Yahoo is trying to get back in touch with its "inner start-up," BusinessWeek says, by targeting business development from within. The name for this effort is Brickhouse, a new unit within Yahoo that is scheduled to be officially unveiled in March and is intended to serve as a kind of in-house VC firm/incubator. Brickhouse is being led by Caterina Fake, a co-founder of Flickr, which Yahoo acquired in March 2005. Brickhouse tested its first big idea this past week, with the release of Pipes, a free online service that lets users remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. Pipes can be used to run personal web projects, or publish and share web services without ever having to write a line of code. BusinessWeek notes that it attracted so much traffic when it debuted this past Wednesday, it had to be taken down temporarily. While Yahoo executives don't expect all of Brickhouse's big ideas to take off, one of the unit's other aims is to offer entrepreneurial employees an outlet for their ideas, as opposed to seeing them leave and start their own venture.
A random sampling of blogs suggests that Pipes has garned a lot of interest so far:
-- Tim O'Reilly is practically breathless, calling it: "A milestone in the history of the internet. While it's still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone."
-- Nick Bradbury explains that it's a platform play and how to use it. (via Rex Hammock)
