Posts Tagged ‘Lijit employees’
This is a guest post from one of the newest players to join our team, Perry Quinn. In addition to being our VP of Market Development, he’s also an avid skateboarder whose claim to fame is that he rode mountain bikes in Nepal with Dan Cortez on MTV Sports in the 90’s. Yep…he has the pictures to prove it.
I went through about a hundred thoughts (slight exaggeration) around what I wanted to write on the Lijit blog. I am not one of our stronger bloggers, but will definitely be kicking in hard in 2009.
I thought about “big to small company” stories…New Year’s resolutions…even began writing about “commitment to blogging.” All met with a not-swift-enough death.
Then I started thinking about what I truly liked about Lijit…and as cliche as it sounds, I realized it was the people. Straight up.
Keeping with this theme, I wanted to write a few words or a sentence about each person that works here. Not anything special or endearing, just the first thing that popped into my mind.
A list of Lijit folks and my random thoughts about them…
Todd Vernon–Rush, cars, being only children
Walter Knapp–I hope he does not get back in shape…will be too much pressure on me.
Micah Baldwin–Old soul. Indian food. “I did not say you are wrong…”
Dan Jones–I can’t have conversations with Dan…I have to use spell check just to get his title right…smartness beyond my grasp.
Leslie Osborne–She owns her own racing helmet (and shoes)!
Mike Meredith–Kicks serious tail on the bass.
Emmanuel Puentes–Daughters that thankfully look like their mother.
Dave Ferro–Has a rocking Bronco and ingests fair amounts of supplements.
Mark Chessler–Head of the OFG group.
Bill Marcum–My future cycling buddy…maybe running buddy too.
Derek Greentree–Became a Rock God on December 16th, 2008. The world, and Derek, are changed forever.
Ningsheng Liu–Is currently becoming a MySQL expert (whether he wants to or not)!
Mike Pritchard–Pip blushes when I use American words that have different meanings in the UK.
Charlie Wanek–I am scared to ride with Charlie…he breaks bike parts.
Doug Farmer–Lijit South–hope to get to know Doug better in 2009.
Jeff Kriese–Also Lijit South–also hope to get to know Jeff better in 2009.
Zach Conger–Quite possibly the most patient person at Lijit…at least with me.
Daniel Weiss–King of all things to be known (he is my answer man).
Ryan Peterson–I hope to learn every tea secret that Ryan knows.
Shawn Tanaka–Has a cool name…and works QA magic through even the toughest sicknesses.
Tara Anderson–Stand-up comedian, seventh grade teacher, evangelist, marketing queen…and she had to sit by me all day long!
Jacqueline Malan–Sockless J, the Tri-State Spelling Bee champion.
Grace Boyle–Fearless future life coach.
Colleen Clair–Knows about 4WD (and sports car) suspensions…more organized than anyone (yes, anyone) I have ever known.
Aditya Kaundinya–I vow to learn how to (properly) say Aditya’s name in 2009!
Julie Penner–Not last on the list on purpose…I am just jealous of her trip to Patagonia!
[Insert witty ending here.]
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This is another in our series of guest posts written by Lijit employees. Mike Pritchard is bestowing the honor on us this week and if you like what he has to say, you can find more of his writing (and photography) on his blog.
So, what is a day in the life of Lijit like? My name is Mike “Pip” Pritchard, I’m the tech lead for the ad server team, and if you’re been following the blog here, you’ll realize that we’ve been pretty busy. Crazy busy, in fact, but we’re excited that we’re working on projects that are helping grow Lijit and create revenue for both Lijit and our publishers. And we have some great projects in the pipeline that you’ll get to hear about as we roll them out!
I’ve been at Lijit since October and I came to Lijit from a non-traditional background for a web startup. You see, I’ve come from a strong AI background and have spent most of my career building robots for either the DoD or NASA! Weird, but true.
I’ve built tiny robots, flying robots, crawling robots, industrial robots. So how did I end up at Lijit and why? Well, I love working in the AI field. The more we learn about biological intelligence the more it seems to be incredibly parallel in nature, the human brain seems to be a vast collection of independently functioning systems (structures of neural networks) working together in a fairly chaotic way, with the emergent behavior being intelligence, or at least what we think is intelligence. Almost like if we were to throw billions of computers together all connected to each other something would emerge from the chaos, something very unexpected. Sound familiar?
