We invite you to join a new experiment we cooked up at Yahoo! Labs called Predictalot, a game that takes NCAA tournament pick ‘em to entirely new extremes.

Here’s how it works. You can invest virtual points on almost any prediction you can think of about the men’s college basketball tournament, like “Duke will advance further than Texas,” or “Every final four team’s name will start with the letter U.” For example, you can invest one point predicting that “there will be exactly 2 upsets in the Elite Eight” and, according to the current Predictalot odds, you’ll win ten points if you’re right.

You can keep your predictions and see how they turn out, or you can sell them at any time, even while you’re following the action on the court. How does that work? Think of your predictions like stocks that can be priced, sold and traded (for virtual points, of course) just like you’d buy and sell stocks, options and futures on the financial exchanges of the world. Predictalot offers hundreds of millions of such predictions, constantly computing prices for them all.

Throughout the tournament, the prices of all the predictions in the system will go up and down based on what’s actually happening in the tournament and on what everyone else thinks those predictions are worth. Based on the value of the predictions you invest in you’ll accumulate points and climb your way to the top of the Predictalot leader board.

In technical terms, Predictalot is what is called a combinatorial prediction market. Some of us at Yahoo! Labs, along with academics like George Mason University professor Robin Hanson, have been studying and writing about them for quite some time, and dreaming about trying them out in the real world. We built the first version of Predictalot during an internal Yahoo! Hack Day. And this year we used the Yahoo! Application Platform to finally build a public version of the game. Like any Yahoo! App, you can install Predictalot to play right on the Yahoo! homepage. (Note that we’re not special in that regard: anyone can develop a Yahoo! App that’s available to millions of Yahoo! users — there’s good sample code, it supports YUI and OpenSocial, and it’s easy to get started. Seriously, try it.)

After some fits and starts, a few late nights, and eventually a few all nighters, we’re proud and excited to go live with Predictalot, version 1.0. I can’t rave enough about the talent and dedication of the research engineers who gave the game a professional look and feel and some real production speed. They turned a very pie-in-the-sky idea into a reality. We have a lot feature ideas in mind for future versions, but the core is in place and we hope you enjoy the game.

With 9.2 quintillion outcomes, or nearly as many as the number of individual insects on Earth, Predictalot is to our knowledge the largest prediction market ever built. We hope that with your participation it will prove a great test to the limits of what the wisdom of crowds can produce.  We’d also like to pave the way for the serious use of combinatorial prediction market technology in a host of other arenas down the road.

Smarter markets will be extremely valuable in a variety of applications, especially online, where markets and exchanges decide prices and allocations for all kinds of goods and services, including advertising inventory. And more and more, the matching of buyers with sellers – which is the core function of any market – is requiring sophisticated algorithms, machine learning and optimization technology. Predictalot attempts to help us better understand these dynamics while also giving us the great satisfaction of picking Duke to go all the way.

(Duke alum) David Pennock and the Predictalot Team:
Mani Abrol, Janet George, Tom Gulik, Mridul Muralidharan, Sudar Muthu, Navneet Nair, Abe Othman, Daniel Reeves, Pras Sarkar

P.S. If you’d like to learn more about the technology hidden in the engine and the scientific factors at play, read our post about Predictalot on the Yahoo! Research website. And don’t forget to also check out all of Yahoo!’s fun tourney experiences.

Key Scientific Challenges, Entry #6: Machine Learning

On January 27, we announced the kick-off of our 2010 Key Scientific Challenges Program.  To highlight the scientific challenge areas included in the program, we launched a series of guest blog posts on Yodel Anecdotal. Our most recent post covered Web Information Management.

Another big challenge our Yahoo! research scientists are continually examining is machine learning. In this entry, John Langford from Yahoo! Labs shares some thoughts on how Yahoo! is driving research into machine learning and why it’s a fascinating field.

When I wake up in the morning, I can’t resist checking my email and browsing the Internet to see if anything has come up. Then I get to work thinking, writing, searching, finding, and learning various things, all using an Internet that’s powered by machine learning in dozens of ways. When I go to sleep at night, I smile because I know that in addition to using machine learning throughout my day, I’ve also done my part to advance machine learning technology, many others have done likewise, and that by doing so we’re making a major impact on people’s lives.

Even though machine learning has such a broad influence on the Internet, it can be quite difficult to recognize. This is primarily because machine learning’s benefits are often hidden — they are the spam emails you don’t see, the uninteresting news articles you don’t see, and the irrelevant search results you don’t see, just to name a few. In this sense, machine learning is like an invisible hand. It’s also sometimes easier to recognize the flaws in a machine learning system – like “Why did my email end up in my friend’s spam folder?” – than it is to notice its benefits. But despite these quirks, machine learning is one of the best technologies we have for solving some of the biggest problems on the Web.

The problem of spam is representative of why machine learning is so effective. Spammers are constantly changing and adapting their strategies and technology to evade even the most capable filters. Machine learning attacks this problem by aiming to build an automatic system able to stay ahead of the game and continually refine itself in response to its environment. We haven’t completely achieved that goal yet, but progress is steady. Machine learning systems can always get better, learn more, work faster and in ever more ways, because people will always want less spam and more interesting and relevant news articles.
Naturally, this reality means we’re constantly running into both the empirical and theoretical boundaries of machine learning and statistics. How do I learn from so much data that we can’t fit it on a machine? How do we extract evidence of what the best decision was? What if the best decision changes? How do I minimize the need to know the best decision? How do I effectively use the incredibly large quantities of information available on the Internet? And how do I fit it all together in an automatic way that is useful to someone? And how do you know it’s useful?

Good answers to these questions can improve the life of just about everyone, which is the core reason why Yahoo! is sponsoring the Key Scientific Challenges Program. If you are a graduate student working on these questions, you understand how exciting and challenging this field is. And if you aren’t, consider the satisfaction associated with changing fields. :-)

John Langford

Yahoo! Labs

March is here, which means college basketball tournament time, one of my favorite times of the year, when even the mildest of fans start keeping up with every single game. When the Virginia Techs and the Daytons are crossing their fingers every single week that they stay inside that coveted bubble. When Facebook and Twitter status updates explode every time a top-10 team gets stunned or a star player makes an amazing dunk.

Facebook and Twitter—those sure weren’t around when I was playing in the Championship game 20 years ago against Duke. I’ll never forget the thrill of that victory, all the memories from the entire season, playing alongside Stacey Augmon and Larry Johnson—broken jaw and all.

I’m not on the court anymore, but that’s one of the beautiful things about the NCAA Championship Tournament: With every correct pick, every upset we call, every favorite team that advances, we (the fans) get to share in the thrill. One million dollars certainly doesn’t hurt, either—which is what Yahoo! is offering one lucky fan for submitting the perfect bracket. No perfect bracket in the end? No problem. The best bracket in the KFC- sponsored Yahoo! Sports Tourney Pick ‘em contest wins $10,000 (just ask Michael Lemon—he’s been enjoying his winnings from last year), and there’s even a second-chance contest from TIAA-CREF for the majority of us that must reluctantly accept our busted brackets.

Starting today, on-the-go fans will have access to a great new mobile experience for staying on top of their bracket selections. Yahoo! has created a mobile site where fans can play the Yahoo! Sports Tourney Pick’em game right on their mobile device at m.yahoo.com/tourneypickem. In addition, they’ll be able to get live scoring, game stats, updated schedules, news, and expert analysis from the Yahoo! Sports editorial team.

And it’s even easier these days to get your friends involved (and we all know the real satisfaction comes in beating that one friend who is so sure he’s going win) with Facebook and Twitter integration. Plus, you can be a die-hard fan without having to invest all the time and research. Yahoo!’s Bracket Wizard and Scenario Generator help fans with those quick decisions and allow them to see at a glance which teams to cheer for along the way to ensure that big W.

One of the perks of being a member of the Yahoo! Sports team is that I get to pitch in and offer my best (and presumably spot-on) advice to the masses. For those last-minute updates, fans can tune in to Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Bracket Live, a live and interactive web-show from the folks who brought you the Emmy®–nominated Yahoo! Fantasy Football Live. Tune in on March 17 as Jason King, Brad Evans, Larry Beil and I give you a final rundown on all the immediate updates affecting your teams. Viewers can even send us their bracket, and there’s a chance we’ll help you out with it on our show.

