When you get 25 of the world’s best hackers in a room together, some amazing things are bound to happen. That’s exactly what’s going down right now at Facebook’s 2nd annual “Hacker Cup” event being held at its offices in Menlo Park.

The registration for the event opened in January and started off with three online rounds of problem solving. Out of 6,000 (8,000 submissions total) qualifying submissions, the group has been shrunken down to just 25 and flown to Facebook for the finals.

The top coders, all male if you’re keeping score, from around the world are a mix of students, independent coders, and professionals. Facebook paid their way to California, including a stipend for obtaining a Visa, since only one of the participants is from the United States. The rest of the finalists are from Russia, Germany, Ukraine, Poland, China, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan.

The company describes the Hacker Cup as:

An annual algorithmic programming contest open to engineers from around the world.

The participants will be given three problems of varying difficulty to solve in three hours and will be judged on speed an accuracy. We’ll be able to tell you more about the problems that the hackers were given, and the winners, once the event is over this afternoon.

What are they hacking for, you ask? Along with the title of “world champion” as the top hacker, the first prize is $5,000, second prize is $2,000, $1,000 for third, and $100 for everyone else. Also, the winner gets their name on this pretty rad trophy:

This event is very much what you’d expect from a company like Facebook, where hacking is a part of its culture. Products like Photo and Timeline have been put together during company hackathons, and we’re told that ingenuity and creativity is the core mentality at Facebook. No matter what language you speak, or code in, solving problems is what the company does and is exactly what it’s putting these hackers to the test on.

How hard are the problems that these folks are working on? Host of the event and Software Engineer David Alves tells us that “They’re really hard”, and I’ll take his word for it. According to Alves only two people completed all three problems last year, with only fifteen completing just one. Participants are forbidden from asking for outside help on the problems even though Alves says that “it wouldn’t help them all that much since the best of the best are in this room”.

Right now you can hear a pin drop as the developers have just been given their first problem to solve. We’ll be sharing more as the day goes on.

Making sure that you have the most secure browser on the web means that you need a whole lot of people doing continual security audits and QA. While Google surely has this experience and capability in-house, the company like to challenge outsiders to find holes in its Chrome browser, and give money away to those who do.

For a little over two years, the Chrome team has had a “Chromium Security Rewards Program” that offers pretty sizable monetary rewards to developers who find security holes and bugs within its browser and increases the reward for those who successfully create a fix for the issue they find.

At the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver from March 7th-9th, Google will be sponsoring a challenge to exploit Chrome with a total of $1M being given away in the following categories:

$60,000 – “Full Chrome exploit”: Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence using only bugs in Chrome itself.

$40,000 – “Partial Chrome exploit”: Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence using at least one bug in Chrome itself, plus other bugs. For example, a WebKit bug combined with a Windows sandbox bug.

$20,000 – “Consolation reward, Flash / Windows / other”: Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence that does not use bugs in Chrome. For example, bugs in one or more of Flash, Windows or a driver. These exploits are not specific to Chrome and will be a threat to users of any web browser. Although not specifically Chrome’s issue, we’ve decided to offer consolation prizes because these findings still help us toward our mission of making the entire web safer.

By holding this type of challenge, Google gets to build a much better relationship with hackers and developers and keep the exploits away from those with nefarious intentions. The company is also giving away a Chromebook to all of the winners, a great way to get these security experts relying on Google’s technology platform even more.

To be able to win the prizes, participants must submit their exploits directly to Google and not anywhere else first, such as publishing them on a blog or sharing them in the press.

Yahoo! has announced today a new social entrepreneurship campaign and competition called “Social Innovation Starts with YOU”.

In partnership with Nahdet El Mahrousa, an Egypt-based NGO aim to encourage social entrepreneurship among young Egyptians. The campaign will take place on April 26 – 27, 2010 in Washington D.C., where Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang will deliver a keynote speech addressing how the Internet can positively transform lives, societies, and economies in emerging markets and Arab communities.

“Yahoo!’s announcement to acquire Maktoob last year shined the spotlight on tech entrepreneurs in the Arab world and the incredible potential and talent in the region that is largely untapped,” said Ahmed Nassef, managing director of Yahoo! Middle East. “This partnership with Nahdet El Mahrousa continues our commitment to invigorate and grow the Internet market in the Middle East as a whole and will enable the next wave of tech entrepreneurs from Egypt to realize their dreams. We can’t wait to see their innovative ideas!”

In an aim to inspire and motivate young online Egyptians, and starting from April, two successful Egyptian social entrepreneurs will be featured on the “Social Innovation Starts with YOU” campaign’s website.. currently unavailable but probably at http://socialinnovation.yahoo.com.

By June, up to ten entrepreneurs will be featured, and visitors to the website can vote for the entrepreneur who they think has made the biggest impact on their communities. The winner will be featured on the front page of Maktoob.com and be invited to be a judge for the campaign’s Social Innovation Competition.

In the Social Innovation competition, launching in June, Yahoo! and Nahdet El Mahrousa will invite individuals from across Egypt to be the next social entrepreneurs of the year by developing new ideas in the fields of education, health, environment, and a wildcard category. The campaign’s website will serve as an entry point for aspiring entrepreneurs by providing an online toolkit of inspirational stories, advice, resources, and Web services to get them started.

Ten winners will be honored with monetary grants and technical and management support to help bring their ideas to life. Among the winners will be already existing social entrepreneurs who will receive support to scale their efforts and achieve wider impact. In total, Yahoo! will contribute $500,000 to the campaign, and as part of that, will provide close to $250,000 in monetary grants to awardees. In addition to monetary support, the innovation awardees will also receive training and mentoring support for three years to help ensure success.

It’s encouraging to know that entrepreneurship support for the region is at an exponential rise. I hope the initiative will soon expand to cover the rest of the region. I also hope that more follow the tracks of Yahoo! and YallaStartup to support the young, talented, and sometimes desperate entrepreneurs in the Middle East.

A few weeks ago we told you all about YallaStartup!, an interesting initative that was set up by Elie Khoury (Woopra), Habib Haddad (Yamli) and Sami Shalabi (Google/ Zingku); three of the rising Entrepreneurial stars in the Middle East & North Africa region (MENA).

At the time, YallaStartup! was offering some lucky entrepreneurs the opportunity to take a six month entrepreneurship course offered by Potential, worth $2000, for free. Once a week course participants meet online for a few hours, allowing participants from all over the region to participate.

The results are in. Six lucky winners from across the region had been selected by the team at YallaStartup! with priority given to those who have had no formal education in entrepreneurship, or who have not had the opportunity to be exposed to entrepreneurship.

Tariq Al-Olaimy from Bahrain;  Muhammad Basheer from Qatar; Abdallah Absi from Lebanon; Muneeb Hussain from Morocco; Beshr Kayali from Syria and Firas Steitiyeh from Jordan

So, heed the call and YallaStartup! The region’s entrepreneurs have never had it this good!