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Rock star interns

Back in the first post to this blog, we mentioned that we really like interns. We weren’t kidding. Interns are an amazing breed of people able to balance work, school and life in ways that would make any lifehacker or GTD convert envious. They make the world go round here at YRB and this post is dedicated to them, past, present and future.

This past semester we were privileged to work with interns from all different backgrounds and disciplines. We had computer science and information management PhD candidates deciphering the meaning of tags - in photos, in videos, in your streams of consciousness. We had MBAs analyzing the innovation framework from prototype to product. We had information management Masters candidates developing new prototypes and researching new user study methods. We had undergrads honing their skills on new technologies and development environments. These interns… they’re filing patents. They’re publishing papers. They’re presenting to Yahoo! executives. They’re launching prototypes with real users. They’re conducting user research studies. On top of all that, outside of YRB, they’re managing full courseloads, presenting at conferences, conducting business negotiations, managing their own startups, writing PhD theses, studying for quals and living it up (yeah, we know they have fun without us). No, these aren’t your coffee-making interns. I don’t know about your interns, but our interns can kick some serious booty.

So, to the ones that have graduated and moved on, we wish you a bright future. It’s a rough world out there, and Yahoo! will always be here for you. To the present interns, it’d be nice if you would learn to make coffee while doing all that other stuff. To the future interns, yup, we are hiring. Hit us up if you think you want to hang out here and show us a thing or two. We’re looking for you!

Why geotag?

My name is Rahul Nair and I am an avid geotagger. It is an addiction but a healthy one. Many of my friends ask me why I bother to geotag Flickr photographs at all, it comes down to two things for me.

(Disclaimer: I am also a researcher at YRB and a driving enthusiast, so I’m going to talk about geotagging from those two perspectives.)

1) Finding photographs: It is a known fact that people are much more likely to remember the location of the photograph than things like the date or time of the image. The other day I got a first hand example of this when I was looking for a photograph of a particular Lotus Elise. Normally I would search by tag but I have over 300 photographs tagged with Lotus so that wasn’t a practical solution. I didn’t remember when I had taken the picture so I couldn’t narrow my search by date. I did however remember that I had taken the picture in Los Angeles. So I went to the Flickr map of my “lotus” tagged pictures in the LA area and the very first picture there was the one I was looking for.

Location also works for disambiguating tags that other people have used. The “apple store” tag returns several thousand photographs but not necessarily from my local store. Doing the same query on the map interface allows me to specifically chose the ones in the Bay Area that I am interested in.

2) Sharing the vibe of a place: Another important part of geotagging is that it allows me to both share and get the “vibe” of a location. For example, I am going to be driving down Highway 1 next weekend and looking at the Flickr map gives me a quick taste of what to expect at various points along the way. The TagMaps algorithm takes this concept even further and uses the Flickr tags to produce a “mental map” of the collective flickr consciousness.

I could go on and on about the benefits of geotagging and how it can change the way you view, share, discover and enjoy your photos, your friends’ photos and the world’s photos, but the proof is in the pudding and you should just try it out for yourself. Go check out ZoneTag. It will automatically geotag images from both your cell phone and your digital camera. Have fun geotagging!

Alcoholic Drinks via Bluetooth

Friday evening at the local bar is more geeky than it used to be. As I was walking into Elixir, one of my favorite local bars, my phone beeped - asking me to accept a BlueTooth message from “Elixir”. Of course, anybody could have sent this message, and my Nokia 6682 is not virus-proof quite yet. So I went to the (friendly) bartenders to ask about it. One of them had no clue, but the other recalled that the owner mumbled something earlier that day about some “new experiment”.

So, what was in the message? A drink coupon. Not for the same night — that would have been stupid, I was already there, ready to down a few, regardless of discount. Instead, the message advertised a future event and encouraged me to show up:

That was a first for me. Have you ever received a BlueTooth coupon? What coupons have you received via Bluetooth? Is this how the local business / mobile device space will play out?

[update: the exact opposite of a bar - the US Navy - seems to be using same technology to advertise itself. A coupon for 1 month off the 2-years service in Iraq?]