I know you guys are as excited about the next few weeks as I am. If you haven’t already, you better get in the game soon. Tip-off is only 8 days away, and it can’t get here soon enough!

-Greg Anthony, Yahoo! Sports College Basketball Analyst

Starting this week, we’ll be bringing you a step closer to the Yahoos who make stuff happen behind the scenes  as well as guests from outside of the company to share their views on various hot topics.

Joey Alarilla, a prominent (some say famous) Filipino blogger and journalist who recently joined Yahoo! as our social media editor for Southeast Asia is our first guest. Read on to find out more about his new role and how social media is playing a critical part in the Yahoo! Southeast Asia newsroom as well as the upcoming Philippine Presidential election campaigns.

Welcome to Yahoo! Can you give us a brief introduction to yourself, for example, what were you doing before joining the company?

Prior to joining Yahoo!, I was the head of the Multimedia Department of the leading online game publisher in the Philippines, Level Up! My projects there included launching our live blogging and live video streaming services and producing/hosting a weekly online show for our community.

I was a tech journalist for over a decade. In 2000, I was one of the pioneer editors who spun off the leading Philippine online news site INQUIRER.net (then called INQ7.net) from the Philippine Daily Inquirer newspaper. As the multimedia editor, I launched the site’s blog network and online video service, while also hosting and producing several podcasts and editing the hackenslash gaming news site. I was also the founding president of the Asian Gaming Journalists Association and a tech blogger for CNET Asia.

Could you tell us what a social media editor at Yahoo! in the Philippines does?

As the social media editor, I listen and interact with the community, not just on Yahoo! properties, but also on other social networks. My job includes understanding and monitoring what’s trending on different social networks; engaging the communities on these networks to exchange ideas and get feedback; and sharing these insights with the editorial team and our content partners.

We are also looking for more user generated content and offering platforms for our users to have their stories covered by Yahoo! and their views heard and read by more audience.

Sounds exciting! Tell us more about the social media scene in the Philippines / Southeast Asia

The social media scene is quite vibrant not just in the Philippines but across the region. It’s becoming more and more mainstream, with celebrities, journalists, politicians, and other personalities becoming more active on social networks.

One of the factors contributing to the growth of social media is the increasing popularity of the mobile Internet. You could say that social media is starting to become the new SMS. When you see people typing on their phones here, they might not be texting, but actually posting status updates on their social networks, or chatting with other online users.

While Twitter and Facebook are gaining popularity in this region, Meme from Yahoo! has a huge fan base and growing very quickly. We have introduced themed Memes for comic book lovers and cosplay and anime fans – two popular topics in the Philippines.

Can you elaborate more on why you think social media has started to become a vital part for news gathering?

News organizations have to evolve to keep pace with the changing habits of their audience. Many Internet users, especially the younger ones, have embraced social media.

Their primary source of news is no longer newspapers, television or even online news. It’s trusted users on their social networks. That explains why you have a personal newspaper service like The Twitter Tim.es, which displays news and blog links from the people you trust on Twitter – you can even check out my personal newspaper.

Increasingly, social media users are “out-scooping” the breaking news teams from mainstream media. Social media is one of the key channels for delivering news and other information. In the Philippines, in the wake of the massive flooding caused by tropical storm Ondoy (international codename: Ketsana), Filipinos relied on social networks to keep themselves informed and coordinate relief and rescue operations. Through social media, different rescue groups were able to harness the spirit of volunteerism and encourage more people to help out the flood victims.

The fact is that news organizations that fail to adapt are in danger of becoming irrelevant. They can no longer assume that users will come to them, but must instead make sure their content is available wherever their users may be.

Due to different factors, some news organizations have been slow to integrate social media into the newsroom. I’m happy to say, however, that the situation is changing. Many news organizations in the Philippines and in Southeast Asia are embracing social media. This is a new and exciting frontier for many journalists, and Yahoo! will be here to help our media partners with our own insights based on our experiences and best practices.

During the recent social media forum in the Philippines, you discussed how social media is shaping the political landscape in the Philippines; do you think the candidates really understand the benefits/ use of social media?

Social media is generating a lot of hype in the upcoming Philippine presidential elections this May. Pundits are saying this will be the first Philippine elections in which social media will potentially be a game changer.

It’s good to see that many candidates recognize the importance of social media in their campaigns – no doubt inspired by the example of US President Barack Obama. What they have to keep in mind, however, is that social media is just one aspect of the campaign, and that their success will depend on how well they integrate it with their overall strategy.

The Obama team was able to reach out via social media but the crucial step was in translating this into actual grassroots support i.e, volunteers going door to door, and voters trooping out on Election Day. Social media is not a silver bullet. It’s not the be-all and end-all of a campaign, and if candidates become shortsighted, they might end up fighting an online popularity contest instead of inspiring action among their constituents.

Moreover, I would like to see candidates focus less on bombarding followers with their messages, and instead concentrate on interacting with voters online and listening to what they have to say. Social media is a conversation, and it’s a chance for voters to truly make their voices heard.

Empowering the voters through social media is the main goal of Yahoo!’s Purple Thumb site for the Philippine elections. We also held a social media forum, to examine the impact of social media on the upcoming elections. It’s all about the community – about putting the spotlight on what ordinary people have to say about the election issues that concern them most.

Social media is your chance to be heard. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.

As Spring Training heats up, we are very excited to announce an exclusive deal with Major League Baseball making Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Baseball ‘10 the official fantasy baseball game of MLB.com.

The co-branded Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Baseball ‘10, will provide fans with the most relevant and engaging fantasy baseball experience on the Web. The combination of Yahoo!’s unmatched sports news and MLB.com’s in-game and post-game video highlights truly makes this the biggest and best game for passionate fantasy baseball fans.

Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Baseball ’10 players can purchase MLB.com’s new Fantasy Highlights package, giving them the opportunity to watch customized in-game and post-game video highlights of their fantasy players directly from their homepage. The unique feature, combined with Yahoo! Sports’ leading online news and insights, will provide players with the most comprehensive and interactive fantasy baseball experience anywhere, taking fans beyond the box score to watch the performance of their fantasy roster as it unfolds on the field.

Additionally, Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Baseball ‘10 will offer a new live online auction draft application and free live scoring, which gives fans the ability to view live stats and instant scoring for teams or matchups and get real-time league standings straight to their homepage.

Yahoo! is the partner of choice for content companies, working closely with major sports, entertainment, and media companies to deliver the world’s most relevant and engaging content to its consumers.  The MLB is the third official league relationship we’ve entered into, with the NHL and PGA Tour fantasy games already leading in their respective online categories. And now, with the combination of Yahoo!’s unmatched sports news, MLB.com’s wealth of statistical research tools and never-before-available live video highlights at users’ fingertips, we know Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball ’10 will quickly become the hottest product serving the incredibly passionate fantasy baseball audience. Check it out for yourself!

“Hollywood’s Biggest Night” is just around the corner and Yahoo! is ready to take you down the red carpet and get you through the evening with up-to-the-minute information and all the news, photos, and juicy gossip you can handle.The 82^nd Academy Awards are at 8 ET / 5 PT Sunday, March 7, 2010 at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood and will be hosted by Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin.  While the show will be broadcast on ABC, Yahoo! once again is THE place where you can weigh in on all things Oscar, from the fashion faux pas to the surprise winners and the heartfelt speeches.

We’ve dedicated an entire section of Yahoo! Movies to this year’s awards show with the idea that Yahoo!’s Coverage of the Oscars starts with you! Let your voice be heard and make sure to cast a vote in our poll: “What do you want to see most when you watch the Oscars?” As of right now, 43% of you want to see who wins the big awards. You can also weigh in on who you think deserves to win Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Director.

Interested in seeing what the stars are wearing? We’ve got you covered with our Oscars Photo galleries including fashion photos from the red carpet, insider photos from the before and after parties, photos of the nominees, and photos from the many events taking place Sunday.

We also have a Featured Videos section, a News section, and an ongoing Oscars Blog.

Coverage of the 82^nd Annual Academy Awards is already underway with both OMG! and Yahoo! News feeding into the Oscars frenzy.

