Yahoo Announces Ultimate Connection Winners

A $25,000 budget on Yahoo Search Marketing and ongoing help with marketing and website design have been bestowed on three entrepreneurs. Yahoo users selected the winners from among the finalists in the Ultimate Connection contest and brought them to New York.

Yahoo’s Michael Mattis discussed the winners and their time in New York on Yahoo’s official blog. Fairy sculptor Melissa Belland, compact keyboard inventor Mike Willner, and Kids Crooked House builder Glen Halliday scooped up the prizes.

Photos of the “power lunch in the sky” showed the winners and Yahoo’s select marketing pros dining on a platform raised over New York Harbor. If the winners were expecting that lunch to take place in some tall building in Manhattan, they must have been pretty surprised at Yahoo’s choice of venue.

Since it was a marketing promotion, it makes sense that Yahoo would do something different and attention getting with the presentation. We just hope no one needed to visit the ‘little entrepreneur’s room’ while gently swaying over the water.

Online entrepreneurs only have a day left to crank out their 500-word essays and send them in to Yahoo. Their competition has a deadline of May 30, 2007, at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time.

Yahoo’s Ultimate Connection is aimed at businesses that want an online edge. Their lineup of prizes for the trio of successful essayists will be capped with an executive meeting with Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, who oh by the way happens to be Dad’s Vice President of Development.

There are other goodies in store as well:

• A $25,000 Yahoo! Search Marketing budget
• A power lunch with your marketing mentor in New York City
• Access to your marketing mentor and a Yahoo! Search marketing mentor throughout the year
• A web site makeover from Yahoo! Small Business and FastPivot

If you take your laptop with you to lunch, this would be a good day to use some of that time to write up an entry and send it along to Yahoo.