in terms of Web 2.0 stuff and cutting edge technology. Sigh…
Overall, Yahoo has great technology in the backend (highly scalable, valuable search indexes) and opening the access for the masses is good.
Developers will save time (basic indexing of the web will cost $300 million easy), APIs are constantly upgraded and BOSS has unlimited usage. They can do mash-ups with other non-Yahoo APIs and services too!
Customers may find themselves inadvertently using Yahoo Search in various format and fashion as long as it serve their end goals.
Yahoo! will then be able to monetize and pump more resources into the system.
Win win win.
I think like AJAX frameworks, such services by various companies are not a zero-sum game. Mash-ups between them is possible and it just makes the Internet more valuable and interesting.
November 24, 2008 at 1:22 pm |
It’s too bad the two events had to overlap on the same day – otherwise I would of wanted to go to the Yahoo event as well.
They had beer, but we served a pretty wicked sautéed chicken, I might add.
You might also want to mention that our own Live Search has recently launched the beta of our search API, which can also do a bunch of cool and wicked stuff to integrate third-party applications with Live Search results.
http://dev.live.com/livesearch/
It’s good to see continual innovation in the search space from different vendors, so people don’t just automatically think that all vendors have conceded search to Google.