Want to be the best informed on this year’s likely winners and losers? We’ve broken down the Academy Awards by category to help you get a leg up on your friends in picking who will win Oscar gold, in How To Win Your Oscars Pool.

Find out why Sacha Baron Cohen (aka Ali G/Borat/Brüno) went from being a presenter to sitting the award show out and watching from home!

Want an expert’s opinion? Who’s more suited to give Oscar picks than OUR favorite Oscar–namely Oscar the Grouch? Sesame Street’s seminal crab-apple took a few minutes to answer some questions on who he thinks the winners will be on Sunday. Check out Oscar the Grouch’s Oscar Picks.

Criticisms of this year’s hottest movies and highest contenders are outlined in Yahoo! News’ Controversies big and small dog Oscars contenders. Find out why there’s been outrage over Sigourney Weaver’s role in Avatar.

Red-carpet style predictions and fashion alerts are revealed in OMG!’s Glam Slam: Oscar Style!

Have your own opinion on the big winners and major upsets? Want to weigh in on some of the fashion wins and fails? Then we invite you to join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.

On Facebook, be sure to check out the Yahoo! Movies fan page (Yahoo! Movies) where you can write captions to photos of your favorite celebs. We’ll be uploading fashion photos of the movie stars from the red carpet, and we’re asking you to submit your most witty captions via comment.

On Twitter, follow @YahooMovies for real-time info on Academy winners. Follow @YahooOMG for updates on fashion from the red carpet. Follow @YodelingMamas for a Mom-blogger’s point of view on the evening. And of course follow @Yahoo for an overall perspective.

See you on the red carpet–and may the best man, woman and picture win!

What do Jennifer Lopez, live animals, giant bananas, and a guy sitting on a couch watching TV have in common? They all contributed to the success of Yahoo! TV’s Primetime in No Time, which just streamed its 500th episode!

But the real contributor to the success of PiNT has been you, dear viewer. Because of you, our popular TV recap show has even more reasons to celebrate…we’ve reached more than 365 million streams, 12 million of which were on one day for Jennifer Lopez’s fall during the American Music Awards. Note to celebrities: please fall down more often and feel free to interrupt Taylor Swift any chance you get. Man, I love LIVE TV! And you guys are spending an average of 6 minutes on our page. Our show is only 3 and a half to 4 minutes long. This is why we love you!!!

We’ve had some good times on PiNT. Remember when Donald Shultz from Wild Recon brought live animals on the set? And who doesn’t love the skits where I get to sing and dance. And of course, my personal favorite — the Steelers winning the Superbowl. It’s their 6th by the way!

But it wasn’t all good times, for me anyways. My least favorite moment was getting sucker punched, falling off of some giant bananas and more torture all in the name of good television as a guest on ABC’s hit show Wipeout. As you are reading this, know that I am still in pain but will continue my TV watching duties. Hopefully I will still be able to have children after my final crash.

Let’s not forget to thank the many special guests who visited the PiNT studio in Los Angeles including the Glee Kids who were really jealous of my voice; reality show contestants from Survivor (thanks for showering before coming in) and The Bachelor/ The Bachelorette; actor Harry Hamlin and comedienne Margaret Cho.

But back to you, dear viewer. Thank you for watching Primetime in No Time on Yahoo! TV, for following me and Yahoo! TV on Twitter (@franknicotero and @yahootv), and for making us THE most popular online video show.

-Frank Nicotero

Surfing the Data Wave: The Problem of Managing Events and Updates for Hundreds of Millions of Users

Key Scientific Challenges, Entry #5: Web Information Management

On January 27 we announced the kick-off of our 2010 Key Scientific Challenges Program.  To highlight the scientific challenge areas included in the program, we launched a series of guest blog posts earlier this month on Yodel Anecdotal. Read our previous post on online advertising, “The Art and Science of Advertising.”

Another big challenge our Yahoo!’s research scientists are continually examining is Web Information Management. In this entry, Brian Cooper from Yahoo! Labs shares some thoughts on how Yahoo! is driving research into information management and why it’s a fascinating field.

A Torrent of Data
Sites like Facebook and Twitter demonstrate that users really like to know what’s going on with their friends. At the same time, the popularity of blog readers and personalized RSS aggregators like MyYahoo! and iGoogle show that users also like up-to-date news. Although social networking and content aggregation seem like different applications, at the core they share a key mechanism: collecting the most recent content from a set of producers, and distributing it to a set of consumers. In the case of social networking, producers write status updates or post links, and consumers (their friends) get a list of the updates. In a news aggregator, the producers are news sites or blogs, and the consumers are the readers that want the content.

The core mechanism that takes content from producers and redistributes it to users is actually quite hard to get right, and is an example of the really tough problems that fall under the Key Scientific Challenge area on Web Information Management (and its sub-topic Data Management)

The main problem is the multiplicative explosion of updates. Consider a popular user of a site like Twitter. Ashton Kutcher, for example, has over 4.5 million followers as of February 18, 2010. Every time Ashton tweets, his words of wisdom have to be propagated to the feeds of all those millions of followers. Even if the average user has far less followers, their tweets may have to be propagated to hundreds of users or more. Suddenly, even a short 140-character message can consume a lot of server resources. It’s for this reason that Twitter notoriously found it difficult to scale and stay up at the same time. Some of the challenges in doing so have been described by Twitter engineers.

At Yahoo!, we’ve been aggregating and distributing content for a long time, and we’re increasingly distributing social updates too. Products such as Yahoo! Mail and Messenger show you recent updates and activities by your friends on Yahoo!. Plus, services like Yahoo! Updates provide tools for developers to feed a variety of different user activities and updates that happen on their sites into Yahoo!’s products (and vice versa). As we build our infrastructure to support both content and user updates, we run into many of the same scaling problems that other companies have been reporting. To address these challenges, we took a step back and looked at the whole architecture needed to support these “user event feeds”.

The Push or Pull Dilemma
I’d like to talk about one aspect in particular, as it directly addresses the intersection of building Internet-scale databases and dealing with social data. When distributing updates from producers to consumers, you have a fundamental choice: should you “push” updates to consumers, so that when a user logs in their feed is already constructed and ready to go? Or should you wait until a consumer logs in, and then “pull” updates from producers to construct the feed on the fly?

Pull ensures that we construct feeds only for users that actually log in, but it has a downside: the time a user spends waiting for their feed can be quite long because the system needs to collect and sort all of the updates from all of the people or news sources that the user follows. Many sites face this tradeoff between doing potentially unneeded work to always be ready on the one hand, and the strain of delivering on demand performance on the other. Digg recently reported moving from a pull to a push model for one part of their site, resulting in a huge increase in the amount of “pushed” data that had to be stored, but a significant decrease in response time for users.

Threading the Needle
At Yahoo! Labs, when we thought about this problem and tried to figure out whether push or pull was best, we realized something that should have been obvious all along: neither push nor pull is best.

Consider a producer named Alice that posts a new status update once an hour. We need to include her updates in the feeds we produce for her friends. Thus, when her friend Bob logs in, he should see some of Alice’s recent events. But we only really need to show Bob some of his friends’ events, because there is only room on the screen to show him 10 at a time. Now imagine that Bob only logs in once a week. In that week, Alice may have produced 80 or more updates. If we pushed all 80 to Bob’s feed, at least 70 will have fallen off the front page (replaced by newer Alice events or newer events from other friends) by the time Bob logs in, and all the resources (network bandwidth, disk I/O, CPU time) spent on pushing those 70 updates would be wasted. Multiply that waste by millions of users, and you can see where this is heading.

Alternatively, consider Carl, another one of Alice’s friends. Carl loves to check his feed and updates it every five minutes (he’s an over-sharer). In this scenario, a push model makes more sense: rather than querying the database every five minutes for Alice’s updates, we should push Alice’s events to a pre-computed page for Carl, and just serve him that same page over and over until a new Alice event arrives and updates the page. That way, Carl’s experience is great for him AND no servers meltdown!

The key insight is that we should do push for some producer/consumer pairs and pull for others. Deciding whether to do push depends on the relative frequency of the producer’s events
compared to the consumer’s logins, as well as the relative cost of push versus pull. We can minimize resource usage by only pushing for producer/consumer pairs where the consumer logs in frequently enough that the cost of pushing, plus serving the pre-computed page, is less than the cost of retrieving the event repeatedly from the producer’s queue.

