UP students shine in first Philippine Yahoo! Hack Day
By Alexander Villafania
INQUIRER.net
Last updated 08:37pm (Mla time) 10/10/2007
MANILA, Philippines -- Five computer science students from the University of the Philippines Diliman showed their programming skills to executives of Internet giant Yahoo! in the first Philippines Hack Day contest.
Ralph Justin Arce and Wigi Vei Oliveros won the gold medal for their project called “YM Status Logger,” which tracks the Yahoo! Messenger user’s status.
Meanwhile, Abigail Yacat won silver for her “YM Conversation Distributor” project, which describes how a user can distribute private conversation to other users.
Bronze medalists were Vanessa Rose Castro and James Wyson who developed the “YM Thesis Mate,” helping thesis makers edit their documents collaboratively using YM.
All three winning projects used application programming interfaces (API) from Yahoo!
Yahoo! Chief of Advanced Development Division Bradley Horowitz awarded the medals to the students at the newly built UP Diliman Engineering Library and Computer Science Building.
Horowitz said that Hack Day is in line with Yahoo!’s promotion of user-generated and distributed content by allowing developers to “hack” Yahoo!’s applications for more improvements.
“In the world of Web 2.0, users will be the content providers but in order to do so, they must have the tools to create their content and so developers must create these tools to benefit Internet users. Yahoo! in itself has a lot of useful applications but we normally miss out on certain aspects of development so we hand the opportunity for improvement to these ‘good hackers’,” Horowitz said.
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