Yahoo! has long been an industry leader on child safety. In fact, we have made it a company priority to protect children online by creating tools for users to safeguard themselves and by supporting efforts to educate children, parents, and communities about safe online experiences.

That is why we were thrilled that Emily Hancock, Yahoo! Senior Legal Director was recently able to accept an award from the Family Online Safety Institute for her work on behalf of Yahoo! to make the internet safer for everyone.

Left to right - Mike McKeehan, Verizon (FOSI Board Member), Emily Hancock, Yahoo! and María José Cantarino de Frías, Telefonica (FOSI Board Member).

The Family Online Safety Institute Award for Outstanding Achievement (“FOSI Award”) was awarded to individuals who have demonstrated an outstanding commitment to advancing the goal of a safer Internet. We could not be prouder to have Emily accept this award. Emily cares very passionately about helping to protect children and she takes a very proactive approach within Yahoo! helping to make changes to products, services, policies and tools whenever possible to achieve that end.  She has been instrumental in the ongoing development and improvement of Yahoo!’s technology for identifying, removing and reporting child pornography.

The award came as Yahoo sponsored the third annual Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) online safety conference, Building a Culture of Responsibility: From Online Safety to Digital Citizenship on November 4th and 5th in Washington, DC. Bringing together leaders from government, industry, education and nonprofits, the conference focused on determining how to best encourage responsible use on the Internet. The conference convened key players from the global Internet community to promote cyber citizenship and coordinate efforts to connect the next billion consumers safely and responsibly.

Yahoo!’s Director of Child Safety and Product Policy, Catherine Teitelbaum also played a major role in the conference, appearing on a panel aimed at “Getting Kids Hooked On Safety When They are Young.”  Catherine spoke of her extended tenure at Yahoo!, working to create a safer online environment for kids and teens, and how the work of keeping kids safe has evolved with time. Her dedication to this issue is just another example of how Yahoo! that serves so many different audiences can also make child safety a priority and successfully integrate child safety features into our broad product offerings.

Visit Yahoo! Safely to get the facts about online safety – http://safely.yahoo.com

This past weekend, the first ever Hacking for Humanity event jointly organized by Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google happened at the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, CA. Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) is an initiative to bring together experts and software engineers to identify key challenges and develop solutions on various humanitarian and crisis response projects.

The idea for RHoK was born at CrisisCamp June 12th-14th 2009 in Washington, DC where an industry panel with representatives from Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft recognized that certain matters, such as crisis response, superseded competitive concerns. During CrisisCamp, one big issue that was identified was the finite resources available, even within large corporations and government agencies. By building a development community focused on disaster response, hopefully we can all do our part to save lives. Over the past six months following CrisisCamp – in partnership with World Bank, NASA, and SecondMuse – the group has forged ahead to make this Hack Day a reality.

The first RHoK event started last Thursday with a mixer event. On Friday, the day was kicked off with a keynote from Craig Fugate, FEMA Administrator. Craig filled the crowd with excitement and motivation, while humoring us with stories like the telling of his “Waffle House” postulate. Following Craig’s keynote, the day continued with lightening talks, five minute rapid presentations on existing technologies and solutions, and continued in the afternoon with BarCamp style hour long breakout sessions.

During the night and following morning, hackers developed technology solutions to solve real-world problems. We had over a dozen hackers working late into the night and a handful who stayed overnight.  Saturday afternoon, 11 hacks were presented. They ranged from people finder portals, to arial maps related hacks, to disaster communication tools. The winners were:

FEMA Prize – Break Glass
1st Prize – I’m OK
Runner Up – Tweak the Tweet
Honorable Mentions – Disaster Mesh and Blue Team

You can find out more information on the winning hacks here and see photos from the event here

Overall the event was a great success and we hope to have additional events in 2010. Keep an eye out on the official RHoK website for news and more information. We want to extend a huge thanks to the other founding partners, Google, Microsoft, NASA, Worldbank, and SecondMuse. Without all of us working together, this event wouldn’t have happened. Internally, Yahoo! Developer Network and Yahoo! For Good were instrumental in our efforts to make this happen. Last but definitely not least, all participants at the event deserve the biggest thanks.  It’s YOU! who really makes the difference!

Jeremy Johnstone
Technical Yahoo!

It’s hard to believe that just over a month ago we kicked-off our search for the next generation of Yahoo! yodelers. This casting call heard ‘round the world brought celebrities and yodelers alike to Yodel Studio recording booths in New York City, London and Mumbai, not to mention all of you who joined in from home and submitted your best (and maybe first?) yodel at http://yodelstudio.yahoo.com.

After narrowing the choices down from more than 21,000 submissions to three finalists in the US, UK and India, and a week of public voting, we have our Platinum winners. Congratulations to:

•    Tiffany Jo Allen of Tucson, AZ
•    Katherine Skene of St. Andrews, UK
•    Ankitaa Bhattacharji of Mumbai, India

We meant it when we said it that Platinum winners would have the chance to be featured on one of the world’s largest stages: the Yahoo! homepage. Go to Yahoo.com, click on the Yahoo! exclamation point at the top left of the page and you’ll hear Tiffany Jo Allen’s yodel (Soon, you’ll here the other winners on the UK and India homepages too!). For the next week, you’ll hear Tiffany Jo’s talented voice on the Yahoo! homepage.

