Ajax Girl

This email was sent by Yahoo CFO Susan Decker to all Yahoo employees today at 9:01 AM PST and has the details of who’s doing what in their new Advertiser & Publisher Group. Lots and lots of SVP and EVP promotions from the Yahoo ranks, and other peanut butter being spread around.

I want to do a summary of this but I can’t get more than three paragraphs in before I get distracted and/or fall asleep.

From: Sue Decker
Sent: Wednesday, February 14, 2007 9:01 AM
Subject: Update on APG Organization

Yahoos,

In December, Yahoo! announced the formation of the Advertiser & Publisher Group (APG), and today I am excited to provide more details with you about how we will be structured and the talented team that will lead APG.

The mission of the Advertiser & Publisher Group is to lead the transformation of how advertisers connect with their target consumers and businesses across the Internet, thereby driving more value for more advertisers and more publishers than any other company. We believe we have the right combination of assets to capitalize on the market opportunity and drive long-term strategic growth for Yahoo!. Our primary objectives in designing this organization are driving customer-centricity, maximizing accountability and facilitating fast, smart decision-making. To that end, we have organized APG around three key critical functions:

1. Demand Channels: focused on providing marketing solutions to our advertising customers
2. Supply Channels: focused on strategically selecting and serving our publishing customers
3. Marketing Products: focused on matching every advertising offer from our demand channels to the best piece of advertising inventory from our supply channels, whether that is on Yahoo! or on one of our publishing partners’ sites.

Marketing Solutions (Demand Channels). Consistent with Yahoo!’s organizational focus on being customer-centric, we have chosen to organize our demand channels around two primary sets of advertisers: those who interact with us through a direct sales relationship (Direct Sales Channel) and those that interact with us primarily through a self-service online model (Online Channel).

The Direct Sales Channel will be led by Greg Coleman, EVP Global Sales, who will continue to manage our industry-leading direct Internet sales organization focused on delivering the most effective marketing solutions to our larger customers. Wenda Harris Millard and David Karnstedt will continue to report to Greg and lead Yahoo!’s direct sales organizations. Greg and his team will also continue to drive our international sales growth, working in tandem with the sales leadership in local markets. The sales operations team will largely remain in Greg’s organization as well, while we will be moving yield management and inventory optimization to a new group on which I’ll elaborate below.

The Online Channel will be led by Rich Riley, who has been promoted to SVP Online Channel & Small Business Services. Rich will lead this team in enhancing and delivering value to those businesses that interact with Yahoo! primarily through a self-service online model, whether they are looking for marketing solutions, publisher products or merchant solutions.

Yahoo! Publisher Network (Supply Channels). Our publishing customers are a critical component of the ad network ecosystem, and we are committed to driving and expanding monetization opportunities for this important customer segment. I have asked Hilary Schneider to lead the Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN) organization. I also want to thank David Karnstedt, who stepped in to lead this group while also leading direct search sales, and enhancing the overall connection and strategy of this group to be more aligned with advertising customer objectives. This team will be instrumental in developing and executing our global strategy of becoming the leading search, display and listings-based ad network by securing ad inventory on off-Yahoo! publisher sites. This off-Yahoo! inventory will complement the Yahoo! network inventory and enable our demand channels to offer our advertising customers not only the broadest array of marketing products but also the most robust and high quality audiences as well. As part of his responsibilities for the online channel, Rich Riley will drive the strategy around customer acquisition and retention of small publishers, supporting Hilary in this capacity.

Marketing Products Division (MPD). The Marketing Products Division is the “magic in the middle” that connects the two customer-centric functions described above. This division is responsible for developing the marketing products and ad marketplaces that will drive the greatest effectiveness for our advertising customers and the highest monetization for our publishing customers. MPD will achieve this by optimally connecting the marketing offers generated by the demand channels with the ad inventory generated by the Yahoo! network and YPN with speed and scale. We are currently searching for the head of this division. MPD is comprised of the following:

Search and Listings Marketplaces: Tim Cadogan has been promoted to SVP, Search and Listings Marketplaces and will be responsible for business and product strategy, marketplace design and matching, business operations and policy for several marketing products, including sponsored search, domain match and the submit family of listings products.