It’s a challenging model to develop and put into place. It can be complicated by an almost endless array of variables, and the challenge of implementing this approach in the midst of hugely popular events, like Barack Obama’s inauguration, or Michael Jackson’s death, which caused huge surges in status updates, makes it even more difficult. It’s also what makes it utterly fascinating.

More details about this challenge, the techniques, arguments and the real-world experiments we’re developing at Yahoo! Labs will be available in our upcoming SIGMOD paper, “Feeding Frenzy: Selectively Materializing Users’ Event Feeds” written by Adam Silberstein, Brian Cooper and Raghu Ramakrishnan, as well as Jeffrey Terrace from Princeton, who was an intern here at Yahoo! Labs last summer. You’ll be able to find the paper on the Yahoo! Labs site later this year and take a look.

Brian Cooper

Yahoo! Labs

We’ve had the unique opportunity to help create an industry and shape the online world, and will continue to focus on the values that brought us here —working hard, having fun, being passionate about your ideas, believing in each other, and always trying to invent the future.  And as we celebrate 15 years today, we are even more excited than ever about what lies ahead, and the potential of Yahoo! and the Internet.

Of course, we didn’t set out to start one of the world’s largest Internet companies or be leading a movement that has changed the world. We were just a couple of Stanford graduate students doing our research (supposedly) while our professor was on sabbatical.

More interesting than our research was our total fascination with the web and all the cool stuff it suddenly made available. But it was incredibly hard to keep track of the thousands of great websites sprouting up everywhere.  We thought it would be fun to catalog the sites by developing a simple directory. So all this began with nothing more than a hobby to help other early Internet users.

Amazing things happen when we’re doing what’s fun.

We soon learned a huge lesson just as relevant today as then: change and growth on the Internet happen at warp speed—especially if you’re filling a need. With the proliferation of websites and with hundreds of thousands of people accessing our guide, it was simply impossible for us to continue doing this on our own.

Taking big steps takes belief in yourself—and in others.

After many late nights and a lot of pizza, we decided to take the big leap, turn our hobby into a business, raise money and devote ourselves totally to building a company.  This was no sure thing.  For example, 15 years ago, we wanted a free service that was ad-supported. But the conventional wisdom was that our business needed to be subscription-based. Few people thought that advertising could be the key revenue generator for the Internet. Of course, the conventional wisdom was wrong and so today we know that August, 1995, the month our first ad went live, was a critical milestone in the history of Yahoo!, as well as the history of the internet.

Focus on the future: it still looks phenomenal.

Internet growth continues to be simply phenomenal, and we’re nowhere near done.  Fifteen years ago, there were 18,000 web sites and fewer than 10 million people globally on the Internet—less than one third of a single percent of the world’s population at the time. Today there are more than 200 million websites with 90,000 created daily. There are estimated to be 1.6 billion people on the internet today—about 25 percent of the world’s population.

These numbers are astonishing, but even more important and more exciting is the impact that the Internet is having on so many people around the world.  From socio-economic opportunities to more accessible health care to educating the next generation and beyond, the Internet has changed the way we live, work and learn.  It has overcome geographic and political barriers and has made it possible for people to raise their voices as they seek greater economic opportunity and freedom.  And Yahoo! has been a leader in enabling these tremendous technological advancements every step of the way.

Let’s aim to be even prouder fifteen years from now than we are today!

All this in just 15 years. Yahoo! has been built by thousands of dedicated employees, hundreds of millions of loyal users and scores of advertisers who envisioned a future that was exciting, challenging and at times daunting.  To work in the sandbox that is Yahoo! and the evolution of the Internet is truly amazing.

And yet as fast as the Internet and Yahoo! have grown and as remarkably our lives have changed, we are just at the beginning of this great transformation.

The Internet still has enormous and untapped potential.  There are billions of more people we need to drive online, and then provide them with relevant content and opportunities that they’ve never dreamed about before.

We are confident that 15 years from today, we will look back in marvel  at how far you, and the Internet have traveled in such a short time. Just as we are doing today.

Jerry Yang and David Filo

Co-Founders & Chief Yahoos

How the trivia challenge works: We will post each of the 15 questions on our official Yahoo! Twitter account (http://www.twitter.com/yahoo) every hour, starting on March 2nd, 2010 at 8 AM PT. Each question will start with a question number, such as “Q1”, “Q2”, and so on. Find the answer to each question by using the link we provide to the Yahoo! site where the answer can be found. Tweet your response to @yahoo using the hashtag #Y15a. Start your answer with the letter “A” (for “answer”), and the number of the question you’re answering. So, for example, if you’re answering question 5, your reply should look something like:

A5 <this is your answer to Question 5> #y15a.

Easy enough? You can get one entry for each question you answer, for up to 15 possible entries in the challenge. You have until 8 AM on March 5, 2010 to get all of your answers back to us. After the challenge is over, we’ll select the winners from among all the eligible entries we received during the entry period.

What you are playing for: One Grand Prize winner will receive a Nikon Cool Pix S230 Yahoo! Camera and a Jawbone Earcandy Bluetooth Headset (ARV $305). Plus, four first prize winners will each receive a Mimobot Yahoo! USB flash drive. (ARV $20)

Anything else you should know? Our friend Matt the lawyer would also like you know that there’s no purchase necessary and the challenge is void where prohibited. The challenge is open to legal residents of the fifty United States, the District of Columbia, and Canada, excluding the Province of Quebec, who are 18 and older.

Happy hunting!

Start now by following us on Twitter: @Yahoo

For the complete list of rules, click here

In a keynote speech at the 4A’s Transformation 2010 conference today, Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz stated that Yahoo! can bring advertisers a combination of strengths that no one else can, because only Yahoo! offers them three things: science, art and scale.

Speaking to the advertising industry group in San Francisco, Carol said, “We want Yahoo! to be the partner you turn to for answers and solutions, and most importantly—when you want results.” By providing science, art and scale, Yahoo can help advertisers and agencies master online advertising.

To read more about Carol’s  4A’s keynote and Yahoo’s value proposition to advertisers, please check out the original post on the Yahoo! Advertising Blog.

The Art and Science of Advertising

Key Scientific Challenges Blog Series, Entry # 4:

Late January, we announced the kick-off of our 2010 Key Scientific Challenges Program, what we hope is a thought-provoking series of guest blog posts here on Yodel Anecdotal that offer a quick overview of these scientific challenge areas. Check out our last post on microeconomics and social systems.

Today, we cover advertising, which is yet another important topic related to the Web. We’ve recruited Vanja Josifovski from Yahoo! Labs to give you a glimpse of how significant advertising is to the online world.

If you’ve seen Mad Men, you’ll know what it’s like to develop an infatuation with the 1960s advertising world – the fashion, the glamour, the old technology. While we’ve come a long way since then, advertising continues to remain a large part of our daily lives and a permanent fixture of our online experience. Here at Yahoo!, we have a special appreciation for the undercurrents of online advertising because it supports a large swath of the Internet ecosystem.

Generally, web advertising closely follows the same two major models of traditional advertising.

First, there is direct advertising, which simply means that the goal of the ad is to get a direct response from the viewer. A good example is sponsored search where ads are shown beside a search result. The most difficult thing with this type of advertising is making sure the ads are relevant. If you searched for the word puzzle – did you mean jigsaw, crossword or Legos? These are complex issues we have spent a lot of time thinking about – and not in the Mad-Men-sit-back-with-whiskey way, but more of a microeconomics, super-computing way.

And then there is brand advertising, which aims to create a favorable impression about a brand or a product. In this construct, ads are usually served up by graphical means, in what we call display ads on web pages. The challenge is matching the placement/context of the ad with behavior of the viewer, both of which also introduce a stunning number of variables and data points.

In both modes – search and display – some complex learning algorithms are needed to provide relevant ads to a user. In a nutshell, it is this problem of relevance that makes advertising one of our Key Scientific Challenges. And it’s also central to the somewhat newer concept of computational advertising — a scientific discipline we developed at Yahoo! Labs that aims to formalize the problem of finding the best ad for a given user in a given context.

