Yahoo: It's our birthday, so have a cone on us
Company celebrates turning 10 by offering free coupons for a scoop of ice cream at any Baskin-Robbins store.
The company, which turned 10 on Wednesday, is celebrating by offering a free scoop of ice cream to its customers. People can visit Yahoo to download their coupons for a free 2.5-ounce scoop of their favorite ice cream at any Baskin-Robbins outlet in their neighborhood.
Yahoo is providing a map on the site to locate nearby stores. Customers must enter their name, e-mail address and ZIP code to receive the coupon. The offer is valid only for Wednesday.
"One of the primary food groups for many Yahoo employees is ice cream--and we'd like to raise a cone alongside all those who have made Yahoo a nice place to stay on the Internet," Yahoo co-founder David Filo said in a statement.
An actual 10-year-old child, however, may be blocked from the free ice cream offer. Under a 1998 federal law called the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, Yahoo isn't permitted to collect information from anyone under 13 years old.
In that case, Yahoo asks for parental consent by requiring that a credit card number be typed in. (The process, of course, only works if young children are honest when typing in their age. If they lie and say they were born before 1992, they can proceed directly to the free coupon.)
In another bid to mark the occasion, the Net giant unveiled an online gallery of 100 photographs that tracks the evolution of the Internet over a decade.
Each photo hosts a blog feature with a comment option for consumers. The company has left the 100th cell blank and is asking people to update it by imagining "the future of the Web."