While only three yodels are official Platinum winners, many more blew us away with their passion and creativity. Be sure to check out the honorable mentions area of http://yodelstudio.yahoo.com to experience a wide range of yodeling genius – from R&B to country duets to death metal, no musical stone was left unturned.  Thanks for sharing in this part of Yahoo! history.

Brian Mullin
Senior Director, Buzz Marketing

*Editors note: As posted earlier on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog. Apologies for any inconvenience.

Open is at the core of many Yahoo! initiatives and products. Over the past two years Yahoo! has been hard at work to change how we develop products and interact with our developer community. In addition to being avid supporters of Open Source, we participated and adopted community-based specifications such as OpenID and OAuth, and were a founding member of the OpenSocial and OpenID Foundations.  As you can see, we love Open.

But Open isn’t always easy.

Whenever we (or other companies) engage in a collaborative effort with a wider community, we are faced not only with technical challenges, but with the complex reality of intellectual property law. Patents, copyright, and trademarks are not what geek dreams are made of. This is why we have actively supported the creation of the Open Web Foundation, an organization dedicated to the creation of an open, free, and community-driven environment for the development of technical specifications:

The Open Web Foundation was founded to help developer communities collaborate and share technical innovation on the web, bringing to the world of formats and protocols the same successful grassroots approaches established by the open source community. Modeled after the Apache Software Foundation and Creative Commons, the Open Web Foundation seeks to facilitate the creation and implementation of specifications with legal agreements that make such work simple, safe, and sustainable.

For the past year, the Open Web Foundation Legal Committee has been hard at work on a new legal agreement for licensing of open specifications. While Open Source software enjoys a wide range of licenses for making software freely available, specifications and standards are usually licensed under a complex set of rules and conditions. These licenses are hard to read and spread over many pages full of terms even many lawyers don’t fully understand. There was also no suitable standalone agreement available for companies and communities to use when making their work available, forcing them into long and costly legal negotiation between the contributors.

Today, the Open Web Foundation is announcing the availability of the Open Web Foundation Agreement (OWFa), a reusable and straight-forward legal document, designed to be easily adopted by a wide range of specification communities and organizations.  Specifications made available under the Open Web Foundation Agreement may include everything from small ad-hoc formats sketched out among friends to large multi-corporation collaborations that ultimately grow into internationally recognized standards with the help of formal standards- setting organizations.

But what makes this agreement even more valuable today, is a commitment by a group of leading companies and individual contributors to apply it to a growing list of specifications. Today, Yahoo! is joining Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and others in making available the following specifications under the OWFa:

* OAuth Core 1.0 Revision A
* OAuth WRAP 0.9
* Simple Web Tokens 0.9

We are also releasing the Media RSS (mRSS) specification under the Open Web Foundation Agreement. Media RSS is an RSS extension used to syndicate rich media content (instead of just text). The specification is used when providers of media content want to share that content with a third party, usually a search engine like Yahoo! Video Search. We are also in the process of transitioning the mRSS specification to the capable hands of the RSS Advisory Board for future development.

This is just the first step in what we hope will be a new path for open collaboration and innovation on the web. The best innovation happens when we let our talented engineers and product managers solve problems. This is one less thing for them to worry about.

Eran Hammer-Lahav

Director of Standards Development, Yahoo!
President, The Open Web Foundation

Why, you might ask,  is Yahoo! Exec Mitch Spolan made up like a zombie extra from Michael Jackson’s Thriller?  Mitch’s transformation from stellar sales VP to Thriller extra comes as the Yahoo! Employee Foundation (aka YEF) announces that they crushed fundraising goals for 2009.  Celebrating 10 years of Yahoos giving back to the community, today’s news comes as a wonderful anniversary present.  Run and funded entirely by Yahoo! employee volunteers, YEF has raised millions over the years through grants to more than 275 nonprofit organizations.

Facing a down economy, YEF set an aggressive fundraising target to service the wide variety of charities supported by employees and the employees stepped up–almost doubling participation form last year with 57% of Yahoos contributing.  In addition to the money raised directly from Yahoo! employees, YEF will be receiving a $1 million bonus from Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo that was pledged if 50% of employees participated in the program.  Congrats to YEF and to the employees for making 2009 a year to remember!

As an added bonus, we are including the amazing video that Yahoo! Exec Mitch Spolan created as a thank you to his team for their efforts.  See Mitch in his cinematic glory recreating Thriller below:

Mitch Spolan: Thrilled for YEF Success

Consider the video a preview of coming attractions, as Yahoo! execs step out of their comfort zones and make good on their promises to dye their hair purple, jump in a dunk tank, do the Thriller dance in full zombie make-up, sing, take a group to Vegas, run the Marketing Olympics, and host breakfast, lunches, and dinners – often in full costume.  And a special thanks to Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz for being the executive sponsor – and for hosting nine lucky Yahoos at her house for dinner.

