Yahoo’s stunning “laptop”

It was supposed to be an Open Hack day event organized by Yahoo in Taiwan. Maybe it was too open (we still don’t have information of any hacks). The computing world was stunned on seeing the Flickr photos of scantily dressed young girls offering lap dances to the guests at the event.

Yahoo has promptly issued an apology, but not many are amused. “…Our hack events are designed to give developers an opportunity to learn about our APIs and technologies…our Taiwan Hack Day is not reflective of that spirit…” thus goes Yahoo’s apologies. But that has only further spurred the activities in blogosphere with one (http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/) having the rather amusing subject line “Honest, honey, she was just showing me her social networking APIs”

But many Taiwanese disagree, and say having dancing girls to attract people is culturally not at all uncommon in Taiwan. The event did not raise any eyebrows in Taiwan, and was not even in the news until the photos were leaked to Flickr. Coming to think of it, if there were similar “item” numbers in a Yahoo-sponsored Open Conference here in India, would anybody mind? Probably not, except Microsoft; there would be more people attending it than all Microsoft’s Developer Conference in the past 10 years combined!