October 2, 2006
All Women Team takes Yahoo Hack Day Top Prize!
All Women Team Takes Yahoo Hack Day Top Prize
Yahoo opened its corporate headquarters to hordes of hackers, press and others on Friday and Saturday for its open Hack Day. After 24 hours of hacking (with a break for a private Beck concert in the Yahoo courtyard the first evening), 54 projects were demo’d to the crowd of about 400 people. Over 3,000 pictures from the event (tagged “HackDay06″) are on Flickr here.
A handful of teams were awarded prizes in categories ranging from “Too Useful” and “Best Schtick” to “Overall Winner”. The overall winner, determined by a quick huddle of judges after the demos (David Filo, Jeff Weiner, Ash Patel, Bradley Horowitz, Chad Dickerson, David Hornik, Peter Fenton, Gina Trapani, Salim Ismail and me) was a hardware/software combination device stashed inside a woman’s handbag.
The winning project, called Blogging In Motion, combined a camera, a handbag, a pedometer and the Flickr API to create a device that takes a picture after every few steps and then automatically blogs those pictures. The device was created by Diana Eng, Emily Albinski and Audrey Roy, pictured to the right along with the device.
The other 53 projects weren’t bad, either. And I had a wonderful time emcee’ing the event. Something special happened at Yahoo this week, and I was very lucky to be part of it. Thank you to Yahoo, and especially Chad Dickerson (head of Yahoo Developer Network) and Bradley Horowitz (VP Product Strategy at Yahoo) for organizing this and inviting me to participate. This needs to become a regular event.
Our previous coverage of Hack Day is here and here.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Posted by Lana at 5:07 PM | Comments (0)
September 10, 2006
This looks pretty cool....
Very Early Look at Synthasite’s Ajax Website Builder
South Africa based incuBeta will soon launch a website builder called Synthasite to help people build webpages entirely online. It will include a lot of the functionality of desktop applications like Frontpage and Dreamweaver (think Writely or Zoho Writer v. Word).
Like Sitekreator and Google Page Creator, Synthasite will be an entirely online application. The service, which is in private beta testing, won’t be launching until later in the fall. However, we’ve had a chance to test it.
Synthasite is going to be very popular. Like Sitekreator it has a wide variety of templates to choose from, and the team has a few ideas on how to help site creators integrate with third party web services as well. It has significantly more functionality than Google Page Creator. However, the beta product is only working currently in Internet Explorer (Firefox will be released soon), and we had a lot of trouble with the site repeatedly crashing and closing down. When we persisted, the results were good, though, and we assume that there will be no public launch before the the site is completely, or at least mostly, stable.
We’ll have a detailed review just as soon as it’s available on Firefox (and therefore Mac) and compare/contrast to Sitekreator.
Posted by Lana at 12:29 AM | Comments (0)
September 6, 2006
Why not Washington, D.C. ? ? ? ?
Man-o-man, would this make life easier for the photogprapher on the go or what?!?!Silicon Valley to become one ginormous WiFi hotspot
Filed under: Networking
Silicon Valley can't be shown up by, say, Singapore, now can it? That's why the Wireless Silicon Valley Task Force has selected the Silicon Valley Metro Connect, a tech consortium that includes IBM and Cisco to build a giant WiFi network for the region. When built, this massive WiFi hotspot will span 1500 square miles (nearly 3900 sq. km), from the city of South San Francisco to Santa Cruz, a distance of over 60 linear miles (96 km). The plan, for now is to have free access for local residents via advertising, but higher bandwidth applications like VoIP or streaming video would cost extra, reports The Associated Press. No word on how GoogleFi fits into all of this, given that Mountain View is part of this territory. Perhaps Google will use its other stronghold in San Francisco to make a power play for the rest of the Peninsula -- creating one giant battleground of free wireless internet access. Still, WiFi for the SiVi is superfly.Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | CommentsPosted by Lana at 10:20 PM | Comments (0)