While industry analysts estimate that about 1.6 billion people are on the Internet today, this still leaves three out of every four people on this planet without access.

This Sunday, at the Internet Governance Forum’s annual meeting, Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang delivered a keynote address to discuss the impact of the Internet on people’s lives, the need to get the next billion people online and the importance of providing those next billion–in emerging markets and beyond–with locally relevant content and communications tools.

“The Internet isn’t just about getting as many people online as possible,” said Jerry Yang. “But making sure that once they’re online, they have something productive to do, something to gain, something meaningful to experience.”

The IGF meeting took place in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, and you can watch the full opening session and keynotes here.  Jerry’s speech starts at about 59 minutes into the opening session, directly after Tim Berners-Lee.

In addition to the IGF keynote, Jerry is meeting with customers, employees and both local and U.S. government officials while in the region.

Yahoo! recently closed the acquisition of Maktoob, the largest Arabic-language Internet site.  According to the World Bank, there are more than 320 million Arabic speakers worldwide, while less than one per cent of all online content is in Arabic.  The partnership between Maktoob and Yahoo! aims to strengthen and support Arabic content on the Internet, adapting current products to the Arabic language while also working with local developers to create new and compelling products.

Yahoo! Women in Tech, an internal stakeholder group for women across Yahoo!’s technology organization, recently partnered with Techbridge to host another K-12 event. Twenty-nine fifth-grade girls from Lincoln Elementary (Oakland, Calif.) spent the day at Yahoo!’s Sunnyvale campus to get a glimpse of what “high-tech” people do all day.

Encouraging girls to consider careers in tech

Imagine that there was a technology program designed just for girls. Techbridge did, and developed a program to introduce girls to various applications of technology and to encourage them to consider careers in technical and scientific fields. The program offers a deep set of services including: after school and summer programs in girls-only environments, career exploration through field trips, interactions with role models, and academic and career guidance. Techbridge is an outreach program of the Chabot Space & Science Center.

Finding your inner geek through play

The day at Yahoo! was packed with activities, beginning with an encouraging welcome by Yahoo! Women-in-Tech volunteer role models. After an icebreaker on Yahoo! trivia, the girls divided into smaller groups for three fun and challenging technical activities.

The Internet Safety game taught the girls important information about how to safely navigate the Web. The Finding your Fish activity helped girls discover how search engines retrieve information. By playing a fishing game similar to Battleship, the girls were able to explore three different types of searching.

By the end of the Algorithm Work Out activity, our guests were able to write their own algorithms for doing a host of callisthenic exercises including jumping jacks, sit ups, leg raises and crab walks.

When I grow up, I want to work at Yahoo!

After a lunch break, the teams launched into a scavenger hunt of special Yahoo! landmarks.

Girls criss-crossed Yahoo!’s vast Sunnyvale campus to check email at the purple cow, learn about assistive technology at the Yahoo! accessibility lab, find Carol Bartz’s cube, discover Mario Land, and more. In addition to getting their run of the Yahoo! campus, the girls were able to meet a broad range of special Yahoos including: Yahoo! Chief Information Office (and K-12 event photographer) Mike Kirwan, Yahoo! Developer Network Managing Editor Havi Hoffman, President of Yahoo! Women-in-Tech Karolina Buchner, and Head of Yahoo! Labs Prabhakar Raghavan,

At the close of the day, the girls shared their favorite memories and let out a collective Yahoooooooo! yodel. Their energy, spirit, and enthusiasm made this event a blast for all. We sent the Lincoln girls home with personalized gold stars, reusable purple goodie bags, and a lifetime of Yahoo! love.

Julie Shin Choi & Shannyn Timrott
Yahoo! Women-in-Tech, K-12 Program

Today we are excited to announce a new deal that will make Snapfish the preferred worldwide printing partner for Flickr!  With 22 worldwide printing locations, our partnership with Snapfish will enhance the experience of Flickr’s 40 + million members by increasing the number of printing options and providing cost-effective, quality photo printing functionalities for both the US and international markets.

Our goal is to making printing simple and easy for our members.  For instance, the print functionality within Organizr will be easily accessible for Flickr members, allowing members to conveniently select photos in a batch process for printing.In the US, Flickr members will be able to go to a wide variety of Snapfish retail partners including Walmart, Walgreens, Staples, Duane Reade, Publix, Meijer, and Longs, among others.  Additionally, Flickr members will have the ability to ship their prints to any location in the world.  And since we know that money is tight for people, our new partnership ensures that our US members will have some of the lowest printing prices around, with competitive international pricing as well.

We believe that this new partnership provides a tightly integrated, comprehensive printing environment to help bring members’ photostreams to life.  We have worked closely with Snapfish to develop a full integration with our online photo organization features – Organizr, Sets and Photo Page – to improve the overall printing experience.  For those members who have used other other printing options, our existing printing partners will still be available to you through the recently launched App Garden.

Our new mobile homepage is awesome. But don’t take our word for it– CNET, NBC, IDG News Service, ReadWriteWeb, Reuters and others have said great things about it and all of our recent mobile product enhancements.

