Lijit

It’s been a while since we’ve profiled a Lijit employee. I’m blaming that on the fact that there only a precious few left that haven’t been interviewed yet AND it’s been a little crazy around these parts. But we’re back and very excited to introduce you to one of the feistiest** members of our Publisher Acquisition team…Erica Prather. Lijit is Erica’s first REAL job out of college (awwwww…how cute!) so she still has a lot of that school spirit that seems to wither the further from graduation you get. Here she is, showing off her Jayhawk pride…

Can you say Rock Chalk? She can…and loudly. But the thing about Erica is that she brings that same enthusiasm to everything else she does as well. See for yourself.

What is your Lijit contribution?

I work in business development, which means that I identify publishers that would benefit from the Lijit search. I maintain relationships with current publishers, help customize their widget and learn way too much about Heidi Montag Pratt while doing the aforementioned. I also act as Advertising Services Manager - meaning that I create ad tags, schedule ad campaigns and generally manage the affairs of our publishers when it comes to the ads served on their page.

What is your favorite word and why?

I appreciate the f*#% word for all of its versatile goodness - if you can name one emotion it doesn’t cover, let me know. But since my mom is reading this, I’ll have to say milquetoast, because it sounds like a cool Kellogg’s cereal, but it’s really describing a boring person.

What turns you off, emotionally, spiritually or creatively?

I’ll have to go with excessive materialism and a skewed perception of reality…I think that people tend to forget that they go to bed with a full belly and a roof over their heads every night. Even I struggle with it (don’t get me started on car troubles) - but realistically we deal with what I call ‘luxury’ problems on a daily basis. Losing your vacation home, your Porsche or your retirement because of a bad economy is really not a problem…I think we forget how truly blessed we are.

What profession, other than your own, would you like to attempt and why?

I just want to travel and get paid for it or just survive doing it. I don’t care if it’s cliche - I love everything about it: the accents, new smells, interesting foods, weird things people wear, funky music, other people’s traditions, it’s awesome. Should I start looking for a trust fund baby to marry?

Something you’re guilty of…

I think we all know that I hate sharing my food when ASKED to. You can borrow my clothes, shoes, earrings, even sleep in my bed, but touch my food and you are dead to me. Maybe it’s because as a kid, if you didn’t make it downstairs in time, you’d miss out on the muffins/cinnamon rolls/treats because I had two siblings (one being a garbage disposal brother). But excuses and psychological reasoning aside - I hate sharing my food unwillingly.

As you can tell from the above pictures and her profile answers, we can all safely say that Erica is far from being a milquetoast. She is spunky, a quick learner and always prepared with a punchline. In other words, she fits in around Lijit perfectly.

Especially with her love of the f*%# word. (Sorry Erica’s mom!)

**Yes, it really is a word.

Lots of reports over the last couple-a days are hitting the wires on how Microsoft Bing and Google are attacking the problem of adding feeds from Twitter and FaceBook into their respective search indexes. Cool. I personally want my stuff discovered and leveraged by folks the world over as I am proud and confident in the content I publish….be it my blog posts, my tweets, my videos, etc etc. To me as a blogger, this is a good thing, offering additional possibilities of exposure and distribution of my creations.

But I am still wresting with the meaning of ‘real time’ in this context…e.g. how content sources like tweets and public Wall Posts meaningfully get ranked, injected into these types of searches and ultimately yield better ‘discover-ability’ of my content.

But first, humor me. Perhaps I am slow, but I’m not understanding ‘real time search’. To me, ‘real time’ is indicative of push-based notification. In other words an event happens and software triggers a process to push this event and it’s notification package to a recipient. Example: Someone tweets and my desktop tweeting software indicates for me via pop up that a new tweet has occurred…all in ‘near’ real time.

Search, however, is inherently post facto. It is a mechanism of forensics to help humans parameterize what they are looking for on the interwebs and the search tools diligently do their job to identify and produce results in a fairly consistent ‘page rank’-oriented way. Then you start the laborious process of hunting through the results to find the needle in the haystack and hope it’s relevant. In other words, an event happens, the search engine indexes this event (even if moments after it was created in near real time) and thus allows it to be discovered later via search. I think that our CEO Todd Vernon summed up three distinct categories for search really succinctly in his post on this subject of examining real time search…

1. DISCOVERING: Something is happening, it may or may not be something I care about, and I don’t know it’s happening. I usually find out about it via some source, personal network, facebook, twitter, digg, CNN, etc. I don’t have a specific mission to know it before I find out about it.
2. ALERTING: Something is happening and I knew ahead of time I wanted to know about it when it happens. I usually find out about these things via some source such as Google Alerts or Filtrbox. Alerts behave a little like a broad based search with asynchronous results that come back some day.
3. SEARCHING: Something is happening or has happened or simply exists. I want to know more about it. I generally want the best answer, or the most recent answer. I may want the best recent answer, but that’s highly subjective and generally defaults back to my trust in the source as the tie breaker.

