New Job

Well I'm officially "between jobs" right now... Although I'm staying with Microsoft, my last day with my current team on the Oslo project in the Connected Systems Division was today. My team was very kind and threw me 3 parties. We had donut day on Wednesday, a happy hour at a local pub on Thursday and then a very nice lunch at a local grill on Friday where around 30 people showed up! I had many people tell me they would miss me and to keep in touch. I will certainly miss this team. It has truly been one of the greatest work experiences of my career. This has by far been the greatest, brightest, most driven, most visionary and exciting team that I have ever had the privelege of working with in my 12 years of experience in the software industry. I will miss them a lot, and I wish them all the best as they work towards releasing Oslo in the near future. I'll be watching with great anticipation to see the great things that they do.

The new opportunities that await me with the new group at Microsoft are also very exciting to me. I cant' wait to start digging into the issues that are in the advertising space. This is an area of huge importance to Microsoft and I'm excited to be a part of that. Microsoft seems to get a lot of press in the technology news, but this piece of the industry has a rather large bit of attention paid to it of late. Here's one rather good article that talks about the types of products that the new team I'll be working with are building.

With ad exchanges, it's not just about the where, but the why Ad exchanges are taking cues from Wall Street firms in offering what they say is sophisticated, computer-driven analysis to make recommendations to agencies about where their clients should buy remnant ad space, according to The New York Times. "We use the analogy of, anybody can trade on the financial markets, anyone can get an eTrade account, but it's how you're smart about how you use your eTrade account that determines how well you're going to do trading," said Darren Herman, head of digital media at Media Kitchen. The New York Times (7/28)