As Yahoo continues to bring our mobile services to consumers around the world, today we are announcing the launch of Yahoo! Mobile en Español, a Spanish-language mobile homepage customized for the specific needs of the U.S. Hispanic consumer to more than 1,900 mobile devices.

In an effort to make Yahoo! the center of people’s online lives, we’re bringing the best of Yahoo! to mobile devices and are providing the U.S. Hispanic population with a mobile experience that is both culturally and personally relevant, uniting their world and the world around them.

A few facts for you about the U.S. Hispanic population:

•    There are 46 million U.S. Hispanics. If compared, the U.S. Hispanic population would comprise the ‘second largest country’ in Latin America
•    Mobile Internet usage among Hispanics is outpacing that of all other groups, with 88% of Hispanics consuming content on their mobile phones (comScore)
•    Hispanics use more phone features, including Internet access, at higher rates than other mobile subscribers.

For Yahoo! Mobile en Español, visit http://espanol.yahoo.com from your mobile device.

And for our Spanish speaking users, more announcement and product details are below:

Yahoo! ha continuado llevando nuestros servicios móviles a los consumidores alrededor del mundo y hoy nos complace anunciar el lanzamiento de Yahoo! Mobile en Español, una página principal móvil disponible en el idioma español y diseñada en base a las necesidades específicas de los consumidores hispanos de los EE.UU. en más de 1,900 aparatos móviles.

Con el propósito de hacer de Yahoo! el centro de la vida en línea de las personas, estamos llevando lo mejor de Yahoo! a los aparatos móviles y proporcionándole a la población hispana de los EE.UU. una experiencia móvil que es de gran importancia para ellos tanto a nivel personal como cultural, logrando juntar su mundo particular con el mundo que les rodea.

Tal como la pagina web de Yahoo! En Español (http://español.yahoo.com), la nueva página principal móvil de Yahoo! permite a los consumidores usar su teléfono para obtener todo lo que desean del Internet en un solo lugar. Aquí mencionamos algunas de las funciones más destacadas, populares y “cool”:

HOY:
•    Proporciona acceso al galardonado servicio móvil Search de Yahoo!, contenido seleccionado editorialmente, así como las noticias de EE.UU. y el resto del mundo presentadas en español, incluyendo la sección “América Latina”, la cual ofrece un contenido importante de noticias de la región latinoamericana.

FAVORITOS:
•    Te permite mantenerte conectado a través del acceso al correo electrónico (incluyendo Yahoo! Mail, Gmail®, Hotmail™) y cuentas de redes sociales de los proveedores más populares de la Web (incluyendo Twitter™, Facebook®, MySpace®, Flickr®, YouTube™ y más), así como mensajería  instantánea, libreta de direcciones y funciones de calendario.
•    También puedes permanecer informado al reunir todo tu contenido favorito de la Web —deportes, noticias, información local, fuentes RSS, las condiciones del tiempo, las acciones, el horóscopo, y más — en un solo lugar.
•    Con la función de sincronización de PC a móvil puedes llevar contigo tu contenido y servicios favoritos de tu escritorio y tu página principal de Yahoo!. Además, para cualquier cambio que hagas a través de la red de Yahoo! en la PC – como añadir una acción a  Y! Finanzas o una fuente RSS a Mi Yahoo! – te brindaremos la oportunidad de que puedas hacer lo mismo de forma muy fácil en tu experiencia de Yahoo! Mobile en Español.

SITIOS Y!:
•    Una lista de directorio con el número cada vez mayor de servicios de Yahoo! disponibles en tu teléfono. Aquí puedes encontrar servicios específicos y descubrir nuevos productos

Para Yahoo! Mobile en Español, visita http://espanol.yahoo.com desde tu teléfono móvil.

Esperamos que hayas disfrutado Yahoo! Mobile en Español y agradeceremos tus comentarios y tu opinión sobre nuestra página.

Felipe Munoz
Principal Director Movil de Yahoo! Hispanic Americas y Brasil

Editor’s Note: Each month, Yahoo! For Good unleashes Purple Acts of Kindness to surprise and delight our local communities. In October, inspired by mandatory composting laws in San Francisco, we partnered with Urban Sprouts to build compost systems in schools and to promote composting at home with students and their families.  Here’s an account from their Executive Director.

–

Every week, Urban Sprouts’ Garden Educators visit seven different public middle and high schools in San Francisco, to teach students to build their own school gardens. Urban Sprouts helps youth grow their own fresh and healthy food right at school, while learning about healthy living, cooking, science skills, and protecting the environment.

Each day, when young people harvest potatoes they grew and turn them into French fries, or carefully weed around baby plants they grew from seed, these students change the way they feel about what foods they eat and what toxins their lifestyles contribute to our natural environment.

One major way students in San Francisco can keep the environment clean is by helping reach our city’s goal of recycling or composting 100% of the waste we produce, keeping it all out of landfills. Students in Urban Sprouts’ programs have said, “I learned how to use the compost bin and about how everything affects our earth. I want to make sure we reduce, reuse, and recycle,” and “I have already started to teach my family and friends.”