So the above known (and I’ll cease and desist on the real time versus retro active search debate for the time being), I have some additional and more important concerns, mainly related to the sheer vastness of the twitterfaceverse and how anything relevant can be discovered from these fire hoses.

Assume someone searches for a term on Bing and they then proceed to the new Twitter timeline result set to poke around at the results. It’s a comprehensive result set at best. But, how am I discovered? Again I’m lost in the sea of the twitter chatter. And as importantly (to me, anyways), how is my trusted network discovered in connection and in context to me during a search as I really want their words, thoughts and images discovered along with mine to help a searcher form an opinion.

To solve this, we did things quite a bit orthogonally here at Lijit to the approach outlined above. We’ve essentially take the ‘internet’ and boiled it down to very explicit and succinct publisher-defined networks. Think of it as filtering the internet’s vastness by producing results based in absolute relevance between sets of trusted associations. If you’ve visited my site, you’re invariably a cycling geek like me. And if you’ve gone so far as to search my site, it’s likely you’ve done so with some strong intent and precision in what you are looking for. Lijit issues results based upon the term’s relevance in all my content and that of my network to provide a super tight snapshot of information we serve to the reader. And like all the content we dish up,  my Tweet’s and TwitPics will all be displayed in addition to those tweets, etc from my network and their chatter about the same topic. We order and display this in very obvious ways including thumbnails to ease discovery….

Net-net, we’ve been doing this ‘real time social media content generation tool’ discovery for some time along with a wrath of on line content sources and have applied relevance to it all. Ultimately when the discussion is all boiled out, the results Lijit produces in contrast with what Bing or Google produce is not unlike the Apples and Oranges analogy and at its core not a debate per se. One yields intentionally focused and ‘tight’ results, the other broad and ‘loose’ results. Both, however, having purpose and fulfilling different search needs. But when pointed at the topic of discovering ‘real time’ micro-blogging content, I am not sure how the ‘broad’ assists in making discovery simple and efficient. These tools are so fundamentally rooted in their network (read: people to people) associations that sifting through the vastness of RT’s, bit.ly’s and tinyurl’s from anonymous and unknown authors and knowing which result to trust and use would be a mind bending, overly complex and time consuming task. But again, all this is strictly my opinion and how I use and value social network tools like Twitter.

So Tweet on. We’ll ensure it is found and understood when its searched for via your trusted Lijit search box on your site.

This was our third year having a booth at Blog World and it just keeps getting better for us. Instead of going on and on about what a great conference it was and how many times our company got mentioned in sessions or during keynotes, we thought pictures might do a better job of telling our story…

Our booth, along with the swag we were handing out, attracted quite the crowd. The  Purell was a big hit…either due to the fact that folks were shaking a lot of hands or that they agreed that Las Vegas was a dirty city.

But, one of the main reasons we go to Blog World is to be immersed in a world we love…that of blog publishers. Seeing their eyes light up when we explain and demo what we do is something that just can’t be described.

Not to mention all the opportunities we have for spreading our message to a larger audience…

However, probably our most favorite thing to do while at a show like Blog World is to thank our current users. Folks like the masterminds behind I Can Has Cheezburger, Neatorama, and WebUrbanist. And slapping a few stickers on cute mommybloggers doesn’t hurt the cause either. (Hi Extraordinary Mommy!)

A conference like Blog World takes a lot of energy. Not only is it a big show, but the fact that it takes place in Vegas makes it all the more tiring. To make sure we were up to the task, we made sure we had all of the essentials covered…

Thanks to everyone we met and to all those who told us how much they loved what we’re doing. Wear your Lijit shirts with pride and we hope to see you next year at Blog World 2010!

[Photo credits: Perry, Grace, Greg and http2007]

Every year, since 2004, Technorati has published the State of the Blogosphere report. The State of the Blogosphere report is considered the best up to date source of information about size, motivations, and practices of long tail publishers.

