11am, I showed up at SFO airport, fresh and dandy. There was a beautiful lady at the check in counter waiting for me and showed me a perfect smile. I handed her my passport, thinking: Cathy's service is just getting better everyday. She looked at her computer, then printed out a paper, explaining that she is putting me on a flight to Japan and then to Beijing because my flight to HK is delayed...Very puzzled, I asked how I can get to HK that way...She looked at me like I couldn't understand her, speaking slowly explaining why Japan route is a great route and Cathy won't charge me anything for the change...I looked at her, wondering either I am not speaking English or she is not, apparently we are not connecting...Our back and forth finally caught attention from her manager, who took a glance at the computer screen, figured out that I am not making connecting flight to Beijing from HK, I am staying at HK for a few days, then to Beijing! Now I am finally back to my original HK flight and it is delayed for 3 hours...

Cathy provided a $25 food coupon for lunch. Even though I am not hungry, I figured, why not, there are plenty time to kill at the airport now...Walking into the firewood cafe, someone ordered garlic french fries, or my god, that perfect smell of the garlic french fries! Did I tell you that I would totally crave junk food like french fries, potato skins once in a while? Well, today is the day...Out of nowhere, just because someone ordered it and I caught wind of it... 

And you know the result, I used the $25 food coupon to get all different kinds of french fries. Below is a picture of the garlic french fries, who is totally guilty.  

    

An old lady sat next to me watched me swallowing all of that french fries in shock and told me "You are very sweet." in the end.  

Very satisfied and happy after shoveling all down my throat, I went to the airport lounge. A big bright lounge with almost nobody there. The staff are very polite. However, I couldn't access the wifi. After a few failed tries, I determined there was problem with their access point, so I called the friendly staff to question. He insists it is my computer problem, offered to fix it. After looking at him trying 15 minutes in vain, I lost my patience, said:"Look, I work in IT, and I know it is your access point, if you can simply reboot it, everything will be just fine." The friendly staff looked at me in disbelief, apparently he thinks I know nothing about a computer...Thank god I had those french fries.

        

After two weeks of the beautiful California sun and two weeks of hot summer in NYC, I just found myself back to California, sitting in the quiet club house and catching up on emails.

It was an amazing month with a lot of activities, started with AlwaysOn award ceremony at Standford. JoAnna likes to put this as: the award that didn't need our "marketing department" to do anything to win.



Doug was on the panel at the opening ceremony and he talked about FreeWheel's Beijing operation, it certainly generated interests from the audience.

 

This twitter like interactive screen is cool. I first saw it in China when attending tech conference a few years ago, a company called jiwai.de powered it, I thought it was so cool that it provides immediate feedback to the speaker. Was sad to see Jiwai.de got sold and shutdown later on. Seeing it here again at Standford made me feel like meeting an old friend.

Then it was two weeks of NYC started with the summit at our office. BTW: We are running out of space at NYC, will need to move soon...Take a closer look at this picture while you can, the next time I post summit event will be at somewhere else...Talking about fast-growing here!

 

One thing I remember so vividly during the summit is running around NYC at a hot summer afternoon during our scavenger hunt event. We were certainly sweating a lot, had a lot of fun too! This is my proud team. I do feel like we have some of the best pictures, even though we are not the winning team. Pretty close though!
 


Then we had a stylish client party at our NYC office, the food and snacks featured three FreeWheel-office-city theme. The drink of the night was called "Beijing Sling". Lori obviously won the most beautiful dress by a big margin for the night  



Dancing revolution was a big hit at the party, a lot of people were playing, especially after a few drinks. I got David Adams playing the game with me, for the record, I did lose to him.

Somewhere in between, Jon took us to the famous Jewish deli that he has been talking about for years. Katz's Deli, we are finally here! I was amazed by all the pictures on the wall, it certainly tell a lot of stories about this hundred plus years restaurant.   



The food turned out not as bad as Jon made us believe, or maybe everything just taste better with cheerful beer?



My personal favorite is the knish.



Arguing about product features with Jack on a sunny Saturday afternoon was a lot of fun. This picture was taken when he was annoyed of me couldn't understand his points
 


Of course nothing in comparison to the Frying Pan event in the following week, this was taken before I got too much of that fruity drink. Sometimes the most innocent is what gets you.
 


