Sad Guys on Trading Floors

In the middle of economic crisis, it’s always good to have a little humor.

Enter another ahort-lived internet meme, Sad Guys on Trading Floors. The captions are the best part.

Add comment October 8th, 2008

Home Automation Knowledge Leads to Less Power Usage

I’ll admit it, I’m a green hypocrite. There are a lot of green and sustainable activities I participate in and support, but I’m far from perfect on me and my family’s environmental impact.

In some cases, we’re not being as green as we could be due to not wanting to make the sacrifices, but in other cases it’s a lack of knowledge.

In general when wanting to use less energy, waste less, and live sustainably the choices boil down to using or doing something less, choosing a more green way to do it, or adopting to new technology that does it better.

Being a fan of technology, I like seeing articles like this that point out new ways that people can use technology to become more knowledgeable about their energy use and how to use less. I currently don’t know for sure how much energy the different appliances and electronics in my house used, and I guarantee I’d use them less or differently if I knew.

I’m definitely going to look into Control4 and other technologies to potentially add to our house. Unfortunately, these technologies are probably still prohibitively expensive for the population at large, but maybe in a few years they’ll become standard on all new homes built and be cheap enough that the mass population can retrofit to homes and apartments.

Add comment July 26th, 2008

Zappos Pays New Employees To Quit

As this past year at Yahoo! has been my first year working for what I’d consider to be a large company, I’ve become more interested in strategies around running and operating companies efficiently. My past experiences have been with startups or small companies where a lot of the challenges that larger companies face don’t exist.

This recent article about a practice at Zappos.com where they pay new customer service employees $1,000 to quit after their first month of training caught my eye. They seem to be thinking it’s doing well so far in making sure the employees working for Zappos.com really want to be there and feel that they are a good fit for the company.

It also brings up some questions. Does this affect the type of applicants they are getting? Do they have people applying with plans to actually quit ahead of time? Seems unlikely to me to go through a month’s worth of work and quit just to get an extra $1,000 opposed to keeping the job.

Is $1,000 enough? Would the number of employees quitting change if the number were $5,000? $10,000? They say that 10% of employees take them up on the $1,000 offer. How many take them up on a $10,000 offer? Is it the amount of money that matters, or just really giving the employees an easy out after the first month when they realize it isn’t for them?

Could this technique be used for more advanced positions? It seems to be working for customer service, but would it work for software developers? Marketing executives? Sure, you probably have to raise the number, but if I hired an experienced product marketer would they quit after a month for $10,000?

As I think through it, I think it might be the easy out of a job you don’t like instead of people really wanting the $1,000. Thoughts?

Add comment June 15th, 2008

Monday Should Be an Interesting Day at Work.

Microsoft pulls the offer for Yahoo.

1 comment May 3rd, 2008

Time to Catch UP

It’s been quite a while since my last blog post, and unfortunately I’m not blogging much for a variety of reasons. Essentially:

1. Adding a third kid to the mix at home definitely takes up some time.


2. Work is very busy and very engaging leaving not much time to blog.


3. A lot of the stuff I would say and discuss is either off limits while doing what I’m doing, or at least close enough to the line that I don’t want to spend the time analyzing it.

I would like to get to posting a bit more, so perhaps you’ll see some quicker posts with just quick comments. I tend to want to provide a lot of value to a post, but I rarely have the time to sit down for an hour or more and work on a lengthy post.

One thing that may help solve this is I’ve installed the wphone plugin so I can post directly from my iPhone. I’m finding that I’m interacting with Twitter and Facebook much more because I’m so often using my iPhone while traveling or out and about, so maybe if I can post to this blog easier through the iPhone I’ll do it more.

Instead of making lots of quick posts, I’ll go ahead and do a quick update in what’s going on:

1. I’ve had a number of recent offsite work trips recently that have been very productive and fun. There have been great discussions with smart people, and a lot of excitement about what we’re building at Yahoo! despite any clouds looming on the horizon. As you can see from the picture above while sailing in the Pacific Ocean, the offsite meetings also have a little fun as well. Unfortunately my team didn’t win the sailing race.