This year, Lijit helped Technorati by supplying some information from within the blogs that make up the Lijit Network. Lijit performed the analysis on the raw data and only supplied the aggregate insights documented in this post.

Analysis was centered on four distinct areas of interest including Search Engine Referrals, Blogroll Promotion, the Impact of Twitter, Advertising and Analytics.

Methodology

Data for this post was collected from two primary sources both directly collected by Lijit.

The first source of data was the ~11K active Lijit publishers that have the Lijit Search Widget installed on their publications. Lijit builds a unique search corpus for each publisher. This search corpus includes the publisher’s publication, his user-generated content, and the network of the publishers who influence the publisher (i.e., his Blogroll). This network of influencers results in a crawl footprint of over 2.5M publications that we actively index in order to maintain the search functionality on the 11K publisher sites. The second source of data used in this post comes from information gathered on those 2.5M sites in the extended network.

Data was reduced to something we refer to as the ‘typical publisher’. For some measurements, some publishers were omitted from the sample when in our opinion the specific publisher or publishers represented a singularity in the data that masked the typical publisher substantially. In addition, for some of the analysis points, we removed publications with less than 100 page views a day. Where lower page view publishers were removed we point it out. As page views drop into lower numbers some of the data begins to skew and it begins to get difficult to distinguish active and inactive publishers.

Search Engine Referrals

A typical site within the Lijit publisher network receives 27% of its page views from clicks on results in horizontal search engine result pages. As expected, the highest single source of referrals to the typical publisher site is Google at 23.5%. Yahoo and Bing were next, accounting for about 3.2% of referrals. Twitter and Facebook were nearly identical and total about 1.6% of traffic.

Lijit categorizes publications into 23 topical/vertical subject areas. The Tech vertical saw the highest percent of page views from search engine referrals at 41%. The remaining topical areas were fairly consistent with regards to percent referrals.

The percent of page views that come from search engine referrals is fairly constant with the audience size of the publication. The exception to this are publications of less than 100 page views a day that receive a slightly larger percent of page views from search engine referrals at around 30%.

It’s unclear why smaller publications get a larger percent of page views from search engine referrals, but may be linked to the ever growing length of horizontal search engine queries. According to a Hitwise January 2009 Search report, over 50% of queries are now 3 terms or more on the major horizontal search engines. This suggests that as the length of the average query string gets longer, more referrals get passed to smaller publications due to the specificity of the queries. This is a positive trend for smaller publishers.

Blogroll Promotion

Based on the 2.5M publications crawled by Lijit, the number of blogs in the average blogroll is 47, a surprisingly high number. Although not always a prominent feature on a publisher’s site, cross promotion of bloggers by other bloggers is clearly a significant factor in publication readership growth.

The typical publication within the Lijit network of 2.5M sites appears in 6.4 other Blogrolls. In other words, the typical blog is pointed to by 6.4 other blogs. The difference between a blog appearing in 6.4 other Blogrolls and pointing to an average of 47 other blogs is largely due to blogs pointing outside of the Lijit crawl footprint. The Blogosphere is a very large place.

The Impact of Twitter

Publications with greater than 100 page views a day received on average 0.83% of their page views from Twitter referrals. This percent tracked very closely to Facebook referrals at 0.80%. Publications below 100 page views a day saw a higher percent of page views from Twitter referrals than Facebook referrals.

Besides horizontal search engines, Twitter is the largest driver of referrals to the typical publication.

Lijit Search aggregates user-generated content that a publisher generates, into search results that display on the publisher’s site. Aggregating this content around a publisher’s site creates a stronger brand association for the reader with that publisher and site.

The most common user-generated content source included within a Lijit Search profile is Twitter. About 50% of Lijit publishers include Twitter in their Lijit Search results. This is a change from prior years. In 2007, 26.6% of publishers included Twitter as a content source in their Lijit Search results. In 2008, 42% of Lijit accounts included Twitter as a content source within their Lijit Search results. In 2009, 50% of publishers included Twitter as a content source within their Lijit Search results.

Twitter was by far the fastest growing content source to be included by Lijit publishers. Clearly, publishers embrace the micro-blog format. Going forward, Lijit intends to track the percent of publishers that use Twitter for blog post promotion as we suspect this number is quite high.

Advertising and Analytics

As Lijit crawls the extended network of publications, we track the widgets and tags we find on those publications. For the first time, Quantcast overtook Google Analytics as the most frequent analytics tag found on publications. This is likely due to Quantcast tags being included in some publishing platform templates.

