Fire Eagle is an open platform that helps users take their location to the Web and gives users a place to store and manage information about their location, and offers developers clear protocols for updating or accessing that information. Because it's open, any networked service can use Fire Eagle to respond to a user's location - to help them find their friends, annotate the world or find nearby services or local information.
Fire Eagle focuses on making it much easier for both users and developers to adopt and integrate location-based services. If you are a developer, Fire Eagle takes away much of the costly and complicated heavy-lifting of developing geo-aware applications. You can focus on how to use location in your service or application without having to build the infrastructure to work out where your users are.
If you are a user, Fire Eagle gives you an interface where you can manage your location information, giving you control over how, when and with what your location is shared. You choose which applications can share and update your location. You choose how much information you want to share – from as broad as country or state, to as detailed as zip code or cross streets, and everything in between. At any time you can hide yourself and change your sharing preferences.
Check out the gallery for the slew of applications you can use with Fire Eagle. And check out our blog for the latest news and applications.
Who built it
How do I get it
Popularity: 18% [?]
Hack Days are fun, no doubt, but what about getting hacks out the door? Yahoo!'s hack culture has been a blast to be part of, but one of the biggest challenges is integrating the great hacks into products and shipping them. After all, product roadmaps are big, and there's always an appetite to do more - would you want it any other way? But, given the size of these roadmaps, it’s not always easy for hack teams to know how to proceed after a hack day. And getting hacks productized is one of the best aspects of the hack program. So, here are some tactics to make that happen....
I’ve been running various flavors of an “enhanced” hack program in my part of the Yahoo! world for almost three years. Borne out of experiments that began while I was managing the Y! Autos engineering team, this program has evolved into these three core aspects:
1. Three-Day Hack Events
Picking the right timeframe for a hack event is key for bringing forward the best hacks while minimally impacting the roadmap. One-day hack events generated lots of very small hacks and proved difficult for hackers to conceive, design, and build something lasting. We tried a one-week-long event at one point in Y! Shopping, but it proved too disruptive to roadmap-focused activities. We settled on three-day events to drive bigger hacks. These three-day events give the teams time to coalesce, commit to a larger idea, and have the time to build it.
2. Business feedback and hack ratings (“H-ratings”)
After the hacks are initially presented in a fun open-call demos/prizes session, each business unit’s cross-functional leadership team (including the GM, product lead, eng lead, design lead, bizdev lead, etc.) meet with the hackers who built hacks for their particular area (e.g., Yahoo! Local).
Hackers then do their demos again, followed by the whole group having an in-depth discussion where “bullet point” level feedback is given and scribed. The leadership team gives each hack a rating, called an H-Rating, which is one of:
The leadership team takes a bias towards approving things for release (“H1”) whenever possible.
We’ve shipped some major hacks with this process:
3. Time to productize
Innovation experts are quick to point out that slack time is essential to innovating. I’m aware of a number of groups at Yahoo! that have tried various things to bring in slack time, such as "Friday afternoon hacking" for all engineers, one-off allocations of 1+ engineers for specific innovative projects, and my own personal favorite – the hack time grant program. With the time grant program, 15% of the engineering team’s time is reserved for innovation work. The engineering managers pool 15% of the team’s time on a quarterly basis; for example, calculating that in a team of 12 engineers, they can spend 25 engineering-weeks per quarter on innovation. This is not an “entitlement” that every engineer gets. Instead, it is time that any engineer can apply for through a one-page email request. The engineering managers review grant requests periodically and they spend the 15% budget every quarter. They can use it to invest in key areas, reward exciting innovations with move development time, and work on getting cool things out the door. In a mystery competitor’s 20% innovation time program (sometimes called a 120% program :D), I’ll hazard a guess that only 20% of the engineers participate, so they net only a 4% innovation investment.
The business value of the grant program is huge:
I have been using time grants for my teams since early 2006. The engineers I work with appreciate that they can get time to work on projects without having to deal with the “unknown” factor, which includes having to negotiate for time in a team’s business roadmap. We are now exploring expanding the grant program to other sibling teams in our org.
In our efforts, the design, product management, QA, and release engineering teams support the program as much as they can. While they aren’t yet formally allocating a percentage of their time, they do help us get hacks into products – especially when they are part of a hack team.
So what’s next for the whole program?
Due to the success of this program in my organization, we're now working on getting the program more widely adopted. Also, I’m looking into whether a “Hack Maturity Model” (a la CMM) might be a good way to clarify various levels of hack sophistication across the company, to correlate success in building and shipping hacks with a set of best practices. “HMM1” might be just participating in corporate hack days, whereas “HMM4” might be H-ratings, formal slack program, and shipping all H1’s within three months. I'll keep you posted on how these go.
Popularity: 22% [?]
Michael Olivier, August 5th, 2008 on 10:58 am
A couple of weeks ago we released a new IMVironment which lets you listen to music from popular mp3 blogs while you’re chatting with your friends on Yahoo! Instant Messenger. As you encounter tracks that you like, you can save them as a playlist in the IMV and send your “remix” to your friend over IM so they can check it out.
Music blogs have become increasingly popular over the last year both for consumers and advertisers as “Fortune 500 companies are waking up to the fact that young hipsters are congregating on MP3 blogs”.
The theory goes that, “the people who troll for music on MP3 blogs tend to be tastemakers who wield considerable influence over their peers.” Why are these kids digging on music blogs so much? Well – you’ll have to try for yourself. Check out the IMV to start exploring music blogs for yourself. When you do – you’ll encounter a pretty amazing place where “BlogJs” like Aurgasm’s Paul Irish are working to “scout out music you've never heard and deliver only the finest."
