Food, beanbags and apps

Font Size

Print

Feedback

Email

Discuss

Related Articles

HP unveils converged infrastructure architectureHP launches of Indigo 7000 seriesHP unveils 'Thinspiration'IBM unveils Lotus center in Pune

: Kamla Bhatt, is a researcher and a technology trend watcher. She is also the host of a popular Internet radio show: http://kamlabhattshow.com

Have you ever wondered where and how some nifty applications and widgets originate and how they reach us? How does it happen? Is there a structured way of innovating and creating these applications? Or, is this done in a fun-filled environment with no constraints except to create something new and interesting? It is the latter that seems to be catching the imagination of companies and developers and it is called hackdays. A hack is sometimes described as a clever or a quick fix in the world of technical developers.

Companies have held internal hackdays to foster innovation and creativity among their developers. Increasingly, those internal hackdays are now being opened to external developers.

Yahoo! is one such company that is holding hackdays for external developers. Hackdays originated as an internal exercise within Yahoo! and in the past year the event has been hosted for the outside world to come and participate and create some interesting and useful mashups and applications.

For instance, Yahoo!’s Our City was born during Yahoo!’s internal hackday. Sensing that there is a great opportunity in the creative process of hacking, Yahoo! has held hackdays in its company headquarters in Sunnyvale, California and one in London. At both these events hundreds of developers participated in a 24-hour marathon session and built some interesting products and as David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo! mentioned, one of these hackers is looking to start a company. Recently Yahoo! held its first hackday India in Bangalore. The goal was to provide an atmosphere for people to network and collaborate said David Filo, who flew down from Yahoo!'s headquarters in Sunnyvale, California.

And magic did happen and I witnessed it by hanging out with a bunch of hackers, who let their creative juices flow. I realised how the right atmosphere, food and music, the important fuelling ingredients for developers can do wonders to their creativity and productivity. They built their prototypes or hacks on Yahoo!’s APIs like flickr, maps and delicious among others.