Comparing 2008 to 2009, there has been a 68% increase in the number of sites with Ad tags installed. This indicates to us that monetizing sites is high on the priority list of most publishers.

Last year, when we ran the analysis, Google Ad tags made up 67% of the Ad tags found. This year that percentage has dropped to 47%, indicating publishers are experimenting with other Ad networks. This is probably not an indication of publishers leaving Google but rather publishers trying other Ad networks and using Google at the end of the Ad rotation.

More Data to Come…

With Lijit’s install footprint of 11K active installed base and a crawl footprint of 2.5M publications, Lijit is becoming the defacto source of information from within publications. Starting in 2010 Lijit will publish a more comprehensive study of what’s happening inside the Blogosphere.

It’s that time of year again for the geeks and bloggers to arrive in masses and congregate in Sin City for Blog World.

Lijit is gearing up for our third year at the BlogWorld New Media Expo held October 15-17th at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

We will be setting up shop at our Lijit booth (#330 to be exact) equipped of course with our soft, Lijit t-shirts. Our crew will be ready to meet and talk all things wijit. If you’re a Lijit user, want to use Lijit or want some Purell to help clean up your search, then be sure to stop by our booth and say hello!

Don’t forget to catch some Lijit speakers, too! Greg Keller, Lijit’s VP of Product Development will be speaking at WordCamp Las Vegas in coordination with Blog World. At 3:00 PM on Friday, October 16th Greg will be speaking on: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Our Readers - A Study of Reader Profile Data. Micah Baldwin (former VP of Business Development for Lijit) will be speaking on a panel with our CEO, Todd Vernon at 11:30 AM on Saturday, October 17th on Measuring and Building Online Influence.

We look forward to meeting you and please feel free to e-mail Tara (tara at lijit dot com) or Grace (gboyle at lijit dot com) if you would like to set up a specific time to meet. For the latest Lijit news fresh from Blog World, follow us on Twitter (@Lijit) as we hold it down on the expo floor.

Lijit’ees present: Todd Vernon, Walter Knapp, Tara Anderson, Perry Quinn, Grace Boyle and Gregory Keller.

Our fearless leader Todd Vernon, CEO of Lijit, was interviewed by Robert Scoble during a visit he made to our plush world wide headquarters here in Boulder Colorado. Have a view here or check it out on Building43.com!

Think about all those times you visit an unknown place. And I mean this in the analog world…e.g. a ‘real life’ place such as when as you walk into a new building and don’t know if you’re even in the right place, what floor you need to be on, etc etc. You have enough stress in your life, right?

Got the mental image? OK, hold on to it for a sec…

Now repeat that real life process I speak of above. You have your Google map printed and in hand, you generally have building location nailed. You walk in and…behold!…a concierge waiting to welcome you to the property and fundamentally telling you you’re in the right place and where to go and hopefully lots of other insightful information. Makes you feel are warm and fuzzy, right?

Ladies and gents: Welcome to the software equivalent of this example above, now available for your site:

The Lijit Welcome Wijit!

Let me give you a bit of a background on the Welcome Wijit. Frankly, it doesn’t deviate too far from the ‘real life’ example above!

Your content is extremely valuable to you and even more so to your loyal readers. Yet how many times have you done a search on a horizontal search platform like Bing, Google, Yahoo, Ask, etc and clicked on a link in the result set only to land on the page, not dive deeper into the content other than a 2 second eye scan and bail on it via back button to return to the search results and keep on searching. Admit it! What we’re attempting to do with Welcome Wijit is prevent this from easily happening to YOUR content. Fundamentally Welcome Wijit is about….

• Welcoming new readers to your site when they’ve linked in from somewhere else…e.g. a search engine, blogroll that includes your site, etc. They land on your property and they get a true ‘greeting’ to say thanks for stopping by!
• Better content discovery: Readers landing on your site for the first time will have an initial experience right off the bat of mining your content. What is old to you is all new to your new readers! Welcome Wijit will help them find it easily.
• Tools tools tools for your readers: The Welcome Wijit by design is about improved loyalty and return visits. The Wijit offers features to quickly add your feed to RSS readers, My Yahoo and iGoogle home pages to ensure they have you earmarked for return visits.
• Pre-selected search results: When a reader is searching the web for something and they stumble upon your site, Welcome Wijit knows that search term and will provide a pre-selected list of the top 3 relevant items fitting that search on your blog, within your content and throughout your network…given them a true ‘feel’ of the Lijit search experience.
• Advertising opportunities: We’re committed to doing what we can to make you more money! Similar to your Search Engine Results Page advertising, Welcome Wijit provides Google Ads to ensure more relevant ads are seen and clicked through by your readers.