Well, that is for the future, but for today humanity has created this vast connected mass (or mess) of information and computers that we’re only beginning to organize. Maybe we’re not organizing it, but its organizing itself. Just like many complex biological systems we see in nature, it is perhaps a self-organizing system and it seems to be organizing itself around structures like social networks.
This, of course, is why Lijit is so important. Lijit is the natural evolution of this process, and allows us to search through these social networks in a more meaningful and useful way. This is why its an exciting time, and Lijit is a cool place to be…
(Photo used with CC license courtesy of: Dan Coulter)
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This is a guest post by our Senior Director of Products and Operations, Leslie Osborne. She was kind enough (read: I forced her) to write a post about our recent company outing.
Don’t get me wrong, golf is a fine sport. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it (save for the sketchy use of plaid in golfing ensembles). It’s just not the sport for me. Never has been. Not even since that special couple of “elective curriculum” golfing days in seventh grade gym class.
I’ve always worried about this slightly during my career, wondering if my lack of golfing skills would ultimately impede my ability to climb the corporate ladder. (At one point, I was concerned that my lack of karaoke skills would impede that climb, but we’ll discuss that some other time.) So just imagine how happy this driving enthusiast was when the sport chosen to celebrate Lijit’s recent round of financing was high-performance go-karting. Yay!
So off to The Track we went on a gray, October afternoon. We dutifully donned driving suits and driving gloves and helmets and neck braces (safety first, folks) and had an amazing couple of hours flinging ourselves around a fantastically entertaining, kart-scaled road course. Some of us were fast, some of us were not so fast, but we all laughed and cheered and had a great time.
Which brings me to the thing I love most about Lijit–yes, even more so than the selfish alignment of automotive interests–is that we all genuinely enjoy each other’s company and have a lot of fun when we’re together, be that at work or at play. I think this gives Lijit, as an organization, a distinct personality (a positive one) and I’d also like to think it translates (again, positively) into everything we do. My hope is that when you visit our site, sign up for our service, install a Lijit Search Wijit, do searches, see your stats, run an ad in our new Ad Network, get an email or comment from us on your blog, or what have you, you can feel a little bit of this company’s tremendous personality shining through. And if not, well, you’re clearly dead on the inside, but we’ll keep doing good work for you anyway.
It was fun to have the opportunity to share an interest that’s near and dear to my heart with my co-workers. (I hope they all think I’m less nuts for attending high performance driving schools now.) I’m glad everyone kept the “shiny side up”, as we like to say, and enjoyed their well-deserved afternoon of offsite celebration.
I guess now all I have to worry about impeding my career aspirations at Lijit is whether or not I continue to beat Todd and Walter…
(To see even more pictures from our day at the races, check out Lijit’s Flickr photostream!)
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This post is by our very own Derek Greentree, who visited the Yahoo! campus for a field trip. In addition to using his business cards for the first time while on this trip, he was also very excited about being the recipient of developer swag. And he was nice enough to share it with the rest of us in the office.
Two weeks ago, I flew out to sunny California to attend Yahoo! Open Hack Day, an interesting developer event periodically held by Yahoo!. Attendees get access during the event to up-and-coming APIs (and other technology) in development at Yahoo!, and are given a challenge to create a mashup or other interesting hack and demo it at the end of the event. You can find information about the hacks that were demoed at the hack day blog.
If you’ve never been to the Yahoo! Sunnyvale campus, you probably won’t know quite what to think, as it’s filled with purple carpet, exclamation points on the walls, and emoticons everywhere. It’s interesting to see a very large corporation try to promote a youthful and exuberant appearance at a corporate headquarters with security guards, a cafeteria, fountains, volleyball courts, outside dining, and multiple buildings. I arrived Friday morning and was also surprised at how organized the event was; after entering, I was always greeted with friendly faces willing and able to help me find what I needed.
The theme of the weekend was APIs and openness. First, I’m happy to see that Yahoo! is getting behind OAuth, an open standard for API authentication. I wish everyone supported this simple mechanism (*cough* Facebook *cough*), as the various APIs offered by services out there desperately need to settle on a single, well-understood mechanism for allowing users to grant access to private data.