It sounds logical enough, right? Can we really build a system that serves the most relevant ad to a user every single time? Can we bring advertising into the realm of the other “computational” sciences? Well, we think so and we’re working hard to tackle that kind of personal relevance. It’s simply going to take some hard core science, some persistence, and continued sharp thinking and hopefully more programs like those at universities (Stanford has a leg up) and our own Key Scientific Challenges to crack it.

Vanja Josifovski
Yahoo! Labs

P.S. If you’re curious about just how big a deal Computational Advertising is, one of Yahoo!’s foremost experts in the field, Andrei Broder, was just elected to the National Academy Engineering. That’s pretty good testimony that advertising is a little bit art AND science.

This week at the University of Washington we are thrilled to be kicking off the second half of the 2009-2010 Hack U™ season. The University of Washington hack will be followed by events at Georgia Tech, UT Austin and UC San Diego throughout March and April.

During each of these hack events, Yahoo! developers teach passionate CS, HCI and engineering students about the latest and greatest open tools and technologies and web programming tips in a series of tech talks, then spend 24 hours with them to help them build their dream hack for the competition held at the end of the week. In true Yahoo! style, the all night contest is filled with fun, free food, schwag, prizes, Wii games and plenty of caffeine!

At the end of the season, the winners from each university will be flown by Yahoo! to our University Hack Showdown, which is normally held in conjunction with Yahoo!’s Open Hack Day, where they will hack it out for street cred, cool prizes and the opportunity to get their hack noticed by web industry judges, including VCs, web entrepreneurs, Yahoo! execs and technology gurus.

“The close of 2009 marked the third year of the Hack U™ program and it’s been amazing to watch the innovation, spirit and quality of the hacks continue to grow, said Jamie Lockwood, program manager for Hack U™. “The students used to just mash up as many open technologies as they could barely thinking about UI or what problem the hack solves, but today we see ideas and prototypes coming together that are more and more sophisticated and in some cases almost ready to go to market.”

The winning Hack U™ students from last season had no problem holding their own against the experienced developers that showed up at the Yahoo! Open Hack event in NYC, winning half of the categories including best overall hack.

The program has definitely caught the attention of Yahoo!’s internal open tech leaders, as well as the external web community. The Hack U™ winners from Toronto even snagged an interview at Y Combinator with their hack idea.

You can read more about the program and view some of the other hacks that have been developed at universities across the country and the world (we had our first India Hack U event at IIT earlier this year!) on the Yahoo! Developer Network site.

Hack U events have been held at some of the best engineering universities around the country including UC Berkeley, Stanford, Georgia Tech, Carnegie Mellon, University of Washington and University of Illinois and we’re always on the lookout for other universities that want to be part of the growing Hack U community We also want to keep the technology topics fresh, timely and up to speed with the latest web industry innovations so feel free to send us requests for specific speakers or ideas for suggested topics.

Check out the website for more information, updates and details about the upcoming 2010 schedule.

– Yahoo! Academic Relations and Hack U™ Team

We all know that the Web makes the world a much smaller place, and we have some great news to share today that will make your Web world smaller and easier, while at the same time expanding your social world online! We’re partnering with Twitter to integrate their real-time social experience into our global network.

What does this mean for you? Very soon, you will be able to see your Twitter feed on Yahoo! just as easily as you use Yahoo! to consume all of the other great content you love from across the Web. Through today’s partnership, along with our recently announced Facebook relationship, Yahoo! is giving your online social life wings to help you stay in touch with the people and things you care about most across the Web. It’s part of our strategy to ensure that Yahoo! delivers the people and things that matter most to you!

Want to see your friends’ latest Twitter posts? Or update your Twitter feed with stories and content from Yahoo!? Or check out trending topics and public updates? You no longer need to stop what you’re doing to see what’s going on with your Twitterverse — you’ll be able to do it all from Yahoo!.

As part of Yahoo!’s Open Strategy (Y!OS) to make the Web more open and relevant, we’re helping you zero in on what’s important to you:

• Coming Soon: Read your personal Twitter feeds directly from Yahoo!’s many products and properties, including the homepage, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Sports, and others — anywhere you can see Yahoo! Updates across our network.
• Coming Soon: Update your Twitter status and share content from Yahoo! in your Twitter stream — we’ve made it even easier to share what’s going on with your friends and followers on Yahoo! and Twitter.
• Coming Soon: Whenever you produce social actions on any website (like comments on articles, ratings, buzzes on Yahoo! Buzz) that you’ve allowed to appear on Yahoo! Updates, those actions can also be shared automatically with your friends on Twitter. (Pssst: Publishers and developers interested in learning more about Yahoo! Updates, including publishing directly into it or using Yahoo! Buzz or the Yahoo! Application Platform as ways of driving social traffic to your site, look here , here and here.
• Coming Soon: Yahoo! media properties like News, Finance, Entertainment, and Sports will include real-time public Twitter updates, allowing you to get a quick pulse-check on topics, trending and otherwise.
• Available Today: Yahoo! Search users will immediately see real-time Twitter results starting today.

The real-time Search integration is available immediately, with other features of the integration to be launched later this year. Go on, give it a test flight: Go to Yahoo! Search to check out how we just made your Web world smaller, yet larger at the same time.

Bryan Lamkin
SVP, Consumer Products Group, Yahoo!

By Travis Reiman, Dean of Students at W.L. Henry Elementary School in Hillsboro, OR

Editor’s Note: Each month, Yahoo! for Good unleashes Purple Acts of Kindness to surprise and delight our local communities. In February, we brought extra cheer to classroom teachers in Hillsboro by delivering purple flowers and gift cards for Valentine’s Day arts and crafts projects. Here’s an account from their Dean of Students.

Last Thursday, the classroom teachers here at W.L. Henry Elementary School in Hillsboro, OR got a special surpise. As vases of beautiful purple flowers were delivered, there were plenty of smiles and lots of confused looks. Is my husband just trying to be sweet??? Did I finally win the lottery??? No one has ever sent me flowers before!!!

Everyone was shocked and excited when they discovered they were the beneficiaries of Yahoo!’s Purple Acts of Kindness Program. In addition to the bouquets, all 19 classroom teachers received $100  gift cards. The gift cards were meant to be used for the school’s Valentine’s Day celebrations so that students could have an extra special day.

This special gift was a great reward for all the hard work and effort W.L. Henry’s students put into learning this year. For the teachers, this opportunity to give their students an afternoon of special arts and crafts projects, candy, gifts, and fun put huge smiles on their faces. Thanks so much, Yahoo!.

Measuring the Unmeasurable

Key Scientific Challenges, Entry #3: Microeconomics and Social Systems

On January 27 we announced the kick-off of our 2010 Key Scientific Challenges Program.  To highlight the scientific challenge areas included in the program, we launched a series of guest blog posts earlier this month on Yodel Anecdotal. Read our previous post on privacy and security, “Data, Data Everywhere, but How to Keep it Safe.”

Another big challenge are Yahoo!’s research scientists are continually examining is microeconomics and social systems. In this entry, Sharad Goel from Yahoo! Labs shares some thoughts on how Yahoo! is tackling the new opportunities for research into the social sciences that the Web is making possible and why it’s a fascinating field.

What do your friends really know about you? How much do they influence your decisions? How often do we stray from the cultural herd? How do groups organize to solve complex problems?

Answers to such fundamental questions about social behavior have often eluded us. With microscopes we peered into the intangibly small building blocks of life, and with telescopes we found our place in an unimaginably expansive universe. But without the tools to faithfully document human activity—a challenge that by comparison seems so palpable—we had no way to investigate the inner workings of our own communities. Now with an explosion of information on every aspect of our everyday existence—from what we buy, to where we travel, to whom we know—we can measure what until quite recently was thought unmeasurable. In the Microeconomics and Social Systems Group at Yahoo! Labs, we are using this proliferation of data to explore how societies function. It’s a fascinating area of study that is just beginning to shed light on new layers of human behavior, making it a perfect fit for the Key Scientific Challenges Program.

In a recent study that’s garnered some attention, for example, we asked, “How eccentric are people?” Looking at consumer preferences across movies, music, and web browsing, we came to the surprising conclusion that ordinary people have pretty extraordinary tastes. In particular, we found that typical Netflix and Yahoo! Music users regularly watch movies and listen to songs that are not even available in the largest brick-and-mortar retailers. This result not only challenges stereotypes about people blindly following the herd, but also highlights the importance of offering consumers broad selection. That is, specialty products may dramatically boost user satisfaction by providing buyers the convenience of “one-stop shopping” for both their mainstream and niche interests.