Display Marketplaces: Todd Teresi has been promoted to SVP, Display Marketplaces and will be responsible for business and product strategy, marketplace design and matching, business operations and policy for several marketing products, including display and content match. As the mission of MPD is to optimally connect offers to inventory, yield management and inventory optimization will move from Sales Ops into this team.

As we move toward a more centralized model for product management in order to drive our key objectives, two key organizations will support these two ad marketplaces teams:

Product Management: Mark Morrissey has been promoted to SVP of APG Product Management and will have global responsibility for the product requirements and prioritization of all advertiser and publisher marketing products, including sponsored search, domain match, content match, display advertising, advertiser applications, publisher applications, and mobile monetization. In the past, our products have been largely managed separately – search vs. display vs. listings, advertiser apps vs. publisher apps, small biz vs. YPNO. To align around super-serving our customers by creating more seamless experiences with our products and leveraging the breadth of our ad products, we are moving toward a much more centralized product management structure by adding display advertising, content match, and publisher applications to Mark’s current responsibilities.

Engineering: Qi Lu, EVP, Engineering will lead all engineering efforts for APG and will partner with Mark Morrissey in Product Management to ensure development and delivery of leading edge products. Qi continues to report to Zod with a dotted line into APG. In his new role leading the SDS-APG solutions team, Dev Patel heads the group that will continue its key role as the data solutions provider to APG, working with both engineering and product management.

Steve Mitgang and Lisa Morita have decided to leave the company to pursue new challenges. Steve’s existing product management and marketing teams and Lisa’s existing Customer and Content Solutions team have become part of key groups in the new APG organization. With Steve’s departure, all of product management (formerly under Steve) will now report to Mark Morrissey . Product marketing in Steve’s org will be organized with product strategy reporting to Tim and Todd in their respective product areas and channel marketing reporting to the demand/supply channels. With Lisa’s departure, Customer Solutions will report to Rich Riley and Tim Cadogan will lead Content and Product Policy, Product Quality and Analysis, Content Solutions and International CCS, on an interim basis. Steve and Lisa have been tremendous assets to the company, and I sincerely wish them both well in future endeavors.

In addition to the Demand and Supply channels and the Marketing Products division, APG includes the Local Markets & Commerce Division and Strategic Marketing and Major Initiatives.

Local Markets & Commerce Division (LMC, formerly Marketplaces). Hilary Schneider has been promoted to EVP of LMC and the publisher network. She will continue to run the Marketplaces businesses (Shopping, Travel, Autos, Real Estate, Local, Hot Jobs, Personals), which are being re-branded Local Markets & Commerce and, as discussed above, she will also oversee our publisher strategy. Hilary has extensive experience managing the operations of large publishing companies in both digital and print media, including Knight Ridder and Red Herring, and I am confident in her ability to lead and grow both the YPN and LMC organizations.

Second, I will look to hire a leader for Strategic Marketing & Major Initiatives. This person will work closely with various groups to pull together APG’s customer and market segmentation understanding, competitive benchmarks, and marketing and communications strategies. He or she will manage a small APG incubation team to generate ideas and implement plans for new segment-specific offerings.

Primary Support Functions

There are several key roles and teams that will serve in support functions to extend my capacity to manage this new and dynamic organization. I am happy to announce Jeff McCombs has been promoted to chief of staff for APG. Jeff and I have worked closely for almost two years on a variety of projects at Yahoo!, including most recently in his capacity as the finance lead for the eBay deal, Yahoo!’s initial foray into the graphical ad network business and he is already well-versed in the new APG organization and many of its priorities.

I’m also pleased to announce a new addition to Yahoo!, Mark Rubash, who will join Yahoo’s finance team as SVP of Operations Finance for APG. Mark will report to me until we identify and hire our new CFO and will partner with Rachel Glaser to cover all of the operating groups in the new structure (see separate email). David Windley is leading the HR function for APG. David joined us recently from Microsoft where he was the HR executive supporting the Chief Operating Officer. Mary Grant will head up the talented legal team supporting APG, and Mary’s experience during her tenure at YSM will be invaluable to this group.

