Yahoo! Hack Comes to Hyderabad

Yahoo! India R&D today announced the sixth edition of Yahoo! Hack India which will be held in Hyderabad on July 13 & 14, 2013. This will be Yahoo!'s first hack event in India hosted outside Bangalore, where Yahoo! has its second largest R&D center. Due to the overwhelming response from developers across India in the last 5 years, Yahoo! decided to expand its hack events to cover more Indian cities over the next few years. This year will see two external hack events by Yahoo! in India, one in Hyderabad and one in Bangalore later in the year.

Yahoo! Hack India brings together programmers, developers, designers from across the industry, start ups and students from the top tech universities in India. Over 1,000 developers from across 20 states in India signed up to participate in Yahoo! Hack in Hyderabad, of which 250 best hackers have been selected after an entry-level coding challenge.

These hackers will now participate in the two-day event which brings forth a series of technical workshops, followed by a nonstop 24-hour coding Hackathon.

"Yahoo! Open Hack days embody all that is happening at Yahoo! - innovation, collaboration and great products for our users. I am very excited to see the fresh ideas these young developers will come up with. This year we expect hackers to build experiences with a mobile-first approach, focusing on high-impact apps and dynamic mobile web experiences that people are excited to use every day," said Hari Vasudev, VP & Head, Yahoo! India R&D.

He added, "Hyderabad has world class tech talent with an extremely engaged developer community. This is our first hack event in Hyderabad, and we expect this one will also represent the same passion, energy and spirit of our previous hack events across the world."

Yahoo! will introduce developers to the popular technologies and tools from the Open Web, including Yahoo!'s YUI, YQL and Mojito,as well as geo-location and Flickr APIs (Application Programmable Interface)-which will serve as the core building blocks for exciting new applications. Yahoo! will also partner with other tech companies and start ups which will give them a platform to showcase their open APIs to the developer community in India.

The participants will be able to brainstorm and build prototypes using these technologies during the official hacking period.

All the entries (hacks) will be reviewed at the end of the 24-hour hacking period. Subsequently, the shortlisted entries will be shown to a panel of judges to determine the winning hacks.

Over the years, Yahoo!'s Hack event has turned into a calendar event for the developer community in India. New registration records have been set - and smashed - each year. The first Yahoo! Hack in India was hosted in 2007, and was attended by 180 developers from in and around Bangalore. By last year, this number had swelled to over 800 hackers, who traveled from almost every corner of the country to participate in the event.