Now, San Francisco has passed a law requiring separation of compostable waste at home for curbside pick up, using kitchen pails and green garbage cans. Our friends at Yahoo! have generously funded our entire project to help students promote home composting among their peers and families.

Over 700 students at seven schools will participate, building complete compost education stations open to the public at their schools, and creating school-wide peer education campaigns to educate their schools on how to use their green garbage cans at home. Urban Sprouts students will build demonstration compost systems and worm bins, create short videos, and hand out kitchen pail liner bags as part of the campaign.

With help from Yahoo! and San Francisco’s youth, we can reach our city’s goal of Zero Waste!

Abby Jaramillo
Executive Director
Urban Sprouts

When you think of Times Square, you think of people – you and me, yellow taxis and lines for the latest shows. How about sitting and chatting with friends and family?  Playing games?  Checking email? Searching for Broadway show times or dinner reservations?

Yahoo! helps you connect with the people and things that matter most to you – wherever you are, including in Times Square.  While Yahoo! is the place where your world meets the world online, over 500,000 of you take in Times Square each day and it’s become a central spot for New Yorkers and people around the world.  We and our partners at the Times Square Alliance think it’s the perfect place to bring you free WiFi service (check out the landing page here)- for  New Yawkers enjoying your cawfee breaks and out-of-towners enjoying the Big Apple. Fuggedaboutit!

And don’t worry if you don’t have a laptop in Times Square – you can also access the service from your WiFi-enabled mobile phone. All you need to do is enable the WiFi feature on your phone, open your browser and click on the “Get Started” button on the mobile landing page. This will take you to Yahoo!’s mobile homepage (http://m.yahoo.com) where you can access your favorite content and services from across the Internet.

So, if you are  in New York City or will be anytime during the next year, come down (or up, depending on where you’ll be coming from) to Times Square to chat, play, search, and enjoy whatever else you do online with free WiFi service from Yahoo! and the Times Square Alliance.  And it’s all about Y!ou (in case you hadn’t heard).

Kelly Delaney
Buzz Marketing

When we asked you to Yodel like you mean it, you delivered!

After handing Yahoo!’s signature yodel over to the people – you whole-heartedly responded – by uploading more than a whopping 21,000 yodels to our online Yodel Studio! Each yodel has its own personality as unique as each of you.  There are hip-hop yodels, country yodels, rock n’ roll yodels, Bollywood yodels… I think you get the point.

Out of all of the yodels submitted, who really rocked the mic?  Based on number of views, we’ve selected the top 3 yodels from each market.  Now YOU can help us choose who will go to the next level and take it PLATINUM! Vote daily for your favorites!

U.S. Finalists:

Tiffany Jo from Arizona – Yodeling since she was five years old, “I choose to participate because I enjoy singing and yodeling. I thought it would be a great opportunity to do what I love.”

Carlo from Arizona – New to yodeling but been singing for a lifetime, “I searched through most of the songs that were available to use as background music until I found the one that brought out the most emotion out of me.”

Christopher from Oklahoma – “What inspired my Yodel was hearing all the Yahoo! Yodels in the past, and wanting to do something a little bit different! I decided to add a little bit of ME in my Yodel!”

UK Finalists:

Katherine
Hajar
James

And representing India:

Nishant
Ankitaa
Ayesha

One winning yodel will represent each country (US, UK and India) and will be featured on one of the world’s largest stages: Yahoo!’s homepage!  So declare yourself, “rock the vote” or in this case, yodel it out – in short, vote soon as polls close on November 15 (11:59pm PT) and the winner will be announced on November 16th! What are you waiting for, vote for your favorite yodel now!

It’s hard to believe that it has been over a year since Getty Images partnered with Flickr to launch the groundbreaking Flickr Collection. We wanted to provide a quick update on how the collection has grown and some of the exciting new developments in our partnership.

When launching the Flickr Collection, our goal was to choose photos that created a commercially viable collection, while preserving the inspirational and unexpected nature of the images that are so prevalent on Flickr. We’re proud to announce that today the collection has grown to over 60,000 images, many of which have been licensed by Getty Images’ customers from around the world.

Since the announcement of the partnership, editors at Getty Images have been busy exploring the Flickrverse to find the right photos to be part of the collection. While we know they’ve enjoyed viewing your work, with over four billion images, it can sometimes be an overwhelming experience!

In the past, the Flickr community could set their account settings to reflect that they wanted to be contacted by Getty Images, but could not proactively present a portfolio of photos for consideration. We know how eager the 40 million + Flickr members have been to showcase their work and wanted to develop a solution.

That’s why, today, we’re very excited to announce a formal Call for Artists, meaning ANY Flickr member can submit their work to be considered for the collection through the Call for Artists group on Flickr.

Detailed guidelines can be found on the group page, but here’s a quick snapshot on the process for submitting your photographs:  A submission should include exactly 10 images that represent what you consider to be the best of your work. The Getty Images creative team will evaluate submissions based on style, subject matter and technical skill. If some or all of the photos – or other images from your photostream – are selected for the Flickr Collection on Getty Images, you will receive an invitation via Flickrmail. This invitation will clearly show Getty Images’ initial selection of images and introduce the enrollment process.