The second most exciting thing demoed (for me) that weekend was YQL, which will be a single URL that takes a SQL-like query and returns data from many Yahoo! services–like Flickr, mybloglog, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mail, and others. Currently, each of these services has a different API and a different authentication mechanism, which means that supporting them is a pain. Having one mechanism for authenticating to the Yahoo! API (OAuth) and for querying any data within it will greatly simplify the code base we use here to interface with external services.
Next was Yahoo! BOSS, a search API. Many services (like Google and even Yahoo!, using yet another API) expose search services to external users, but BOSS is special. The problems with all the major existing APIs out there is draconian usage restrictions. Many of them, for example, don’t allow you to:
- Reorder search results
- Change the display of search results
- Use the API more than a certain (low) number of times per day
- Inject advertising of your own into search results
This is a mistake: allowing services to use your search data in unique and interesting ways is a win-win for the service and the search provider. With BOSS, on the other hand:
“BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is different–it’s a truly open API with as few rules and limitations as possible. With BOSS, developers and startups now have the technology and infrastructure to build next generation search solutions that can compete head-to-head with the principals in the search industry. BOSS will grow and evolve with a focus on providing additional functionality, tools, and data for developers.”
I attended an excellent presentation by Vik Singh, a member of the BOSS team, on some example usage. He’s also developed a very cool Python library called the BOSS Mashup Framework that lets you whip up interesting mashups using Yahoo! Search with simple, elegant code. If you’re a developer and into this stuff, you definitely should check things out.
Perhaps most importantly, the weekend made me think about APIs that Lijit wants to offer (or could offer) to the outside world. We have access to a lot of interesting and unique data here, and I’ve seen more than a few startups that would benefit by having access to the work we’ve done. Look for more on this in the future, but I think providing access to Lijit’s data via a set of APIs could produce some very interesting mashups, and help Lijit grow in cool and unique ways.
[Photos found on Flickr and used via CC license: freshelectrons, Jinho.Jung, and bluesmoon]
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Another in a series of guest posts written by Lijit employees. This time, Ningsheng Liu explains to us his interpretation of the word Lijit. As someone who is not a native English speaker, he does a great job. And yes, it is (unofficially) Ningsheng week around here.
Obviously, ‘Lijit’ is not officially an English word and naturally there is no dictionary meaning. Otherwise, my folks in China would not have asked me, “What does Lijit mean?” They are all quite capable of using dictionaries.
Do I know the answer? No and yes.
No, I don’t know what ‘Lijit’ means from a linguistic perspective. I didn’t even bother to ask my colleagues. As a name, it should be a noun but most people pronounce it li`jit, putting the accent on the second syllable. I wondered how it should be pronounced in the context of “Do you Lijit?” But it’s not important. Who cares how ‘Yahoo’ and ‘Google’ are pronounced in the context of “Do you Yahoo?” or “Do you Google?”
If I tell my folks in China, “I don’t know what Lijit means”, they would be very disappointed. In fact, a word that is not included in the dictionaries does not necessarily mean it has no meaning. Yes, I have learned the true meaning of Lijit in the past two months.
To the users of the widget, Lijit allows them to easily create their own search engine that searches their blog, bookmarks, photos, blogroll and more. With the Lijit search application installed on publishers’ blogs, readers can search all of the blogger’s content. In turn, Lijit provides users detailed statistics about those searches, so they can better understand and serve their reader community.
To investors, Lijit has a proved management team, a clear vision of business direction, an organic growth trend and a believable shot at ROI. They generally believe great people at Lijit working in a large and underserved market will discover and develop the products and services needed to be successful.
To competitors, Lijit cannot be overlooked at any point of time. Lijit is still very small but it is very strong. Lijit does not provide all the needs in the market sector but it provides unique services for what it does. Lijit is almost always a step ahead although its step is not very big.
To employees, Lijit is a family in which they spend a significant portion of their lifetime. They care about each other and learn from each other. While they may not come in with smiling faces every single morning, they do leave with smiling ones every single evening. The employees want to grow, in terms of personal and professional development, as Lijit grows.
To other people who currently do not know of Lijit today, they will learn about it very soon if they blog. Hopefully, Lijit (as a word and a service) will soon be as popular as Yahoo and Google.
Do you Lijit?
Photo credit: jovike
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