Such a fun month!...Now I need to get back to my emails

        

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know this is no longer news, you probably have seen it somewhere else, however, I just couldn't miss the news in my collection, so bear with me

TV Everywhere Heating Up Dog Days of Summer

08.03.10 | View Full Article at FierceIPTV

August is usually a pretty slow time for news, summer vacations aregetting used up and business plans are getting final revisions beforethe fourth quarter kicks off in October. But the TV Everywhere ecosystemdoesn't always follow the laws of the summer doldrums.

In a nutshell, just like the weather, TV Everywhere is turning up the heat.

Last week, Turner Broadcasting System announced it was going livewith a TV Everywhere play with Verizon FiOS TV, giving Verizon'scustomers access to TBS and TNT content 24 hours after they air onregular TV. And, true to form, it can be accessed either from the TBS TVEverywhere website, the TNT TV Everywhere website, or through Verizon'sown TV Online site. The programming is now available with the help ofboth Adobe Systems Incorporated and FreeWheel.

"We are excited about this deployment and the next iteration ofauthenticated multiscreen content distribution," Andy Heller, TBS vicechairman, said. "It is more imperative than ever that TV Everywheregains traction throughout the industry given the rapid deployment oftablets and the ability of mobile devices to display long-form videodirectly from Web sites."

No doubt.

At last week's The Independent Show in Baltimore, MTV Networks andDiscovery executives predicted that TV Everywhere would fail, unlessoperators delivered more ad revenues to programmers. Complaining thatVOD hadn't delivered on its promise to date, MTV's Joey Molko said: "Theextent to which we can monetize (TV Everywhere) will really drive theextent to which we can embrace it. If we monetize it the exact same wayas linear [TV], I think people will be excited about it. If it remainslike VOD, I don't think people will put a large amount of content outthere."

But content is continuing to roll out. Outdoor Channel just announcedit was using Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA, CMCSK) subsidiary thePlatform'svideo player technology and social network components for itsOutdoorChannel.com website.

"It's another cable programmer starting to open up their library andbring it online," said Marty Roberts, VP of sales and marketing atthePlatform.

thePlatform also revealed that it had juiced up its new mpx Betavideo management system to give content owners more security options andgreater DRM flexibility.

Roberts told me he sees the industry gearing up.

"We're still working with a number of cable operators that arebuilding out video portals with the TV Everywhere aspect," he said. "Wehave a couple of programmers that are actually out in beta now and we'rehearing about a lot of programmers that are kind of waiting for thefirst ones (to go) and then they plan to get engaged throughout thefall.

"We're in the thick of it and its only increasing. So, there's a lotof activity actually going on in the market right now; it's gettingpretty exciting. People have been dabbling with online video for thepast couple of years; now they're getting serious.

My buddy over at FierceCable Jim Barthold, writes that another cablecompany, Charter Communications, (OTC BB: CCMM) is rolling an eight- to10-channel TV Everywhere trial to between 5,000 and 10,000 subscribers.

Ah, hot fun in the summertime.-Jim

        

I have told everyone that I lost my inspiration in updating my blog because the new product we are working on is so hard and it has used up all my energy...Well, thanks to the team, after many drinks, I found my inspiration again

Cindy was very nice to setup an outing at Frying Pan on Pier 66 with all NYC folks and the Beijing visitors, we had a nice night out. The weather was perfect, the food was great, and the team was just unmatchable.  







I think we finished the night well with nobody getting drunk or falling into sleep like the previous night (Frans, look at what you did?!)

 
The only crazy moment was after Nacho finished the remaining beer in the pitcher as he didn't want any alcohol to go wasted. I only get to catch his facial expressions. Perfect match to the funny picture above, don't you think so?


Designed by Nacho, our fast-growing freewheel boat is heading to the direction pointed out by the captain.


Thank you all for a great night, and thank you for helping me to find my inspiration back! Good night!

        

From VideoNuze: FreeWheel Lands Univision and Scales Up for Live Events

Friday, July 23, 2010, 06:44 AM ET
posted by: Will Richmond

FreeWheel, the video ad management and monetization provider, is announcing this morning that it has landed Spanish-language broadcaster Univision as its latest customer. In the past year, Univision has become one of the most active broadcasters involved with online video, signing a deal to move a large amount of its content to YouTube for distribution, offering full episodes of its telenovelas at a recently-created web site, "Novela y Series," launching a video app for BlackBerry users, and of course most recently, streaming 10 million+ hours of live World Cup games on UnivisionFutbol.com

For FreeWheel, Univision follows Turner, Warner Bros., VEVO, Discovery, CBS and others on FreeWheel's customer roster. Note that Univision had not yet deployed FreeWheel for its UnivisionFutbol.com site but that FreeWheel was inserting ads in ESPN3.com's World Cup online streaming which generated 7.4 million unique viewers and 15.7 million hours viewed. I talked to co-CEO and co-founder Doug Knopper earlier this week, who shared some recent statistics from the World Cup action and discussed how FreeWheel is scaling up to better serve ads in live, as well as on-demand, online video.