When we first launched, we aimed to create a “living collection” – one that mirrored the vibrant Flickr community itself. Now, with the community’s help, the collection will continue to grow and bring a new flavor of photography to Getty Images and its customers — an authentic view into the daily lives of people around the world.

We at Getty Images truly can’t wait to review the portfolios of the accomplished and experienced photographers that contribute to Flickr. With the community’s help, the collection will better represent, what is, in effect, the world’s image library.

Andy Saunders
Vice President of Creative Imagery
Getty Images

Victor Tsaran is one of those people who just impresses the hell out of you. He grew up in a Ukrainian orphanage and is now a talented computer engineer in the U.S. He’s an accomplished musician and songwriter. And he also happens to be blind.

Victor runs Yahoo!’s accessibility program. He helps make it easy for people with all kinds of disabilities to use our sites. When I first met Victor, I had the same naïve reaction most people have – dumbfounded by how he could crank open his laptop and be fully self-sufficient reading email and surfing the web. That’s because I was clueless about all the remarkable ways that people with disabilities use technology.

Victor’s made it his mission to educate our designers and engineers, helping change their assumptions that accessibility somehow requires sacrifice or compromise. On the contrary, Victor argues that accessible design is better for everyone. Just as curb-cuts were designed for wheelchairs, they’re also a great convenience for strollers, luggage and shopping carts, right?

But driving the point home sometimes means making someone walk a mile in his moccasins. Enter the Yahoo! Accessibility Lab, which has been toured by more than 75 product teams to date. It’s filled with a wide array of assistive technologies – screen readers, onscreen keyboards, interactive Braille displays, etc. When Yahoos arrive, they’re told they’ve just had a stroke and can’t type with their fingers. They’re given a rubber ball and asked to type their name. Um… Next, they’re fully paralyzed. “OK, try to send an email.” Uh… After they’re introduced to the technology solutions, they watch videos of disabled people in action.

All this leaves developers making accessibility a goal before they write their first line of code. It’s why anybody can access rich features and tools on products like Yahoo! Sports, My Yahoo!, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Messenger for the iPhone. It’s why third-party websites that are inaccessible in their own right are now entirely accessible via the new “favorites” area on the Yahoo! Homepage. Victor has helped Yahoo! make enormous strides since joining us four years ago, but there’s still more to come.

We spent some time following Victor with a video camera to not only understand his work, but to appreciate his daily experience. Commuting by train. Playing guitar. Making lunch with his wife Karo Caran, a fellow student from the Overbrook School for the Blind. We watched as sighted people had their first awkward interactions with him. He laughs when he describes how often people raise their hands when he asks questions during his new hire orientation briefings. Well-meaning commuters sometimes escort him to the wheelchair zone on the train platform. It took me a while to realize he’s not offended by questions like “Did you see my email?”

Here’s Victor’s video profile:

Spend any amount of time with Victor and you realize that his blindness doesn’t really make him all that different from anyone else – except that his computer talks to him. Really, really fast.

Read more:

• Victor’s post about screenreaders
• Victor’s post about the launch of our Accessibility Lab in Bangalore
• An interview with Victor about his life and music

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Video credits: producer, Nicki Dugan; cinematographer, Brad Williams; director/editor, Ricky Montalvo
Photo by gingervitis

Happy Mole Day to you all! No, we’re not celebrating the burrowing mammal or even the chocolate-accented Mexican sauce. Mole Day commemorates Avogadro’s number — 6.02×10²³ — a way to measure infinitesimal things like atoms and ions. It’s celebrated from 6:02 a.m. to 6:02 p.m. on October 23rd. Get it? Here’s what our chemists concocted this week:

• Faces of the Flickrverse: Tagging has always been the fun part of Flickr, making it a cinch to find photos of anything from fungus to flugelhorns. This week, People in Photos made its debut, letting you add people to your photos, find photos of people you know, and manage which photos you’re in. If you’re tagged, you’ll get notified in your activity stream. If that sounds at all creepy to you, never fear – you’ve got plenty of privacy power. Opt out, opt in. More on the Flickr blog.
• Teach your phone to yodel: Sure, your mobile can probably mimic the sound of crickets, a dog bark, a vintage telephone, or sonar. But can it yodel? Now it can. In support of our Yodel Studio promotion, which seeks the world’s best new yodelers with a chance to be featured on our homepage and in our global marketing campaign, we’ve cooked up yodeling ringtones. And not just your government issue yodel. We’re talking hip-hop, a cappella, R&B, reggae, and bluegrass yodels. Download them here or text YODEL to 49737 in the US, 56263 in India, and 83338 in the UK. Oh, and don’t forget to submit your yodel and/or vote for your favorites. The deadline is November 8th.

Subscribe to the RSS feed (or add it to My Yahoo!) to get this Product Pulse every week.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Quick – which padlock brand can withstand a bullet hole? Which personal computer shattered Orwellian drudgery in 1984? What soft drink did some kid give “Mean Joe” Greene? Which hamburger consists of two all beef patties special sauce lettuce cheese pickles onions on a sesame seed bun? Which paper towel is the quicker picker upper? Where can you have it your way? Which cellular network never has you asking, “Can you hear me now?”