So how does the Welcome Wijit Work? Let’s show ya!

Turning the Welcome Wijit On:

If you have the Lijit Search Wijit installed, Welcome Wijit is ready for use! You’ve got to turn ‘er on though first. You do this by visiting your Wijit management console and you’ll see a new tab for Welcome Wijit. By default Welcome Wijit is turned off. Simply check the ‘Show my readers the welcome wijit’ and you’re done. In addition, the Welcome Wijit management console provides you certain customization features and a preview of the wijit as you see here:

By default, the Welcome Wijit is set to appear above the post your reader is clicking in from via search engine, etc. The position of the Welcome Wijit can be set to be seen below the post, however:

How your readers interact with Welcome Wijit

You’re probably asking: “So how do my readers interact with Welcome Wijit?”. Easy! Assume that the reader has found your site through prototypical means…e.g. a search engine search, a link from someone’s blog roll, a link in an email, etc. The Welcome Wijit determines things like where your reader came from, what search terms if any were used to find your content, etc, before unveiling itself and providing the pre-selected content for your reader.

From a mechanical perspective, Welcome Wijit will invoke and appear within the content post region of your site. In cases where we can not automatically detect this, our team can work with you to ensure this fits to the place you need it to. Welcome Wijit automatically determines characteristics of your blog and assumes styling traits of your Lijit Wijit to inject itself into your site elegantly.

What are the main features of Welcome Wijit?

Let’s walk you through the UI. Note that the screen shot below is what is referred to as ‘expanded mode’, controlled by the reader to unveil more tools (and more of your content!)

1 Welcome Wijit will ensure we say hello to your reader from the place they came from. A Google search in the example above.

2 RSS Subscription feeds have been added to put them front and center. By design we want new readers to come back to your site time and again to enjoy the content your publish.

3 Your Network is key! Providing a link to traverse over to your Lijit user page so readers can see your network, popular search terms, etc is designed to help readers see your larger presence on the web.

4 Like RSS, we’ve added one-click tools to insert your site’s feed into iGoogle or My Yahoo gadgets so your readers can scope out your new prose first thing in the AM with their coffee.

5 The Lijit Search Field is front and center and designed to incentivize readers to search more of your content. It will be pre-loaded with the search term the reader was hunting for on their initial search when they found your site.

6 Pre-selected content based on the search term will be unveiled to ensure the reader will see the historical depth and richness of your content. What’s old to you is new to them! Let ‘em find it easy!

7 Thumbnail previews of the content items will help attract readers to see your content and visually parse its relevance. Plus it’s pretty cool.

8 Advertising like that on your Search engine Result Page are included on the Welcome Wijit in a slim and non-intrusive implementation. We’re about making you more money and advertising opportunities like this will help ensure this with better and more creative visibility to your readers.

So there you have it folks! The first release of the Lijit Welcome Wijit! The team is pushing to produce more tools for  you and your readers, dear publisher! Better discovery of your content, improved time on site as they see really what you have published all yield improved loyalty and more opportunities for you to make money and gain more exposure.

So go ahead and enable your Welcome Wijit! Start giving your readers that big ‘ol warm electronic hug when they enter your domain for the first time. Not unlike when your Grandma used to hug you when you visited. C’mon, you know you have a soft side….

Check out our FAQ if you want more info !

Little Ben Matson has been with our company for long enough now that we can easily make jokes at his expense. That’s always the true test, isn’t it? And fortunately for us, he can laugh at himself AND he has a blog designed to document his D&D adventures. Really…what more could we want from a co-worker?

Let’s not forget that Ben is an extraordinary team player who is willing to help out anyone at any time. Since he’s been at Lijit, he’s been put in many situations of extreme pressure and has passed all the stress tests with flying colors. Of course, he has yet to experience the famed Lijit Holiday Party. We’ll see how he does with that one. In the meantime, enjoy getting to know Ben. I can honestly say that the picture he provided me of his summer internship has to be one of the best of all time.

What is your Lijit contribution?