During the World Cup, FreeWheel dynamically served up to 64,000 simultaneous ad requests for ESPN3.com, which Doug said is 50 times higher than FreeWheel typically serves across its entire network. He further believes that this is the largest live event that has had dynamic ad insertion. The benefit of dynamically inserting is that ads can be optimized for certain audiences and also can more specifically follow advertiser policies such as product exclusivity in a pod.

Freewheel is seeing more interest in live online events among its customers (for example VEVO broadcast a live pre-World Cup concert) and as a result is enhancing its capabilities in this area. Of course World Cup is one of the biggest sporting events, but FreeWheel is also inserting ads in other sports like NASCAR races for Turner and in baseball games for MLB. As I wrote recently, sports continues to be the shining star of online video. While there will periodically be the random huge online live events like President Obama's inauguration, sports and music will drive peak live viewership.

        

Univision Taps FreeWheel To Make It Digital Player

by Gavin O'Malley, 38 minutes ago

Univision Communications' digital division Univision Interactive Media has tapped video monetization technology company FreeWheel to manage its advertising business and monetize its digital video content. Kevin Conroy, president of Univision Interactive Media, said the partnership was crucial to realizing the division's ambition video plans. "We are working to significantly expand our video presence on the web," he said. San Mateo, Calif.-based FreeWheel was founded in early 2008 by three DoubleClick alums and digital media veterans. The company offers content owners, carriers and distributors end-to-end video ad management technology, which simplifies the task of managing video ad sales, ad serving and ad sales rights across widely syndicated distribution channels. Other existing media clients include Turner, VEVO, CBS and MLB.com. By his own estimate, Doug Knopper, co-founder and co-CEO of FreeWheel, said Univision Interactive has the necessary content to become a major player in the video space. "Univision Interactive Media is in a fantastic position to grow its video offering," he said. Indeed, Univision Interactive already boasts a library of over 50,000 videos, across its owned and operated properties, as well as across web, mobile, and tablet devices. Today, more than two-thirds of Hispanic adults are online, with Internet penetration among Hispanics growing every year for the past five years. In the third quarter of this year, there were 9 million global visits to the home pages of Univision.com's social media properties, including Mi Página, forums, and chat. To date, FreeWheel has raised about $29 million. In April, the company closed another round of financing worth $16.8 million. New investor Steamboat Ventures — a firm affiliated with The Walt Disney Company — joined existing investors Turner Broadcasting System, Battery Ventures and Foundation Capital. Last year, FreeWheel signed more than 15 content providers, added 15 ad networks and distribution partners, and grew to 70 employees in San Mateo, New York and Beijing. In one instance, it established a partnership with Attributor Corp., a provider of content monitoring and monetization platforms. The alliance created a mechanism by which content owners and distributors could identify and monetize their user-generated video content. Attributor delivers content identification and automated policy infrastructure that scales Web-wide for content owners. FreeWheel selects high-yielding packages of ads from the sales forces and ad networks that it knows are allowed to sell into a given piece of Attributor-identified content.

        

AlwaysOn Announces Top 250 Most Promising Companies in Tech, FreeWheel is the winner of Digital Media Category!

Annual 'Global 250' list recognizes emerging technologies most likely to have largest impact on the industry over next year

SAN FRANCISCO, July 19 /PRNewswire/ — AlwaysOn, the leading producer of world-class conferences for venture investors and entrepreneurs of emerging private companies, today announced the winners of the AlwaysOn Global 250, the premier list of the top emerging private companies that are creating new business opportunities in the global technology industries. The overall winner is SecondMarket, the largest centralized marketplace and auction platform for illiquid assets.

The AlwaysOn Global 250 has a proven track record of predicting the companies that will represent the biggest business investment and deals over the next 12 months. The 2010 list categories winners are OpSource (Cloud and Infrastructure), GroupOn (Consumer Internet), FreeWheel (Digital Media), Bloom Energy (Greentech) and Appirio (SaaS and Enterprise.) SecondMarket is also winner in the category of Enabling Tools and Devices.