That was easy, right? Well, that’s thanks to ad agency creatives who turned simple brand messages into iconic household catchphrases. They make it look easy, but it’s not. And it can be even tougher when creating online advertising because there’s more to it than simply putting an ad on TV. We know all about that and are working with our advertisers to foster big, memorable ideas online.

Here’s a digital short that our creatives produced to pay homage to all those creatives out there:

For the full story behind this video, head over to our new Yahoo! Advertising blog.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

If you’ve spent any time on the Web, a highway, a taxi, or in front of your TV lately, chances are you’ve seen elements of our new global brand campaign, which launched in the U.S. in September, in the U.K. and India earlier this month, and more markets to follow.

We decided to catch up with our chief marketing officer, Elisa Steele, to get some skinny on the effort. We asked her about the campaign’s genesis, the significance of the “It’s Y!ou” messaging, why we decided to launch a campaign now, why we went with a vignette approach in the campaign video, her favorite scenes, and why we introduced a new form of the Yahoo! yodel at the end of the new spot. Here’s the Q&A:

And we’re trying something new here — this is the first in a series that we’re dubbing Yahoo! Yodelcasts. We’ll interview Yahoos from all walks of life, share tips and advice, and take you behind the scenes. We’re all ears if there’s something you’re particularly interested in hearing about.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

If you passed through midtown Manhattan yesterday, you might have thought that yodeling was a hip new genre busting out on the music charts. But the phenomenon was just the Yahoo! Yodel Studio.

Crowds of starstruck pedestrians formed around a recording studio that we erected overnight in Times Square as yodels echoed through the canyons of the city. We invited anyone and everyone to come inside and give us their best interpretation of the Yahoo! yodel. What was at stake? The potential fame and bragging rights of having their yodel featured on the Yahoo! Homepage and in our new advertising campaign.

We camped out on Military Island for 12 hours in a brick building that included a dressing room with costume gear, a rehearsal room with gold records on the wall, and a state-of-the-art recording studio. Celebrities were on hand to mentor yodelers — Jewel, Pete Wentz, LeAnn Rimes, Randy Jackson, and Rob Cavallo, chief creative officer of Warner Music Group and one of the world’s most highly acclaimed music producers. (Jewel said her dad was so proud that all those years of coaching her to yodel had finally paid off.) Kimberly Caldwell of American Idol fame was our tireless emcee and we even had America’s Got Talent’s Manuela “The Yodeling Dominatrix” Horn to help rally brave souls. And house band musicians — with many Grammys among them — sat atop the marquee of the Hard Rock Cafe (Hollywood Squares-style), ready to give a live riff for each yodeler. We heard rap yodels, bluegrass yodels, punk yodels, funk yodels, hip hop yodels, the list goes on. We even had two Cirque du Soleil performers stop by for a rendition. And they were all projected on the Jumbotron for the crowd to enjoy (or, at least, be amused by).

The last time we sought the best new Yahoo! yodeler, back in 2003, we ended up launching the singing career of a 9-year-old girl named Taylor Ware. Yesterday, one lucky performer (pictured above) — a foot messenger whose boss told her she could come perform before she delivered her last package of the day — caught the eye of Pete Wentz and Rob Cavallo, who spent extra time coaching her and left with her MySpace info and email address. Remember the name Chanese Elife, people — she might have a bright future ahead!

We also held events in London and Mumbai because, you know, yodeling knows no geographic bounds. The top winners for each country will be crowned on November 15th, based on which videos receive the most views. So head over to the gallery and check out the contenders. You’ll help them find an audience of more than 500 million people.

For more on the event, read Lyndsey Parker’s Yahoo! Music blog posts, browse photos in our Flickr photostream (slideshow below), and watch video highlights from our NY, London, and Mumbai events:

Ya-hooooo!

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

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While yodeling originated in the Swiss and Austrian Alps as a way to communicate between mountain peaks, many of you associate the yodel with Yahoo! – or, should I say Ya – HOOOOO! It is, after all, one of our most beloved and recognized assets.

Today, we’re giving the Yahoo! yodel back to the people with the launch of Yodel Studio, a global casting call for the world’s best yodels. Yodelers who take us up on this challenge will personalize and reinterpret our yodel, competing for a chance to be featured in Yahoo!’s new global advertising campaign and on one of the world’s largest stages: the Yahoo! homepage. Your yodel will also be heard through the donation Yahoo! will make to local and global charities of your choice for each yodel submitted (up to $130,000).

To kick this whole effort off in style, Yahoo! is hosting live Yodel Studio events today in New York’s Times Square, London’s Covent Garden and tomorrow at Mumbai’s High Street Phoenix Mall. Professional recording studios have been built in each location with celebrities on hand to coach yodelers. Jewel, Pete Wentz, LeAnn Rimes, and Randy Jackson will join us in New York with super producer Rob Cavallo; Pixie Lott and the X Factor’s Sinitta will be in London; and Bollywood singer Shankar Mahadevan and musical artists VJ Nikhil Chinappa and Shaa’ir + Func will mentor in Mumbai.