In other work, we used web search queries to forecast the commercial success of movies, songs, and video games. Weeks, sometime even months, before a movie opens or a video game is released, one can find traces of pent up consumer demand in the search query logs. We found that these telltale signs of early interest are remarkably good predictors of future success. The catch? Although the search logs do reflect user intent, more mundane indicators, such as production budgets and reviewer ratings, perform equally well at forecasting sales. Thus, the benefit of web search as a prediction tool may have less to do with its superiority over other methods than with its generality, low cost, and real-time nature.

At a time when we are drowning in data, at Yahoo! Labs we’re asking a simple question: what can you do with it? The answer is limited only by our imaginations.

We just announced with Microsoft that we have reached clearance for our search agreement, without restrictions, from both the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission.  We’ll now turn our attention to beginning the process of implementing the deal.

Here are some useful links to get more detailed information about today’s developments:

Search Alliance Official Website

Official Press Release

Yahoo! Search Blog

YDN Blog

Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog

Yahoo! Transition Center

Video: Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz discusses Yahoo! & Microsoft’s new Search Alliance: Click here

Video: Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz talks about Yahoo’s continued innovation in search: Click here

Official US DOJ Antitrust Division statement: Click here

We will continue to update Yodel with new information today and throughout the process.

Dibble here…Jerry Yang, Scott Noteboom and I were joined by Governor Dave Heineman of Nebraska, Mayor Douglas Kindig of La Vista, Attorney General Jon Bruning and Nebraska Congressman Lee Terry, and hundreds of guests, as we celebrated the grand opening of Yahoo!’s new state-of-the-art data center in La Vista, Nebraska and our new sales and customer support center in Omaha. We are so grateful to the residents and local businesses in Nebraska with whom we could not have succeeded without their support.  Yahoo! serves billions of advertisements each day and services more than 600 million users from around the world each month and this data center is just one of many we’re building that will streamline our efficiency, while helping the planet. Yahoo! thanks Nebraska for being a part of the next phase of growth for the Internet.

David Dibble – EVP Service Engineering & Operations

Yahoo! Hong Kong conducted a survey to find out about consumer behavior and retail trends during Valentine’s Day. Incidentally, this year, the first day of Chinese New Year (CNY) also falls on 14 February. The last time these two occasions clashed was 57 years ago.

The survey was conducted with more than 1,000 respondents, 80% of which were born in the 70s or the 80s. 50% of them, who are either in a relationship or married said they will be celebrating the day with both their partner and family, while 34% chose to celebrate Valentine’s Day before or after 14 February.

Other interesting survey highlights include:

1.    52% of the respondents who have “someone special” in mind, said that they will not confess their love to that person on Valentine’s Day since it is also CNY and the “atmosphere and mood” is not quite right.

2.    Consumer confidence is growing steadily in Hong Kong and the survey shows that 66% plan to spend five to ten percent more for Valentine’s Day this year, or have the same budget as last year. 15% of the respondents plan to spend between US$250 – 650 on gifts for their partner.

3.    Nearly 50% of the female respondents prefer gifts that are more personalised, unique and practical. They also said that the most unwanted Valentine’s Day gifts include flowers, chocolates, soft toys, health and beauty products.

4.    About half of the respondents who are either in a relationship or married shared that they will use less gift packaging to be more environmentally friendly.

5.    20% of the male respondents would like to spend Valentine’s Day in ShenZhen, China while 20% of the female respondents wish to spend the day in Paris. None of the male respondents chose Paris as an option.

6.    80% of the respondents who are single revealed that they will use online match-making services like Yahoo! Personals to find a potential partner or to meet more people through social gatherings.

According to Lisa Tam, public relations manager of Yahoo! Hong Kong, VIP members of Yahoo! Personals are invited to send messages to other members in the hopes of finding someone special and stand to win prizes during this special festive season.

Internet users can also visit Yahoo! Hong Kong Auction site to purchase Valentine’s Day and CNY gifts for their loved ones.

For everyone interested in following excitement of the Winter Games that get underway today, Yahoo! makes it even easier for you to get all your information, even if you are on the go.  In addition to keeping fans on top of the action with a Games-dedicated website, today we’re launching a new Olympic mobile site at m.yahoo.com/olympics.

It’s the place to go when you’re out and about and want up-to-the-minute coverage on this year’s Games. You’ll get access to everything from live results, upcoming events, medal counts, and photos to news, expert commentary, and more—all from your phone. We’ve also integrated Olympics into our mobile search results, so you can easily find what you need fast.

So head over to the newly launched  Yahoo! Mobile Blog to get a preview video of the mobile Olympic experience and all of the other cool mobile things we are are doing at Yahoo!

The 2010 Winter Olympic Games kick off this week and like the King (aka, Elvis Presley) says, “I’m all shook up!”  The Winter Games are a special and emotional experience for me and I’m thrilled to be working with Yahoo! Sports in my home country to report first hand on all the action.

I’ve been skating since I was four years old and have experienced every Winter Olympics, either watching or competing, since that time.  I’ve had some incredible memories over the years, from winning my first Olympic medal at the 1994 games in Lillehammer and learning how to snowboard after competing at the 2002 games in Salt Lake.  But nothing beats that feeling of going to the Games to compete and stepping out on the ice for the first time.

I won’t be lacing up my skates in Vancouver but it’s going to be fun covering this year’s athletes as Yahoo! Sports Winter Games Analyst. I’m especially stoked about seeing up-and-comers like Kim Yu-Na from Korea, Evan Lysacek from the USA along with Mr. Comeback Evgeny Plushenko hit the ice for the individual figure skating events. But rest assured that I’ll make time to see some of my other favorite events like Short Track Speed Skating, Snowboarding and the Ski Jump.

Yahoo! is also letting fans get into the action by submitting their favorite winter sports photos in the “Winter Sports Moment” sweepstakes
at http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/vancouver/fancouver. Fans get a chance to win prizes like digital cameras, and even a trip to the U.S.
Freestyle Skiing Championship in March. My colleagues and I are going to be covering all the events live from Vancouver over the next two weeks,
so keep checking back at Yahoo! Sports  for the latest and greatest news on the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.

Elvis Stojko

Yahoo! Sports Winter Games Analyst

Want to use your Yahoo! ID to tap into Arianna Huffington’s mind? How about any of the other contributors on the Huffington Post? If so, we have some good news. Starting today, you can use your Yahoo! ID to log into the Huffington Post with just a couple of clicks.

This is just one of the new features Huffington Post has enabled by tapping into our Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) platform. Y!OS is built on the idea that Yahoo! is more fun and personally relevant when we’re open to the best of the Web and when we make it easy for you to share and connect with who matters to you on Yahoo!. And in addition to letting you use your trusted Yahoo! ID on the Huffington Post, Y!OS technology is also powering two other great new features that are live today.

The first is Yahoo! Updates. Once you’ve logged into the Huffington Post with your Yahoo! ID, you’ll also be able to automatically share the comments you make there with your friends and contacts on popular products like Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger.

The second is a new application for the Yahoo! Homepage that you can use to get a quick view into the hottest Huffington Post articles across 80 categories in a matter of seconds.

Finally, we’re also teaming up with the Huffington Post through Yahoo! News to feature and develop specialized articles, opinion pieces and reporting. Across Yahoo! we’re always looking for ways to bring you great content, whether it’s our own original reporting through our Yahoo! Newsroom Blogs, or from great sites like the Huffington Post, a leading voice in digital news.

To get started trying out these capabilities and sync up your Huffington Post and Yahoo! experiences, head over to the Huffington Post and click on the log in with Yahoo! ID button, install the new Huffington Post App on Yahoo.com or head straight to Yahoo! News.  Or better yet, try all three.

And if you run your own Web site and want to learn how to integrate with Yahoo!, check out our Yahoo! Developer Network and behind the scenes look at how Huffington Post did it. We’re excited to hear what you think.

Greg Cohn

Director of Strategy & Business Development for the Yahoo! Platform Technology Group

Photo courtesy of saferinternet.org

The nature of the online and mobile environments is rapidly changing and so are the challenges for parents and children – from empowering kids to be safe and responsible online, to digital reputation management to cyber-bullying.

