Yahoo!’s Open Hack Day in Taiwan is over and was full of energy from the first to the last minute. 40 teams participated, each with up to 6 people, from all over Taiwan. The event was held in a youth centre in Taipei on 20/21 September 2008.

Image by myhsu

As at the Hack Day in the US just a couple of weeks ago, the engineers coded throughout the night to produce stunning hacks for the big presentation on Sunday. Two of the winning hacks were built using Blueprint:

Biking Tour Around Taiwan
A Blueprint service that uses location based services and information from Yahoo! Taiwan Maps, Local, Knowledge, and FireEagle. The user can push his location from his phone when he rides the bike and can send cheers and greetings to his friends using Yahoo! Go. At the same time he can share his route map with others and can search for nearby local information.

Fun Map
Also a mobile location based service that integrates Yahoo! Taiwan Maps, Local, Shopping and Knowledge and is built on Blueprint. The user can submit various searches that are relevant to the user’s current location and are instantly displayed on a map.

To get an impression of this stunning event you can see some more pictures on Flickr.

Congratulations to the winners and to all the hackers who took part, and a big thanks to Yahoo! Taiwan for a great event.

Yahoo! Buzz is giving mobile users a new option to find out what’s hot on Yahoo! Buzz while they’re out and about with a new Yahoo! Go widget developed using Blueprint, Yahoo!’s mobile development platform. The widget can be found in the “Yahoo!” or “News & Info” section of the Yahoo! Go Gallery Widget or by searching “Yahoo! Buzz” from within the widget gallery.

The Yahoo! Buzz widget will allow mobile users to see the top buzzed stories in various categories from the last 12 hours. By clicking on the stories, users will then be able to see a summary and image, and from there can click over to the publishers’ site to see the full story.

We’re happy to announce working previews of several exciting new enhancements to our development platform: new Yahoo! Blueprint runtimes that let you create mobile websites, as well as standalone mobile applications for a wide range of devices.

Let’s have a look at these new runtimes:

Yahoo! Blueprint Runtime for Mobile Sites
Use to build rich mobile websites that:
- are hosted in your server infrastructure
- are accessible under your own URL
- work and looks great on hundreds of different devices

Technically, this runtime creates a proxy layer that redirects HTTP requests from your server to Yahoo!’s. This allows you to “host” the Blueprint service on your own server while relying on Yahoo!’s back end to interpret and render Blueprint markup - giving you the right HTML or xHTML that looks best on your users’ phones. Download the preview of the Yahoo! Blueprint Runtime for Mobile Sites today.

Yahoo! Blueprint Runtime for Mobile Apps
Use to create mobile applications on a variety of prominent devices and platforms. Since these are standalone apps, you have full control over how and where to distribute them. When you download today’s developer preview of the Yahoo! Blueprint Runtime for Mobile Apps, you can run your Blueprint service on many Java-enabled phones. The full version will provide you with the possibility to create mobile applications across a wide range of Java, Symbian, and Windows Mobile devices.

The above announcements complement the existing Yahoo! Blueprint Runtime for Yahoo! Go 3.0 Widgets, which provides access to millions of users within Yahoo!’s flagship mobile service.

Stay tuned for more
By adding these new runtimes to the Yahoo! Blueprint platform, we’re showing our passion for bringing new distribution and deployment options to the world’s developers and publishers.

To learn more about the Yahoo! Blueprint platform and its key components, check out the Blueprint overview page.

Meet the Yahoo! Blueprint team at the CTIA Wireless I.T. and Entertainment show in San Francisco starting this Wednesday, September 10 to Friday, September 12. The Yahoo! Mobile stand is going to be amazing and should definitely be on your must-see-list for the show. Step by at booth 417 to chat with us and have some ice cream.

Don’t miss the Wednesday morning keynote from Yahoo!’s Connected Life EVP Marco Boerries that takes place at 9.30 AM in Moscone West/Level 3. We also got some news to share.

See you in San Francisco!

Markus

On September 7th—yes, it’s already coming this Sunday—you can meet Yahoo! at the MobileWidgetsCamp in Austin, Texas. We will present Yahoo!’s new open mobile platform and show you how to code and deploy widgets in separate lab sessions.

The MobileWidgetsCamp is an ad-hoc gathering of mobility professionals and enthusiasts who come together to discuss, present, watch presentations, learn how to code, and in general, exchange information, all while focusing on the emerging space of mobile widgets and web applications. The event is free to attend and takes place in the brand new AT&T Executive Education & Conference Center in Austin.

Please visit the event’s site at http://barcamp.org/MobileWidgetCampAustin to register and for more information.

See you in Austin!

Markus

P.S. For all of you who cannot make it to Austin : A Blueprint development session will take place during Yahoo!’s Open Hack Day on September 12th and 13th in Sunnyvale, CA . Please sign up at hackday.org.