March 28, 2008 on 8:47 am | In Fun Stuff | 10 Comments
One of our team members, Mazi, got married last month under the rotunda at San Francisco’s City Hall. His wife, Mariana, is from Argentina and her family was unable to fly up for the wedding. So at their reception, Mazi and Mariana hooked up their laptop and webcam, signed into Yahoo! Messenger, and shared their live celebration with Mariana’s family thousands of miles away in Buenos Aires.
Bringing webcams along to big events seems to be a growing trend, especially in the delivery room. In August of last year, an airman stationed in Afghanistan was able to watch the birth of his baby girl back home in Oklahoma with the help of the hospital’s webcam live feed. Read the full story
Congratulations to Mazi and Mariana! Maybe they’ll inspire you to think of fun ways to include your far away family and friends in your next big event.
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
March 18, 2008 on 10:15 am | In Avatars, Features, Fun Stuff | 4 Comments
It’s that time of year again when students, alumni and fans around the country put on their favorite college colors to cheer on their team in the NCAA College Basketball tournament.
Grown men will cry, women who don’t normally follow sports will become rabid with NCAA fever, and productivity in offices will take a hit as workers follow the games from their cubicles. Of course Yahoo! Messenger has a few items to further fuel your basketball obsession…
When it comes time to taunt your friends about their team losing or making a bad play, check out the NCAA audibles. There’s a referee ready to charge your friend with an offensive foul, a baseball cap-wearing superfan (complete with horn), and a laid back player who illustrates what it means when the defense is “taking a vacation”. To access the NCAA audibles, click the Audible icon in your IM window, click “More Audibles”, then “See All Audibles” and select NCAA Basketball (Yahoo! Messenger 8.1 or 9.0 Beta only).
You can also show your team pride by dressing the part. Head over to the NCAA section on Yahoo! Avatars to find jerseys from over 25 schools including Duke, University of North Carolina, UCLA, Kentucky and more.
To find out more about the tournament and follow all the action, check out NCAA Basketball on Yahoo! Sports. You still have time to pick your teams before the first game – download the tournament brackets: Men’s | Women’s
And if you’re on the go and want to follow what’s happening, go to http://m.yahoo.com/ncaa from your mobile phone for the latest scores and highlights.
Go team!
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
March 4, 2008 on 1:13 pm | In Events, Fun Stuff | 11 Comments
Back in September 2007, we told you about a celebration at Carnegie Mellon University that honored the Emoticon. Twenty five years earlier, Professor Scott Fahlman was the first to use the text version of the emoticon with his colleagues on a computer message board. To mark the anniversary, Professor Fahlman and his colleagues teamed up with Yahoo! to start an annual student contest for innovation in technology-assisted, person-to-person communication, now known as the Smiley Award.
Last week, “One Cold Hand” (http://onecoldhand.com), a website designed to reunite lost gloves with their mates, was named the winner of the inaugural Smiley Award. “One Cold Hand” was created by Jennifer Gooch, a graduate student in Carnegie Mellon’s School of Art, and Turadg Aleahmad, a doctoral student in the Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) – part of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science. They will share the $500 first prize, and their names will be engraved on a plaque kept on permanent display at the university.
Winner Jennifer Gooch said. “A lot of my current work and research looks at how people use technology in order to connect. As a native of Dallas, we didn’t need gloves very often. When I moved [to Pittsburgh, PA] I noticed them everywhere, lying on the ground lonely and useless. I thought a site to reunite gloves — a dating site for gloves, as it were — would be an interesting metaphor for our attempt to find what’s missing.”
A Smiley Award honorable mention went to “Moodjam” created by doctoral student Ian Li. Moodjam is an online diary that allows people to express their moods and feelings using patterns of color. Another honorable mention went to “Buxfer” (http://www.buxfer.com), a free, Web-based application that allows its users to easily keep track of shared expenses, which is handy for roommates, student social groups and many others. Buxfer was created by computer science doctoral students Ashwin Bharambe, Amit Manjhi and Shashank Pandit.
The winning student projects were chosen by a panel of faculty and student judges at Carnegie Mellon and Yahoo! joined in the celebration held on campus last week (see pics here).
Congratulations to “One Cold Hand” for winning the first Smiley Award! We look forward to seeing even more innovation inspired by Smiley in the coming years.
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
Here are some photos of the Smiley Award party, held last week at Carnegie Mellon University (photos courtesy of Ralf Brown):
View a larger slideshow
February 29, 2008 on 10:42 am | In Features, Fun Stuff | 18 Comments
We got an email in our inbox recently from Bogdan Nasgodineanu, a Yahoo! Messenger user who lives in Constanta, Romania (see pics on Flickr). Bogdan has worked for several years in the Romanian music industry, but recently turned his focus to composing and producing his own music.
Yahoo! Messenger is very popular in Romania and has inspired tributes from users there (check out our post on Darius’ Emoticoncerts). For his homage to Yahoo! Messenger, Bogdan, aka “Mister Boogie” took some of our most popular audibles and mixed them into a pumping club groove.
To listen to his creation, visit Bogdan’s MySpace page at http://www.myspace.com/misterboogie; then click on the song “Yahoo All Stars” in his playlist.
Bogdan told us “As I try to create my own songs, I am constantly looking for new sources of inspiration, to put a new sound in my music, to distinguish from others and all those songs that sound very much alike.” He used some of his favorite audibles from the “Hello”, “Flirts” and “Goodbyes” category. Be sure to listen to the track to see if you can pick them out.
Thanks Bogdan for this great groove! 
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
February 26, 2008 on 1:18 pm | In Features, Fun Stuff | 36 Comments
Ever wondered what the the devil’s laugh would sound like when you send the emoticon? 
Or wished that you could send a loud emoticon smooch over to your sweetie on Yahoo! Messenger? 
Then you’re in luck! A few of our favorite emoticons have found a second career as audibles. Audibles are animated characters with sound that you can send to a friend while you IM. You’ll find eight emoticon audibles to choose from including the cowboy, happy face, the devil, and more.
To try out the new emoticon audibles, click the audibles icon (the one with the lips on it) above the text box in your IM window (Yahoo! Messenger 8.1 or 9.0 only). Click the More Audibles button on the right, then “See All Audibles”. Then select “Emoticons” from the list.
Emoticons, let your voices be heard.
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
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