As with any changes of this scale, we are evolving the organization over time. For example, we are still evaluating how we will organize for global delivery, including our U.S. based employees that help us deliver our products internationally. Additionally, to strengthen accountability and streamline decision-making, the UED team will transfer its reporting into one of the executives in the Marketing Products Division. Until the leader of this group is named, the team will continue to report through Larry Tesler.

Moving forward we are focused on finding the best ways to achieve our mission with speed and scale to deliver the best experience for all of our customers. Your leadership team will be facilitating the transition of the organizational changes outlined in this email in the coming weeks.

Please plan to join the APG all-hands today at 2 p.m. We invite all Burbank employees to attend in person at the Burbank Marriott. For those in other offices, you can access the live webcast from the front page of Backyard. If you would like to submit a question to be answered at this all-hands, please email question@yahoo-inc.com.

We have structured APG with the singular focus of driving more value for more advertisers and more publishers than any other company. I am incredibly excited by the opportunity ahead of us, the amazing assets we have to build upon, the ability of the APG leaders and their tremendously talented teams. Now, it’s game time! I look forward to all that we will accomplish together in 2007 and beyond.

Sue

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/90912529/

Vyew is a new collaboration tool suite that lets users share a common online visual workspace and their desktops. It is impressive. The service came out of beta status today and is now offering premium accounts in addition to the free accounts already available.

Vyew is a little like WebEx and other high end conferencing offerings. It’s also a little like Thinkature and other easy collaboration tools. It’s definitely a company to watch, though I didn’t have the easiest time using it myself while testing it.

Free accounts allow the creation of two workspaces with 10 uploaded items. For $10 or $20 per month you can raise those limits substantially.

Vyew doesn’t require a desktop client to be downloaded by users. That’s key for quick and easy adoption by new users. Workspaces are shared in Flash and desktops with a Java applet. There’s text chat and with a single click Vyew will generate a unique login for participants to use for a free telephone conference call.

There’s a well produced, in depth screencast with a very earnest voice here.

The workspace tools are on the sophisticated end of standard. Pointing arrows are unidirectional, which is a small thing but I’d like to have text to the right of an item and point an arrow left connecting the two. That’s not easy to do though and hardly anyone goes to the trouble in adding that to services like this. There are a number of alpha-plugins like the Yahoo Maps one in screenshot below.

How is the performance? The administrative functions are very well done - all the options available are a joy to use. In Safari I had some trouble with the workspace when the desktop sharing was turned on. The desktop sharing I found easy to start but a little difficult to use without any practice.

I would recommend trying out Vyew and seeing if you can get the use of it down. If you can, the price and features are fantastic.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/90849343/

Speaking of weather, Yahoo weather says “Unknown Precipitation” is falling from the sky in NYC.

WeatherDock opts for the phrase “Wintry Mix,” which makes the precip sound more like a cocktail or lounge music compilation.

And then there’s the icon that accompanies it: every crappy weather icon you can think of layered on top of each other. I think if you look really close at it, you can see locusts.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/270-wintry-mix

How come when I search for Chicago or Tucson or any other US city on Weather.com I don’t get a single pixel of weather data on the results screen?

I get links for ski forcasts. Links if I’m getting married. Links to traffic information. Links to city parks. Links to lawn & garden resources. But no temperature, no precipitation, no forecast.

If I search for a specific zip code I do get weather, but searching for a city name gives me just a list of matches (the first one is the one I want 99% of the time). Just show me the weather and give me the other links and matches as secondary options, not primary suggestions.

Who’s making decisions over there?

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/269-weathercoms-odd-priorities

TechPresident is a new online project tracking and aggregating information about all the US Presidential candidates’ use of online social media.  Though consisting of more Democratic Party aligned contributors than anyone else, the group’s research has already resulted in some fascinating revelations.