On February 9^th, people and organizations around the world are taking a moment to recognize the importance of safety on the web. Safer Internet Day is organized by Insafe each year to promote safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile phones, especially among children and teens. This year, the focus is on “Think B4 U post,” with the goal of empowering kids to manage their digital reputation (e.g. how people are viewed based on what they post and share online) in a world where photos and videos can be broadly shared within minutes, and result in serious consequences.

At Yahoo!, we have been committed to fostering a safer internet for many years, and today we are helping to amplify what people can do to create a safer online experience. As a long time leader in child safety, we have been working closely with national child safety advocates, law enforcement agencies, educational leaders, and parents to help coach youth about protecting their online personas. In addition we build child safety tools into our products, and encourage youth to take advantage of these tools.

For many teens around the world, mobile devices are the primary way teens stay in touch with friends and family and engage with the web. Given this role mobile devices play in youths’ lives, we recognize the need for mobile safety tips, and are helping to educate kids and parents with Yahoo!’s Mobile Safety Tips.

To celebrate Safer Internet Day, Yahoo! is sharing our top 5 tips:

1. Think before you send. Stop, and think before you share a thought or forward a photo. Imagine your grandmother or principal on the receiving end. The best filter is the one between your ears — use it to your advantage.
2. Protect your personal information. When you send email, texts, photos or instant messages to people who are not trusted friends or family, don’t give out personal information they could use to find your physical location or exploit you. Guard your password like a hawk.
3. Control negativity. Think carefully about who you want to communicate with and who you should ignore. Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger have features that allow you to block people. If you receive abusive or harassing messages online, report the abuse where and when you see it.
4. Use Safe Search. Yahoo! offers a default Safe Search filter to help keep inappropriate content out of your search results. While no filter can guarantee 100% removal of all inappropriate content, using a filter like Safe Search will make a big difference in keeping unwanted material out of your search results.
5. Download applications from trusted sources only! If you download software from a third party, be sure to only download applications from developers you trust. And, read their Terms of Service and privacy policies to really understand what you’re giving them permission to do when you download their app.

Catherine Teitelbaum, Yahoo!’s Director of Child Safety and Product Policy

Here’s a look at some of the ways Y! leaders thanked their employees for donating to YEF.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
Nine lucky Yahoos, chosen at random from the pool of thousands of employees who donated to YEF, were treated to a gourmet dinner and fast-paced trivia game at Carol’s home.  The game was an ice-breaker to get the evening started.  A good time was had by all.

Attendees included (from left to right): John Kao, Raini Rao, Andrew Miller, Carol, Ryan Friedlander, Amee Fujikawwa, Dungjit Shiowattana, Ann Vanderpyl, Carol Lerche and Mohamed Hack.

Thriller Dance
The N. America region blew the doors off their goal with a 72% participation rate.  So, living up to their promise to do their version of Michael Jackson’s Thriller dance if they beat their goal, Hilary Schneider, SVP for the N. America region and her leadership team brushed up on their moon walk and hit the dance floor in front of a standing-room-only crowd at Yahoo!’s Sunnyvale cafeteria..

Their performance was the most exciting event to hit the Sunnyvale cafeteria since the introduction of free soda.  The King of Pop would be proud. 

“It’s close to midnight and something evil’s lurking in the dark…”

Hilary and team rock it!

Bryan Lamkin + tennis skirt = Serena Williams (?) 
Okay, so maybe Serena doesn’t have to worry about losing her status as the fashion queen of the tennis courts, but Bryan Lamkin, SVP of Products, Global Applications, gave it his best shot.  To thank his team for beating their fundraising goal, Bryan held a Wii tennis contest in the Sunnyvale cafeteria and dressed as his favorite female tennis star. 

Yahoos Jason Titus and Bryan mentally prepare for their Wii tennis match.

Bryan strikes a pose as the Wii tennis matches begins.

The Marketing Games 
There may be worldwide winter games starting soon in Vancouver, but the Yahoo! Marketing Team couldn’t wait.  As a reward for hitting 73% participation rate among her team, Elisa Steele, Chief Marketing Officer, hosted the first ever Marketing Winter Games. 

Activities included moving on giant skis, curling on fake ice floors and playing basketball with ginormous balls and hoops.  Elisa got into the act as she strapped on a full-blown hockey goalie uniform and did her best impression of Jacques Plante, as Yahoos tried to slap thepuck past her. 

A new, competitive winter sport – group skiing indoors. Keep your balance!

Elisa gets ready to block an incoming puck. The National Hockey League tried to recruit her after seeing her defensive stance.

While it’s often fun and games at Yahoo!, the most important accomplishment was raising money so that the Yahoo! Employee Foundation can continue to provide grants to non-profit organizations championed by our U.S. employees. 

Thanks and congratulations to all of the Yahoos who contributed to the fundraising drive, proving once again that Yahoo! cares about our communities.

Last week marked the official kickoff of Yahoo!’s two-year sponsorship of the new Yahoo! Cycling Team.  And this past weekend, rider Dirk Copeland defeated 50+ other cyclists to win first place in the Cherry Pie Criterium.  What a fast start for the team!

The Yahoo! Cycling Team was formed by Ikeman Cycling, Inc. who’s mission is to promote young cycling talent in the U.S. and to grow the sport of cycling worldwide.  The team is comprised of a mix of young talent and seasoned cycling veterans.  Based in Northern California, the team plans to race the majority of its season on the West Coast as well as a portion of the National Racing Calendar.  Dependent upon its success in the U.S. circuit in 2010, the team plans to move on to Continental Status in 2011.

“We’re excited to launch this team in a community that is as enthusiastic about cycling as we are,” says Kevin Klein, Ikeman Cycling Owner and Yahoo! Cycling Team General Manager. “Both our young riders and experienced cyclists are eager to get our season under way and establish ourselves as a dominant elite team. “

For more information about the team and the 2010 racing schedule go to the Yahoo! Cycling Team Website (www.cyclingteam.yahoo.com) or follow the team on Facebook [facebook.com/YCyclingTeam] and Twitter [twitter.com/YCyclingTeam]

Data, Data Everywhere, but How to Keep it Safe:
Key Scientific Challenges, Entry #2: Privacy & Security

On January 27 we announced the kick-off of our 2010 Key Scientific Challenges Program. Earlier this week we launched what we hope will be a thought-provoking series of guest blog posts here on Yodel Anecdotal that offer a quick overview of these scientific challenge areas. Check out our first post on green computing.

Today’s entry is another incredibly important issue and difficult challenge posed by the Web – privacy and security. We’ve recruited Ashwin Machanavajjhala from Yahoo! Labs to share his point of view on why privacy and security are Key Scientific Challenges.

As a popular destination on the Web, millions of users interact with Yahoo! every day. They search for information online, read the news, click on ads, upload, tag and share photos, and so on. Each of these billions of individual actions sheds some light on a particular user’s interests – what they like, what they want to know more about, buy or do in their spare time. They are all valuable cues that can be used to customize someone’s Web experience in a way that’s personally relevant to them.

Ultimately, a personally relevant experience is at the root of what we’re trying to deliver with all of Yahoo!’s products. The information that comes our way is a prime asset for making our users happy. But at the same time, with all that information comes a huge responsibility. We need to take extreme care to make sure people’s privacy is not breached. This responsibility to earn and keep our users’ trust is not just a matter of Yahoo! policy (although that is critical too), it’s also a technical challenge that requires scientific innovation to continuously improve and maintain.

When it comes to the trust of our users, we’ve learned lessons on how to approach both the policy and technical elements of privacy and security.  On the policy side, we are extremely proud of our Data Anonymization Policy, which has received wide support and affirms our commitment to help protect our users’ privacy. Yahoo!’s policy both dramatically reduces the time we hold personal data and increases the scope of log data covered under the policy. Under the policy, we anonymize user log data, including deletion of total IP address, after 90 days with limited exceptions to fight fraud, secure systems and meet legal obligations.  We’re also expanding our commitment to include data on page views, page clicks, ad views, and ad clicks as part of this policy.

