November 19, 2008

YDN Mashups in Bucharest, Romania

Poli20 is a 9-weeks course for approximately 30 students from Politehnica Bucharest, the best known technical university in Romania. The course is the result of collaboration between Yahoo!, Adobe, uberVU, and Politehnica Bucharest. UberVU is a Romanian startup that tracks topical conversations across many varieties of social media, all over the internet - blogs, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and so on.

The Poli20 students will learn how to create an application in a production environment. They will work in teams to complete a working application by the end of the course, due in December. The applications will use technology from Yahoo!, Adobe, and uberVU. We hope to have many applications to showcase at the end of the course.

Last week we invited Yahoo! engineer Ted Drake to talk about BOSS. He uses BOSS on some of his websites such as v3ggie, a vegetarian search engine. Ted discussed the features, issues, strategies, and opportunities offered by Yahoo! BOSS.

Ted's presentation was interrupted by lots of questions and ideas from the students (we have quite a great bunch of students at the course). We had a little bit of fun with various examples and there was a lot of good vibe in the room. Afterwards we walked to a small, nearby cafeteria and continued the talks till 10-11 in the night.

Young developers in Romania are very interested in Yahoo!'s APIs and the ways they can use them to create their own applications. Yahoo! is a leading service provider in Romania (a vast majority of Romanian Internet users use a Yahoo! service) so mashups of our APIs should prove to be really popular. I have seen some ideas of using Yahoo! Maps and photography that could really provide great use in Romania.

Check out some of my pictures from Poli 20 on Flickr.

Bobby Voicu
Community Manager, Yahoo! Romania

Posted at November 19, 2008 7:07 PM

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