It gives a preview into the type of things we’re working on making possible in a scalable manner through a premium exchange on APT from Yahoo!.

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

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.

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?

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.

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?