The IMV is the latest chapter of a web music story we’ve been telling all year long. It's an initial foray into making the web music discovery process a truly social experience, something that you do together with a friend. If you use YIM, you can give it a spin by clicking on the IMVironment drop down next time you’re chatting with someone and selecting the “Honda Fit” IMV. Check it out and let us know what you think!
Popularity: 43% [?]
On Monday, we went to Adobe Engage at the Dogpatch Studios in San Francisco. Billed as “Adobe's annual conversation on the future of applications and the web” – this gathering of “key thought leaders and influencers” was also a coming out party for Adobe AIR, which officially launched on the same day.
AIR allows web developers to package up existing web apps or Flash movies as full fledged desktop applications. The AIR runtime must be installed on a user's machine, but once in place – the same AIR app will run on Windows or a Mac, and a Linux implementation is due out soon.
Robert Scoble was at the front, live streaming the event from his cellphone via qik.com and his archived content provides an interesting bird's-eye view of the event. After introductory messages from Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen and CTO Kevin Lynch, Adobe handed things off and let several different companies share the work they’ve been doing with AIR over the past year.
We saw a variety of cool apps, but perhaps more interesting were the types of teams that have been building them. Most of the AIR apps presented at Engage came from very small teams - internal propellerheads given the freedom to experiment and play in a very small corner of their organizations, all of whom have been attracted to using Flex and AIR. Even the names of these teams were telling: Yahoo's Media Innovation and Advanced Products groups met up with participants from the “Disruptive Innovation Group” at EBay, the Research Development team at the New York Times, and the NASDAQ Research group, to name some of the teams.
Yahoo! presented 3 apps. The first was a News Minibar application which we originally developed in AS2, wrapped in AS3, and converted into an AIR application. It sits on your desktop and keeps you up to date with weather, stock prices, and newsfeeds of your choice. We also released an updated beta version of our Blog Remix app, which lets you remix different music blog posts together and export them via HTML to your blog.
Our Yahoo! Live demo included a personal shout to the audience at Engage from music artist Tilly Key via her Y! Live page. Things got interesting when people watching Tilly’s page realized they were able to enter live comments that would appear in real time in front of the audience at Engage, but by that time Live product manager Michael Quoc had moved on. He was showing some of the cool mashups that external developers have already built using the Y! Live APIs. During the Q&A session afterwards, someone commented that we had “guts to show something like this with wifi, and all the other craziness..."
In all, the Engage event provided an early peek at interesting new technology and applications in 2008. Apparently many people (and companies) seem to agree that for building innovative software, less is more. As a developer on a small team in a big company, it’s great to see platforms emerge that allow small teams to build great things, “upon the shoulders of giants.”
Adobe Engage 2008 about to begin photo by Kendall Whitehouse.
Popularity: 30% [?]
I'm Chris Kalaboukis, a director in the Intellectual Property Innovation group here at Yahoo!. I run a number of internal innovation programs, one of which solicits, evaluates, and acts upon ideas from any and all Yahoo! employees; yet another asks Yahoos to look far into the future and envision products and services for that future. Often, I hear people complain about how Yahoo!, in comparison to our perceived competitors, is not doing so well.
People, both internally and externally, compare us to Google and other companies in that space, and complain that we can't compete and aren't innovative. That’s pure BS. The fact that we aren't doing as well as Google is based on false premises. Yahoo! isn't Google. We are much, much more than a search provider. If you look at all the areas we play in, and actually excel in, then we crush our competition. In News, Finance, Sports, Mail and other web offerings, we kick everyone’s butt on a regular basis. Despite that, we seem to be stuck in a funk because of our perceived follower status.
How do we combat this? I have a simple suggestion. Let's look at another industry that was once pronounced moribund. Consider gaming: the gaming industry was recently in such bad shape that the entire space was declared to be in decline, and one specific player was practically pronounced dead. Who am I talking about? Nintendo. Not much more than a year ago, prior to the announcement of the Wii, pundits were saying that gaming industry innovation was dead. Budgets for games were exploding; smaller developers were out of the running. Then innovation won. The Wii smashed all records. Any company in a similar position can closely observe what Nintendo did, and do something just as game-changing, but for the Web.
After hearing about the Wii I waited in line at 5a.m. a month prior to release to pre-order a console -- so that I could be assured of one for my kids. As one of the first owners of a Wii, I had no idea it would become a runaway smash hit. In fact, the Wii blew past Sony, re-established Nintendo as the leader in their space, and created a whole new market and playing field for games and gaming.
How did Nintendo do it? Simple – they stopped trying to beat the other guys at increased processing speed, better graphics etc., and looked at the core appeal of gaming. For most people, gaming is for FUN. Nintendo looked at the decline of the hardcore game market, looked around at people who weren't playing games, and asked – how do we get everyone else to pick up the controller and play?
We might ask a similar question and take a similar approach. Look at the core appeal of the Internet. There are still huge untapped markets out there. Yahoo! has more than 500 million users, but there are billions of people on the Internet. We already innovate. We are building and launching incredibly interesting new products. We should challenge our assumptions about the “search engine” field. We need to play in a new field, where WE are stronger. Let’s keep innovating, let people know about all the fantastic innovation that is going on within Yahoo!, and build our own field to play in. Like Nintendo and the Wii – we can and we will change the game.
wii-family photo by dcodez. Used with permission.
Popularity: 11% [?]
Chris Kalaboukis, February 4th, 2008 on 10:37 pm
Search
Stay Connected
Recent Posts
Next* Links
Our Community
When / Where
About Next*
