EightBlack.

One lonely, single email has made me think twice about Yahoo!

It wouldn’t take you long to work out that I’m pro Google - I just sit better with the whole brand. Google’s elegant, simple, a bit quirky and massively successful.

It’s not to say Yahoo! isn’t. But to me, as a search platform, they’re too much “me, too”.

I’ll acknowledge though that as a portal, as a enabler of virtual community, Yahoo! is a formidable player.

But I got an email from Guy Kawasaki this morning talking about Yahoo! putting on an event called “Hack Day”

The concept’s brillant marketing.

Yahoo! opens up their campus, puts on enough pizza and Krispy Kreme donuts to choke even the most determined and invites 500 developers to walk right in and start mucking aound. They created 54 prototypes in a 24 hour period.

They even brought in a band to entertain everyone.

But think about the end result for Yahoo!

- They get to identify talent for virtually nothing
- They get to portray the image that Google isn’t the only company capable of being trendy
- They generated press coverage on 2 major TV networks
- They create a viral buzz (like this)
- They recieved a huge amount of blog coverage (again, like this)
- They might uncover the next big leap technologically speaking, in terms of product development

You can see pictures of the event here.

Cool. Very cool.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 4th, 2006 at 6:55 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.