On the technical side, we’ve invested in giving our users the ability to understand and shape how we interpret what’s personally relevant to them by launching our Ad Interest Manager, a central place where Yahoo! visitors can see a concise summary of their online activity and make easy, constructive choices about their exposure to interest-based advertising served by the Yahoo! Ad Network.

And our scientists at Yahoo! Labs have also been active in academic privacy research, examining new mathematical definitions of user privacy and developing novel technologies for sharing and utilizing user information to improve Web experiences in a privacy-preserving manner. These experiments and research have been published widely, opening up new avenues of investigation on issues that are critical to Yahoo!, like protecting search log data and dealing with so-called vanity queries, to new privacy frameworks that can be used in any field where making data available broadly is a key objective in overall innovation, as it is with the World Bank, Census Bureau and medical institutions publishing important public health studies, for example.

These efforts are just the beginning, though, which is why privacy and security is a Key Scientific Challenge area, and we can’t wait to see what the word’s aspiring minds have to say on the topic.

Ashwin Machanavajjhala
Research Scientist
Yahoo! Labs

Today, Yahoo! launched the Yahoo! Mobile Blog, which you can find at ymobileblog.com.  The blog will provide you with interesting information on what’s been happening in the industry, and behind the scenes at Yahoo! Mobile — from new products and features, to quick tips and tricks to market trends and predictions.

Below, you will find the first post from Irv Henderson, VP of global mobile products for Yahoo!.  In it, Irv discusses the purpose of the blog, background on Yahoo! Mobile and his views on what’s to come for 2010.

To add the Yahoo! Mobile Blog to your RSS reader, click here to subscribe:

On Wednesday we announced the kick off our 2010 Key Scientific Challenges Program. It is a thought-provoking competition that encourages top graduate students to help invent the future of the Internet by working with Yahoo! Labs to investigate and test their ideas in the real world.
 
The Key Scientific Challenges Program focuses on a variety of scientific issues that we believe are central to developing a better understanding of the Web and the foundational technologies that will accelerate innovation. Over the next couple of months, we’ll be offering a series of guest blog posts here on Yodel Anecdotal that offer a quick overview of these scientific challenge areas from a Yahoo! (or Yahoo!s) who have expertise in the field and can explain how their research can have an impact on making the Web more engaging, relevant and powerful.
 
Today’s our maiden voyage, and the first guest blog post comes from Scott Noteboom. Scott is one of the foremost experts on building data centers that makes it possible for Yahoo! to run some of the fastest, most popular Web sites in the world.  He’s also leading the charge to make Yahoo!’s data centers as efficient as possible, and we’ve asked him to talk about a new challenge area we just added to the Key Scientific Challenges Program this year, green computing.
 
Thanks,
The Key Scientific Challenges Team at Yahoo! Labs
 
Key Scientific Challenges, Entry #1: Green Computing
By Scott Noteboom
 
Increasing demand for the Web services and applications that have become such a central part of our lives (like email and Web video, just to name a few) is also causing a steady rise in the need for more and more computing power to make all of theses services work and work well.  When we talk about computing power, we’re often talking specifically about data centers, buildings that house thousands and thousands of servers working 24-hours-a-day to make sure that the Web sites you want are there on your screen and on your phone when you want them.
 
Of course, while the performance of servers is improving almost everyday, making all kinds of new innovations possible, they also require a lot of power. They need so much power that a 2007 joint report by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory revealed that energy consumption from data centers had doubled between 2000 and 2006 and was expected to double again by 2011. The report further calculated that there would be huge energy and money losses without increases in the efficiency of running and cooling these centers (because servers produce a lot of heat).
 
Recognizing both the problem and the opportunity that this presents, Yahoo! has embraced its role as a leading environmentally sustainable company by addressing efficiency in our data centers head on.  We announced in June 2009 that we’d be committing to a significant reduction in the carbon intensity of our data centers by 2014. And to accomplish this goal, we’ve developed several innovations, including a new high-efficiency data center design that reduces our cooling load and increases utilization in our data centers, increasing the productivity of our servers, and squeezing as much productivity as possible out of every last kilowatt-hour. These efforts have gotten us some recognition and hopefully will inspire more innovation because making the world’s data centers more efficient is also an important element to tackling global warming.
 
Everyone wants to see innovation on the Web and what it makes possible for us in our everyday lives continue to flourish, and that’s where innovation behind the scenes in data centers is so important. By making data centers more efficient, we can make sure that future innovations that make the Internet more and more powerful for all of us will also be environmentally sustainable.  
 
This is by no means a pipe dream, which is why we’re so excited to be part of the Key Scientific Challenges team recruiting some of the best young minds in the world to learn from our experiences and accelerate their own research and ideas. A study by The Climate Group entitled Smart 2020 predicts that, while greenhouse gas emissions from the Internet industry will rise to approximately 1.3 gigatons of CO2, the combined impact of smart grid, smart logistics, smart buildings and videoconferencing could reduce emissions by approximately 7.8 tons.
 
We’re very excited about the next big ideas that will continue to bring radical improvements in energy efficiency and truly green computing. If you’re interested in learning more about the Key Scientific Challenges Program visit the site, and if you’ve got an idea for research into green computing, get working on a proposal. Submissions are due March 5th.

As many of you are likely already aware, the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, kicked off this week.  WEF was created to serve as a catalyst for cooperation across business, government, the media, science, the arts, and civil society to address pressing challenges and future risks as one community.  Aligning with this mission, Yahoo! and other industry leaders today announced an initiative called GreenXchange (GX), a program designed to help address sustainability in the digital age.

As a founding member of the GreenXchange, Yahoo! is collaborating with Best Buy, Creative Commons, IDEO, Mountain Equipment Co-op, Nike and nGenera to create a web-based marketplace for sharing intellectual property which is intended to lead to new sustainability business models and innovation.  Businesses are in a unique position to use collaboration and open innovation as powerful tools for combating climate change.  The goal is to accelerate the learning curve for energy efficiency and sustainable business practices by making patented technologies for research and licensing available, in a manner that’s good for our individual businesses and the planet.

As an active participant, Yahoo! is planning to license patented technologies that we have developed to improve performance and increase efficiency in our data centers around the world.  Today, the members of the GreenXchange are hosting a CEO breakfast at WEF.  We are calling on other corporations to join the GlobalXchange commitment to fast track the development of innovative solutions to sustainability challenges.

The GreenXChange is part of Yahoo!’s 360 degree approach to advancing sustainability through internal commitments to drive change in cooperation with other institutions (including the Department of Energy) and work collaboratively with other influencers setting sustainability as a priority.

David Dibble, EVP of Service Engineering & Operations, Yahoo! Inc.

When disaster strikes, people want to help, but they often don’t have the resources at their fingertips.  At Yahoo!, we’ve implemented a number of ways people can stay up to date in the aftermath of the devastating Haiti earthquake and find ways to help with disaster relief efforts.

I am very fortunate to work in Yahoo! for Good, a team at Yahoo! whose focus is to empower people around the world to make a positive impact.  To support relief efforts in Haiti, Yahoo! is collaborating with non-profit organizations, leveraging our global network of services to raise awareness, and offering much-needed funding for the millions of people who have been affected by this natural disaster.

Here are the ways we are helping.

• The homepages of Yahoo.com, Yahoo! UK, Yahoo! Italy, Yahoo! Canada, and Yahoo! Mobile are connecting people to the latest news and ways to donate.
• Yahoo! News is providing ‘How to Help’ links in related stories and created a Topic page about the earthquake with donation resources.
• The Yahoo! Employee Foundation approved a $100,000 emergency grant to UNICEF and Partners in Health.
• US Yahoo!s have donated more than $80,000 to the cause in the last 48 hours, including corporate matches for those donations.

It doesn’t stop there.  We are scheduling banner ads across the Yahoo! network to support organizations like the American Red Cross and UNICEF who are providing relief efforts in Haiti.  We are also providing prominent placements on Yahoo! Sports and OMG to encourage people to donate. And there is more to come.

In the last 48 hours, I’ve been so inspired and humbled by fellow Yahoos who have stepped up to make all of this happen at lightning speed.  It’s times like these that remind me once again of the amazing power of the Yahoo! network to encourage people to take action. Join us in this important cause by making a donation to one of the charities listed here.

By Connie Chan, Yahoo! for Good