The companies selected for the AlwaysOn Global 250 represent the top private companies that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technology in Cloud and Infrastructure, Consumer Internet, Digital Education, Digital Media, Enabling Tools and Devices, Greentech, and SaaS and Enterprise. The list is selected by AlwaysOn editors in collaboration with partners at Manatt, Morgan Stanley, the Blackstone Group, KPMG, Silicon Valley Bank, Sonnenschein, and Bridge Bank, as well as industry experts across the globe. Judges recognize honorees based on market opportunity, nature of innovation, media buzz and awareness, commercialization and ability to create stakeholder value.

"After examining the companies that are on the AO Global 250 list, it's obvious that innovation is not only alive and well in the Global Silicon Valley, it's accelerating in economic power and scope," says Tony Perkins, founder and editor of AlwaysOn. "The companies certainly represent some of the highest-growth opportunities in the private company marketplace."

All of the winners of the AlwaysOn Global 250 will be celebrated at annual "Summit at Stanford" conference, to be held July 27-29 at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. This two-and-a-half-day executive gathering is designed to identify the most promising entrepreneurial opportunities and investments in the global tech industry. AlwaysOn and Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP) "Summit at Stanford" features the most innovative companies, eminent technologists, influential investors and journalists in keynote presentations, panel debates and private company CEO showcases.

The current program for "Summit at Stanford" 2010 can be found at: http://www.aonetwork.com/AOEvents/2010/Summit-Stanford-2010-0

To register for a media pass for "Summit at Stanford", please visit:

http://www.formstack.com/forms/?883274-Lib5naUzvs

For tickets to "Summit at Stanford", please contact Jeannene Glass at jeannene@alwayson-network.com.

For sponsorship opportunities, please contact Marc Sternberg at marc@alwayson-network.com.

About "Summit at Stanford"

The 8th annual AlwaysOn and Stanford Technology Ventures Partners Summit at Stanford is a two-and-a-half-day executive gathering that highlights the significant economic, political and commercial trends affecting the global technology industries. The AlwaysOn & STVP Summit at Stanford features the most innovative companies, eminent technologists, influential investors and journalists in keynote presentations, panel debates and private company CEO showcases. The AlwaysOn & STVP Summit at Stanford's goal is to identify the most promising entrepreneurial opportunities and investments in the global tech industry.

About AlwaysOn

AlwaysOn is the leading business media brand networking the Global Silicon Valley. AlwaysOn helped ignite the social media revolution in early 2003 when it launched the AlwaysOn network. In 2004, it became the first media brand to socially network its online readers and event attendees. AlwaysOn's preeminent executive event series includes the Summit at Stanford, OnMedia, OnHollywood, OnDC, OnDemand, Venture Summit Silicon Valley, "Summit at Stanford", GoingGreen, GoingGreen East, and GoingGreen Europe. The AlwaysOn network and live event series continue to lead the industry by empowering its readers, event participants, sponsors, and advertisers like no other media brand.

        

It has been a while since I last updated my blog...Flipping through my camera images, found so many pictures meant for the blog, however, never did the update in time...

For example, the following picture of the wedding sweets:
 


I meant to write a post about all FreeWheeler weddings since we founded. There is a tradition in China where the newly weds would give candies to their friends and family after wedding to "share the sweets", I have got similar gifts when attending weddings in US, it has the similar meaning. I typically ate all the candies when I got them in the last few years, now I realized that I should have collected them. I have made a decision that I will collect all the FreeWheeler wedding sweets, starting from now. Collecting all the sweets and love stories, let them witness FreeWheelers joining the team, forming their family, having kids and watching them grow...Just imagine what a great memory it would be! Watch me collecting them, my friends

And this, I took a picture of Twitter when it went down during the world cup games:



A cute picture of the whale saying "Twitter is overcapacity". The popularity of the world cup games took down a lot ofwebsites, not just twitter. I am very proud that we hold up well. With alot of work behind the scene, of course. There are, as always, untoldstories behind each success. Apparently each failure has a story too,Twitter recently announced abandoning Cassandra, I wonder whether it hassomething to do with this.    

And, how can I miss the big US group visiting BJ office. — Yeah, we have been busy...
        
Doug and Jon presenting the all company update at Enterprise to Beijing team.