Candidates’ use of MySpace, YouTube, Google and Yahoo! ads are the primary things being watched on the site so far.  The sidebar of the site displays the growth of each candidate’s friends list on MySpace.  Barack Obama is in the lead and growing fastest among Democrats, Texan Ron Paul is in the same position (noting a statistical anomaly otherwise favoring Mitt Romney) among Republicans.  A post from yesterday titled “YouTube: Who Gets It?” charts the candidates’ use of that medium.  All the Democratic candidates except Dennis Kucinich (who also believes government sponsored jet contrails are used to control the weather) have official channels on YouTube, while only Milt Romney does among Republicans.

Among other interesting findings are that only six candidates have purchased search engine keyword ads and Republicans are doing a much better job of it.  Only Republicans are buying ads on Yahoo! as well as Google and only Republicans are reported to be buying ads for searches for their opponents’ names.

TechPresident is a project of the Personal Democracy Forum.  Other contributors include Zack Exley, Director of Online Organizing and Communications, Kerry/Edwards ‘04, Mike Turk, former e-campaign director of the Republican National Committee and Bush-Cheney 2004, Lynne d Johnson, Senior Editor, FastCompany.com, video blogging star Steve Garfield and Ruby Sinreich, of NetCentricCampaigns.com among others.

If you’re interested in viewing all the Presidential Candidates’ videos on YouTube, embedded below are the RSS feeds of all their official channels according to TechPresident.  (Disclosure: The service used to display the videos is provided by SplashCast, my employer.  It’s also the only way I know to display all these relevant videos. Click the guide button to see the full list.)

See also BlogtheCampaign08, another group project tracking social media in the Presidential election. That one is made up largely of web 2.0 consultants readers here may be familiar with.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/90764736/

Chris Double of Mozilla has posted about a proof of concept showing Zimbra working offline with Firefox.

The Firefox features used to enable offline operation were:

• DOM Storage for storing emails and folder information. DOM Storage is an implementation of a WHATWG specification.
• Offline Cache. A patch is available for Firefox that adds an offline cache specifically for web applications to store data (like images, pages, etc) that must be available while offline. Items are loaded in the cache using a rel=”offline-resource” element on a <link> element.
• JAR file Protocol. Firefox accepts JAR protocol URLs. These reference individual items in a JAR file and allow convenient bundling and caching of resources. For example, to reference the file /core/AjxCore.js in the ajax.jar file, the URL would be: jar:/zimbra/js/ajax.jar!/core/AjxCore.js
• Offline Events. The browser has “offline” and “online” events that are triggered when the user chooses to go offline via the menu, or when network connectivity is lost. I modified Zimbra to listen for these events and display a status indicator showing whether it is in offline or online mode.

He also put together a screencast showing him working offline.

Nice work!

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/offline-zimbra-in-action

Israeli company BubblePly has significantly upgraded its service for overlaying images and text on video.  Launched in December, the service now allows live links, full control over fonts and extensive use of images.  It’s a much more useful service now than it was before.

Users can work with videos added by URL from almost any video site on the web.  Copyright concerns are believed to be moot because the service doesn’t change the video itself, it just places a layer of data on top of it.

The company highlights favorite videos from popular viral video sites for users to annotate - though annotation may be too serious a word.  There’s presumably no shortage of young people who would enjoy marking up the recent hit video “Spiders on Drugs,” though BubblePly points to a copy of the video allegedly sold to ebaumsworld by someone other than the creator.

The company has made a number of special Valentine’s Day videos that users might enjoy marking up, as you can see below in the second of two examples.  I would get in big trouble if I sent one of these videos to my girlfriend today, but I suppose if I had BubblePlied the video invite to tonight’s screenings of FourEyedMonsters in 30 cities that might have been appreciated.

BubblePly seems to be targeting youth social networks, though a Google search for their name on the site brings back almost no results - compared to almost 100k for slide.com.  Perhaps this new upgrade will make Bubbleply more useful for different potential users.

See also Mojiti for an arguably stuffier implementation of similar functionality.

Check out these two examples of videos that have been worked over by BubblePly. You can add your own annotation as well, including notes on any Web 2.0 companies in the first video that have tanked since it was posted last August.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/90718424/

SilverStripe is an opensource CMS from Wellington, NZ.

The admin piece is built using Prototype, Scriptaculous and the TinyMCE rich text editor. It uses Object Oriented PHP5 and talks to MySQL backend.

