Yahoo! launched their first ever Open Hack Day in Southeast Asia in mid October and developers have been raving about it since then. Other than the usual hacker and developer group meetups, there hasn’t been any large scale hacking events going around in Southeast Asia. That definitely took a turn when Yahoo! launched the Open Hack Day initiative. It’s a refreshing change to the up and coming developer ecosystem, something even our friends have been raving about for a while now.

Best part of all is that Yahoo! is encouraging people from various regions to mingle and innovate by giving opportunities to talented developers around the region. They have done this through their regional developer selection campaign where they will be flying developers across the region to attend and hack at the event. They recently rounded up the selection process and 1 developer from each region (Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam and Philippines) was picked for an all expenses paid trip to attend the event . We are proud to announce the 4 deserving developers who will be joining us in Jakarta next week.

From Singapore

Siddharth Singhal is a technology enthusiast driven by innovation. His work has gotten many accolades around the world by companies like Gemalto, Microsoft, British Telecom, Tata Consultancy Services, Freescale Semiconductors, N.P.L. , N.I.C.(India), A.U.V.S.I. etc.. . His last two ventures Indriyaan and Jal gained a lot of traction worldwide. While his primary work has been in the field of embedded systems, the objective driving him has been to enable better lives, through technology. He has worked on a variety of languages and platforms from assembly level, C in RTOSes, hobby robots etc. to developing entire solutions on Microsoft technologies for Imagine Cup’07 and ’08.

From Malaysia

Nazrul swings on the web, life, culture and free open source software technology leading a life as a creative information technologist. An experienced Web designer & developer, he programmatical-ly uses his left brain to create & develop web applications and participate in open source projects munching Drupal cookies & Open Source cakes. On the right, he embraces chaos & simplicity in design.

From Vietnam

Chan is an 18-year old chap who works as a freelancer in Ho Chi Minh City – Vietnam. Having gone through an intensive-algorithm program in high school, he is now only interested in web technology and has since then, dabbled with Flash, PHP, JavaScript and web design. After his senior year, he decided to take a year off and work for Zoes Creative Studio as an IT Manager. However, with a great desire for technology, he longs to finish his science bachelor degree in KAIST University for the next four coming years. During his spare time, Chan. loves to travel and get his hands dirty with the traditional Japanese paper folding art called Origami. Check him out on Facebook and Twitter.

From Philippines

After a five-year stint as head of VAS and later, of Innovations, at Sun Cellular, Dominick Danao founded Happy.Mobile Corp., a mobile VAS content aggregator in the Philippines. Happy.Mobile is also into consulting services, listing as clients Nokia,Siemens Networks, Bayan Telecommunications (CDMA network), Bluemedia Communications (WiMAX provider), among others.

Mr. Danao’s primary success as an IT innovator and entrepreneur happened 10 years ago when he founded and ran Pinoymail Corp., a free e-mail company catering to Filipinos worldwide. The company was sold at the height of the dotcom era in 1999, making it one of the Philippines’ biggest tech stories at the start of the millenium.

He has now replaced a cozy corporate life for a startup and is back into writing code. Obviously, his main interest is mobile applications; however, of late, he has been working on casual games on Facebook and online social games for kids with his nine-year-old daughter, who is the “chief creative officer” in his nascent gaming company.