Yahoo staff take web ideas public

Yahoo's Hack days give staff 24 hours to work on an innovative idea

Yahoo has begun publicly testing two web services created as part of an internal competition to show off employee innovation.

A system to choose clothes based on colour, and a technology to merge maps, were both put forward at Yahoo's Hack days, where staff are given 24 hours to work on an innovative idea.

MapMixer won the product design competition at the company's California headquarters.

The application allows users to take any map and merge it with existing information on Yahoo Maps to create a hybrid showing the extra details.

The software is designed for non-technical users and handles all the scaling and rotation automatically. The hybrid map can then be saved in a user's My Maps account for later browsing.

Meanwhile, the Shop by Color feature is designed to help customers on the Yahoo Shopping portal.

Developed by Yahoo Shopping's Hayro Kolukisaoglu and Sundeep Tirumalareddy, the search filters items based on one of 56 colours.

This allows shoppers to choose items of the same colour, regardless of the colour name used by a particular manufacturer.

Hack days have been held at Yahoo every three months since 2005 and include staff from offices all around the world.