I am one of two Publisher Support Engineers at Lijit, and we do a variety of things around here. Whenever a blogger has a technical question, or runs into a problem with something, we work to provide the answers and solutions they’re looking for. Whenever we can’t handle an issue ourselves, we track down the people that can and make sure things get resolved properly. But my job is not just troubleshooting, I also get to trick-out the special accounts we create with a bunch of custom features for the different business development deals that go on around here. One of the things I really enjoy about my particular role at Lijit is seeing all the different ways our products get used, and all the neat things our company can do.

What is your least favorite word and why?

If I could remove any subset of words from the human vocabulary, it would be racial slurs. They are a bane on our advancement as intelligent and benevolent creatures, and generally come from a place of ignorance and hatred.

What is your favorite sound and why?

The ambiance of the natural world. When you can get away from all of the cars, all the humming electrical boxes, and all of the noise that society makes, you can hear what the world sounded like before the modern age. Admittedly, it is mostly just wind, but it can really have a profound effect on you if you let it. I also really like the sound of eggs cracking open.

What profession, other than your own, would you like to attempt and why?

Before joining Lijit I spent some time as an intern in an intergalactic mercenary syndicate with a focus on mounted dinosaur assault squads. They had their hands in everything from galactic warfare to spice smuggling, plus they had amazing dental benefits. Ultimately though, Lijit just made me a better offer.

Something you’re guilty of…

Living a total bachelor lifestyle. I very rarely cook for myself, or even buy groceries. I’m pretty sure the only things in my fridge right now are some shredded Parmesan cheese, half a jar of raspberry jam, and a couple beers. A few of the girls in the office have tried teaching me the ways of healthy and responsible food purchasing habits, but I have thus far proved untrainable.

Actually, Ben, speaking for many of the girls in the office, we think you’re highly trainable. Thanks for all you do, even when we continually bug you for tech support help. If you’re interested in learning more about Ben, follow him on Twitter, take a look at the outtakes from our photo shoot, or ask him if you can join him on the next quest to raid the Green Dragon’s lair. I’m sure he’ll let you play. He’s nice like that.

In case you were wondering where all the honey bees have gone…look no further.

According to eyewitness reports, the swarm “arrived in tight formation, surveyed the Rio Grande across the street, found it unsuitable and then proceeded to colonize our tree.”

The guy in the white shirt is Bill, a wonderful guy and Lijit employee who alerted us to the swarm’s presence yesterday. After others in the building caught wind of the news, a small crowd gathered to enjoy the spectacle of nature until some do-gooder beekeepers came by to collect the bees a little while later.

A final close-up shot of the swarm, so you can fully appreciate just how Lijit we can bee…

Many thanks to Zach Conger, our resident Systems Architect and honey of a guy for rushing out to document this extraordinary event.

And yes, this does constitute exciting around our workplace. No judging.

Aditya holds the honor of being the first intern that we had at Lijit AND the first that we hired upon college graduation. That’s how important QA is to us. Here he is in the Lijit offices, working diligently on the white board, or for the purpose of this picture, pretending to be…

(And yes, Aditya is a little out of focus but it’s only because I was playing with my new camera and amazed at the focal capabilities.)

What is your Lijit contribution?

As part of the QA team at Lijit, I work on making sure that the Lijit product is as bug-free as possible. The best part of my role is that I get to see and test all of the cool features being added to our product before they are released to our publishers. The more bugs I am able to test and find, the better the quality of the product.

What turns you off, creatively, spiritually, or emotionally and why?

Not being appreciated for the work being put in. It is my belief that appreciating an individual’s effort, however small, helps to bring out the best. And this applies to any setting.

What is your favorite word and why?

In recent times, I think my favorite word has become ‘Verified!’ because that status on a bug means that the product is cleaner and of better quality. With releases becoming more frequent, it has become my new mantra.

What profession, other than your own, would you like to attempt and why?

Playback Singer in Indian movies because I love music. I think music has the ability to influence people’s moods and I would love to be able to do that. And since I have grown up on Indian movies (Bollywood!), it would be great to be a part of them.

Something you’re guilty of…

I am crazy about cricket and can never get enough of it. In the summer, I play the game at least 3 times a week (I wish it were sunny all year in Boulder) and watch pretty much any cricket match that India is involved in.

We love having Aditya around and hope that as his first job out of college, we haven’t set him up for future disappointment when he realizes other companies aren’t as cool as ours. Here’s to Aditya’s ninja-like QA skills and many more successful bug smashings! (Insert the Hulk’s menacing growl here.)