There is a nice feel to using the explorer interface to manage files (e.g. hit rearrange and you can drag and drop), and then seeing your site in preview mode. A really nice touch is being able to see your site in draft, and compare it to the published version.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/silverstripe-cms

Scorcese uses X to mark the spot in The Departed

“As an homage to Howard Hawks’ classic 1932 Scarface, Scorsese scattered Xs throughout the movie (some more subtle than others), using them as a symbol of impending doom.” [via GF]

Eliot Noyes: “The Forgotten Pioneer of Corporate Design”

“It is harder still to explain why the designer and architect, who died in 1977 at age 67, isn’t better known today, when the principles he championed—the notion that good design is good business, for instance, and the belief in interdisciplinary design teams—are now accepted wisdom. Every designer working in or for Corporate America today owes Noyes a debt of gratitude.”

WSJ analyzes social bookmarking sites and says it’s a few power users that dominate links

“The Journal’s analysis found that a substantial number of submissions originated with a handful of users. At Digg, which has 900,000 registered users, 30 people were responsible for submitting one-third of postings on the home page. At Netscape.com, a single user named ‘STONERS’ — in real life, computer programmer Ed Southwood of Dayton, Ohio — was behind fully 217 stories over the two-week period, or 13% of all stories that reached the most popular list. (Netscape, which gained fame with its namesake browser, is now owned by Time Warner’s AOL unit and operates a news site.) On Reddit, one of the most influential users is 12-year-old Adam Fuhrer.”

Mingling with restaurant customers

“My dad never seemed to be working at all. I’d look on as he mingled with diners, mostly making idle chit chat. With strangers he’d walk up to their tables as they ate and ask them how their meals were. At the tables of regulars he might sit down and share a drink, maybe even roll some dice. It was a fantastic excuse for a job. Or so I thought. It turned out that my dad had the most important job in the place. His endless conversations with patrons clued him into changes he needed to make on the menu. He was quickly able to comp a round of drinks if customers received slow service, nipping their frustration in the bud. They would often tell him how they’d heard about the restaurant, and possibly mention an upcoming party they were planning and did the restaurant do banquets? (answer: of course!)”

Suggestions for improving the Complete New Yorker UI

“Nearly 33% of the vertical space is consumed by tool chrome, those thick gray bars segmenting the screen. Combined with the often bizzare and mostly useless ‘Abstract’ below, this leaves 11 rows for search results, the place where users make decisions on what to launch in the viewer. Unforgiveable.”

PowerPoint solutions that “move beyond bullet points”

“The single most important thing you can do to dramatically improve your presentations is to have a story to tell before you work on your PowerPoint file. You’ll take Hollywood’s cue and write a special type of script that focuses your ideas and helps you figure out what you want to say and how you want to say it.”

Information visualization and the debate over global warming

“The most memorable moment in ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ is when Gore goes off the edge of the graph, rising up in a cherrypicker high above the stage to show what will happen if the present trends continue unabated. It’s a nice bit of theater—the message is dramatized as well as shown through the graph and described verbally. It’s also a crucial moment in the story Gore is telling.”

“I did not know that yesterday!” provides answers to unusual questions

What country drinks the least beer? How did the rainbow become associated with gay pride? What was the first thing ever sold on eBay? How did the tradition of placing candles on a birthday cake originate? Etc.

“It’s just like a mini mall!” [via CM]

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/267-sunspots-the-mingling-edition

I hadn’t been in a Blockbuster for years so I found a recent trip there amusing. See, Blockbuster offers 2-day movie rentals. But the company gives you a one-week grace period too. So, in reality, you get 2 days + 1 week to return that movie at no additional cost. And if you get a 7-day rental, you actually get 14 days. The poor clerk who had to explain this setup sounded like he was trapped in an Abbott and Costello routine.

Similarly, I recently received an Amazon Reward Certificates valid for 18 months. But the certificates says it’s “valid for 18 months, followed by a 6-month grace period, after which it will expire.”

So 2 days is actually 9 days. 7 days is 14 days. And 18 months is actually 24 months. The extra time is nice, but it’s too bad people don’t just say what they mean anymore.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/251-grace-periods