 

Dinner at the kindergarden table restaurant . The place has becoming one of FreeWheel visitor's favorites, the waiters at the restaurant were shocked that we wanted a reservation for a group of 20. I guess they have never hosted such a big group before. They were in a flurry, we had a great time though  
  


The great wall trip. Many more pictures taken by FreeWheelers, I will find the group picture and post later. The following is for our US visitors. 



The Knopper Family and Nick at the bird's nest. Benjamin is a cool kid, I hope he enjoyed his first China trip!



And, birthdays, birthdays, birthdays!

This cake is for Diya, who spent her birthday atBeijing specing out our new product features.



June birthdays and I no longer celebrate my birthdays, this is official.


July birthdays and FreeWheel Beijing's 3 year anniversary cake.


Andrea has been very creative on those cakes, very good looking and tasty!

        

Article today on AdAge about FreeWheel's Beijing operations. In this article, I discussed how and why we go to Beijing to build our engineering teams and our experience so far. I hope this provides an alternative view point for companies in similar situation as FreeWheel when they consider building their teams.

Many thanks to JoAnna, Adam and Michael Learmonth for making this happen!

Need Talent? Why China Is (Still) Land of Opportunity

Google's Gone But It's Still One of the Best Places To Hire a Team

Posted by Diane Yu on 05.18.10@ 12:10 PM

Diane Yu

There's been heated discussion in recent months regarding how U.S.businesses (namely Google) can, should and actually do operate in China.What's been lost in the rhetoric and debate is China's overall increasing attractiveness to entrepreneurs, as it has become a marketplace for driving innovation. There are companies that are successfully navigating the country's political and cultural intricacies, and that's the untold story worth sharing.

Recruiting the best talent in a short period of time is key to a technology startup's success. In China, the inherently competitive nature of the education system, influenced by Beijing's dense advanced degree populations, has turned the nation into a hotbed for elite-level engineers and developers, most of whom are clamoring to work at startups.

Out of the 10 million high school graduates who take China's college-entrance exam each year, less than 7,000 of them are admitted into Peking University and Tsinghua University, the top two schools in China (both in Beijing). Who gets accepted? Go beyond high school valedictorians and picture the top one or two students from entire regions, selected from thousands of classmates.

It is this tier of elite students who come to Beijing to receive their education and most of them choose to stay here post-graduation to jump-start their careers. Envision the engineering talent of Silicon Valley, New York , Seattle, Boston, Austin and Denver, in one city —that's Beijing. When my co-founders approached me to start FreeWheel in 2007, I made it clear that I would not join unless we could operate our tech team in Beijing. I knew there was no other way to build a world-class team in such a short period of time. Luckily, my partners agreed.

Why was it easy to attract such talent to a newly formed U.S. startup? Let me explain. The accelerated growth of China's overall domestic economy has created a severe imbalance in the country. Graduate degree holders often find there are not enough jobs that meet their expectations in terms of environment and salary. The government can't support them nor can developed Chinese companies. At the same time,stories of successful entrepreneurs are recounted on Chinese TV, in magazines, and just about everywhere. Robin Li from Baidu, Jack Ma from Alibaba and Charles Zhang from Sohu have become household names. Even more so than here in the U.S., developers and engineers in China want to work at start-ups. They especially want to work at U.S.-based startups, because generally we provide better pay and a more open culture.

Very often startups choose to build their team in one geographic location to avoid communication costs for distributed departments, but because of that inherent limitation, they face the challenge of recruiting top-tier talent. We decided instead to follow the talent, and developed communications systems that addressed our geographic diversity (our two U.S. offices are in San Mateo and New York). We utilize the project-tracking system Jira to monitor all products,requirements and developments, and this tool has dramatically helped reduce the communication barrier. Skype and IP phones have also proved extremely practical for scheduled and impromptu conference calls and meetings.

As we've grown we've actually found that our geographically divide has not hindered us but has become quite beneficial. Due to time zone differences, we literally operate around the clock, providing 24/7client support with no additional staffing needed. Our customers love the fact that they can file a support ticket as they leave the office and know that the issue will be resolved before they wake up.

My founders and I took a major gamble when I convinced them that the best move was to build our tech team in China. And it turns out we were right. If I could go back and build our business from scratch, I would,without question, take the exact steps we took: go to the best talent,build a team in Beijing, and use the right tools to establish processes that mitigate communication risk. What has worked for our business can in fact work for yours as well.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Diane Yu is co-founder and chief technology officer for video ad-server FreeWheel, managing the company's engineering and developer team out of Beijing.