And if you need some yodel inspiration – might I suggest channeling your inner Jewel?

So get yodeling soon – the deadline to submit your yodel online is November 8! Read more here.

Brian Mullin
Senior Director, Buzz Marketing

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Since New York is the city that never sleeps, it’s no surprise that a sleepless night of coding didn’t phase the developers who attended Open Hack Day NYC. They produced some of the most creative and progressive hacks we’ve seen at these hackathons.

First, a quick review. We have hosted Open Hack Days since 2006 to foster collaboration and innovation within the developer community. This was our ninth event, preceded by shindigs at our California headquarters as well as in Taiwan, London, Bangalore, and São Paulo. We provide the hands-on workshops, tech talks, food, beer, Red Bull, and various hackery diversions, and developers stay up all night long to deliver creative mashups that they demo before a panel of judges.

About 300 developers attended our inaugural NYC event (sporting a greater proportion of blazers and ties than we’re used to seeing), which kicked off Friday morning with a keynote by Clay Shirky, a New York University professor and social media guru (here’s a video interview we grabbed). After a day of workshops and training sessions, developers adjourned to a hacker lounge with a steampunk theme. Victorian bird cages dangled power cables above each hacker table. A bright red wall was hung with gilded portraits of various well-known innovators. A Victorian maiden was hacked with a monitor for a head, displaying the latest tweets with the #openhacknyc tag on her face. Chalk boards featured ornate steampunk-inspired drawings that would have impressed H.G. Wells. And, of course, there was the table of hacker snacks and a beanbag-filled corner dedicated to Guitar Hero.

Before the hacking began, we hosted a geek’s open mic event with Ignite NYC. For two hours, participants had five minutes on stage to talk through 20 slides that automatically rotated after 15 seconds. It was a bit like the everyman’s TED. We heard about Moby Dick written in Japanese Emoji, the violence of the media, how to save journalism, what “open” means, patents, surprisology, benefits of living in colonies at sea, the New York Times Index (yes, it’s still printed on paper), clothing made of scissors and agave leaves, and the tyranny of a flavored chewing-tobacco lover on YouTube. There was even a visit from the Spaceman from Outer Space (who apparently wasn’t a fan of Alien IV).

By Saturday afternoon, about 100 hackers persevered and submitted 40 hacks. Without further ado, our winners:

• Best Overall – InsiderTrade.org: You can sign up for instant alerts about insider trades for the various stocks you follow. It’s live – try it.
• Best Overall, Runner up – TVitter: If you’re a Mystery Science Theater 300 fan, you’ll love this one. The team hacked our Connected TV widget to produce an app that lets people watch TV together and throw out comments that others can see.
• Connected TV (1st place) – Recipe Finder: This app lets you find and display recipes and even includes a countdown timer so you don’t burn your cupcakes while you get engrossed in Glee.
• Connected TV 2nd prize – Fantasy Football Widget: Brings the #1 fantasy sports league to your TV.
• Connected TV 3rd prize – Couch Potato RSS: This app lets you follow your favorite RSS feeds while you’re surfing TV.
• Best UI – Inhabited Web 2.0: Brings a social filter to individual websites by letting you see where people are congregating on a web page – “perhaps next to a great deal, interesting news story, or funny video.”
• Best Mobile – Community Bulletin Boards: This app brings community bulletin boards to your iPhone so you can find, create and add to message boards based on location just like physical bulletin boards that one sometimes finds in parks, on streets, in shops etc.
• Accessibility – Audio Texter: An app that allows blind and visually-impaired people send and receive SMS messages.
• Best Food/Hardware Hack (tie) – The New York Toast: From Team MakerBot, we had a 3D printer that printed news, weather, and photos in peanut butter, jam, and frosting… on toast. News for breakfast.
• Best Food/Hardware Hack (tie) – Delicious Cake: Since Team MakerBot found cake mix in their grocery bag and an extra supply of wire and LEDs, they spawned another team that created a cake that showed sentiment (positive and negative) for del.icio.us URLs. It was not eaten. This team included Diana Eng, overall winner of our very first Open Hack.
• Hack for Good – Power Trends: A platform that helps consumers save on their energy bills and helps energy providers predict load but leveraging social media. It measures energy usage for participating towns, who compete for prizes for being below their power consumption baseline.

Here’s a quick video recap of the event:

For more of that just-like-being-there feeling, you can view our Flickr photoset, other photos from the event, and check out tweets here.

Up next? Taiwan. We’re coming to hack you. This weekend. Get ready.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Photos: 1. Hack maestros – Eric and Havi, 2. Winning hackers, 3. Best overall hack – insidertrading.org, 4. Judges, 5. YDN stickers, 6. Peanut butter printing, 7. Steampunked emcees, 8. Winning hackers, 9. Last minute hacking, 10. NYU’s Clay Shirky keynotes, 11. Hacking a nap, 12. Hacker heart, 13. Eli hacks the stickers, 14. Steampunked Twitter display, 15. Hacker lounge, 16. Creating the NY Toast