2. Ad Tech in San Francisco was quite a show, as it seemed like the largest show in recent memory. Unfortunately, I wasn’t really blown away by much there, as it seems like a lot of companies are competing in the ad network and ad exchange space without really differentiating themselves significantly from the competition.

3. The iPhone is really the most revolutionary thing web or technology wise that’s hit me in a long time. I’ve had mine for quite a while now, but it amazes me how useful it’s become. I also find that I do more RSS feed reading, twittering, Facebooking, and Digging on the iPhone than on a normal computer. Part of that may be because I’m traveling quite a bit, but I think mainly it’s because those applications all have simplified versions for the iPhone that I find more usable than the full web versions. I can’t stand the normal version of Facebook now compared to the ease of use and simplicity of the iPhone version.

4. My family is a lot of fun right now with the three kids all making it pretty wild at home.

5. I’m excited for summer and fall, as they are really the prime two seasons in Eugene for enjoying the outdoors.

Hopefully I can follow this up with an increased frequency of posts, although I anticipate keeping them pretty short until I have more time in my day at some point.

Add comment May 2nd, 2008

The Last Lecture from Dr. Randy Pausch Video

As a father of three kids, I found the following video from Dr. Randy Pausch to be important and quite moving. Paush is a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon who only has a short time to live due to pancreatic cancer, and he made a special last lecture for his class and most importantly his three kids that is about his mindset and how to live life. Pretty inspirational stuff.

Thanks to Cale and Sabrina for passing this along.

3 comments March 4th, 2008

An Overview of an Ad Exchange

Over on the YPN Blog, Jerri Gillean here in the Eugene Right Media/Yahoo! office contributed an overview of what an Ad Exchange is and some important questions to ask when comparing ad exchanges.

When you’re looking at joining an exchange, ask these questions:

1. Does it work in real time? Using historical data is like checking yesterday’s weather to predict what to wear today.
2. Is it neutral? A neutral exchange simply provides a technology that allows for buying and selling, and doesn’t attempt to hold all the relationships with the buyers and sellers.
3. Is it scaleable? If your site goes from 100,000 to 100,000,000 impressions a month, will that exchange be able to handle that volume?
4. Is it secure? How does the exchange protect you as a publisher? (This is key: It isn’t as easy as you may think.)
5. Is there open competition? Does the exchange allow non-members to compete with exchange members?
6. Is it a community? Sure, there’s competition, but are there also forums so that people can communicate with each other and form partnerships?
7. Is it a technology platform? Is it open, with APIs that anyone can connect to?
8. Does it have publishers, advertisers AND networks?
9. Is there a solution for me? Does the exchange offer a solution for both enterprise and non-enterprise publishers?
10. Are there strings attached? What else does the exchange require you to do?

In my opinion, not everyone claiming to be an ad exchange today really is one.  So the questions Jerri lists are definitely interesting to ask across all the companies who say they are operating an ad exchange today.

1 comment February 15th, 2008

Online Advertising Taking Over TV Advertising: It’s Happening

HipMojo points to and analyzes a report from WPP’s GroupM unit that Sweden will be the first country where internet advertising surpasses TV advertising in 2008, and it would happen in the UK in 2009. This is major. While I think it will take a bit longer in the USA, it’s happening faster than I would have predicted a couple of years ago.

1 comment January 4th, 2008

FTC Approves Google and Doubleclick Merger

It’s been heating up for a while in the online ad platform space, and it’s now going to get hotter with Google and Doubleclick’s merger allowed to proceed by the FTC. I expected it would be approved, so no big surprise here.

Add comment December 20th, 2007

I Like The Sound of Nanosolar

I’ve often thought solar power was one of the most promising clean energy options for many reasons, but it seems as if the advancement of the technology hasn’t moved as fast as it should or is capable. Over the last couple of years I’ve read about many promising advancements that seemed to start pushing solar forward. The latest news from a company called Nanosolar gets me excited as they’ve brought a new flat panel solar technology to a commercial state that is cheaper than many past solar options.

What’s the advantage of what they’re doing? It’s cheaper than big bulky panels, smaller and flatter, and very powerful. I think in the future we’ll start to see solar flat panels covering almost every building and rooftop. Why not harness the sun’s power? This seems like a great step for that business, congratulations to Nanosolar.

Add comment December 19th, 2007