This week at the University of Washington we are thrilled to be kicking off the second half of the 2009-2010 Hack U™ season. The University of Washington hack will be followed by events at Georgia Tech, UT Austin and UC San Diego throughout March and April. During each of these hack events, Yahoo developers teach passionate CS, HCI and engineering students about the latest and greatest open tools and technologies and web programming tips in a series of tech talks, then spend 24 hours with them to help them build their dream hack for the competition held at the end of the week. In true Yahoo style, the all night contest is filled with fun, free food, schwag, prizes, Wii games and plenty of caffeine! At the end of the season, the winners from each university will be flown by Yahoo to our University Hack Showdown, which is normally held in conjunction with Yahoo’s Open Hack Day, where they will hack it out for street cred, cool prizes and the opportunity to get their hack noticed by web industry judges, including VCs, web entrepreneurs, Yahoo execs and technology gurus. “The close of 2009 marked the third year of the Hack U™ program and it’s been amazing to watch the innovation, spirit and quality of the hacks continue to grow, said Jamie Lockwood, program manager for Hack U™. “The students used to just mash up as many open technologies as they could barely thinking about UI or what problem the hack solves, but today we see ideas and prototypes coming together that are more and more sophisticated and in some cases almost ready to go to market.” The winning Hack U™ students from last season had no problem holding their own against the experienced developers that showed up at the Yahoo Open Hack event in NYC, winning half of the categories including best overall hack. The program has definitely caught the attention of Yahoo’s internal open tech leaders, as well as the external web community. The Hack U™ winners from Toronto even snagged an interview at Y Combinator with their hack idea. You can read more about the program and view some of the other hacks that have been developed at universities across the country and the world (we had our first India Hack U event at IIT earlier this year!) on the Yahoo Developer Network site. Hack U events have been held at some of the best engineering universities around the country including UC Berkeley, Stanford, Georgia Tech, Carnegie Mellon, University of Washington and University of Illinois and we’re always on the lookout for other universities that want to be part of the growing Hack U community We also want to keep the technology topics fresh, timely and up to speed with the latest web industry innovations so feel free to send us requests for specific speakers or ideas for suggested topics. Check out the website for more information, updates and details about the upcoming 2010 schedule. -- Yahoo Academic Relations and Hack U™ Team

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Yahoo Developer Network