Yahoo "Sorry" For Offering Lap Dances at Developers Event

From DailyTech: A big ad partnership from Microsoft may in time help Yahoo rediscover its magic, but over the last year the company has seemed very lost. With its search engine powered by Bing and its team now focusing on APIs and the advertising partnership, Yahoo has yet to prove itself a legitimate competitor to Google.

Now an embarrassing debacle is earning the company some additional publicity. After Yahoo hosted Taiwan Open Hack Day, a special event for engineers and developers that was held last weekend, a series of photos found there way onto the internet -- as ill-thought out decisions often do.

It turns out that Yahoo hired scantily clad women to spice up the event a little bit and give the guest lap dances. They attended what Yahoo described as a "brainstorming" session, clad in bras and miniskirts. The pictures made their way onto Flickr and soon lit up the blogosphere, prompting headlines like "Honest, honey, she was just showing me her social networking APIs."

Apparently Yahoo did the exact same thing the year before, according to All Things Digital's Kara Swisher. Writes Swisher, "It is not clear why all the thumpa-thumpa music and dancing gals did not engender complaints last year."

Somehow it never crossed the mind of Yahoo's events coordinators that hiring lap dancers yet again might not be a wise decision. Ultimately, it was the provocative pictures that truly launched the story.

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