OpenX Blog

Earlier this year we sent out the call for feedback on what we should include in a Joomla!/OpenX module. Based on this we have developed a simple straight forward prototype module - one that makes it easy to integrate OpenX tags into a Joomla! site and use the native functionality to control where ads are displayed.

Can I try the Joomla!/OpenX module?
Yes! The module is currently in private beta and we are looking for more Joomla publishers to test it. Based on private beta feedback we expect to further develop the module before a public release.

Email us to join the private beta programme

What about other content management systems?
This is the first of many CMS modules we’d like to develop. We are going to start with Drupal, Wordpress, Alfresco and eZ Publish since they are among the most popular according to OpenX publishers. Right now the product team is needs suggestions about what these modules should include, please send us your thoughts.

Register to help us design and test these modules

I want to write an OpenX module for XXX?
Awesome! We’d love to hear from you find out about your ideas. We might be able to give you some good advice and suggestions too.

Get in touch and tell us what you are planning

We’ve been experimenting with Twitter as a quick simple way of sharing information about what’s happening around OpenX.

Here are the last 7 days tweets by OpenX.

You can see the latest OpenX twitter updates on the blog sidebar or visit the OpenX Twitter page here: http://twitter.com/openx

A new OpenX beta update is available for download. We were very excited to see how stable the first beta was but, as you would expect, there were lots of bug fixes and enhancements to be made. In fact, in this update we’ve closed 90 bugs!

If you haven’t tried the new OpenX beta yet, now is the time. You can find out about the new features included in the beta programme.

Existing beta testers will be interested in the key bug fixes and enhancements we’ve made:

• The OpenX API can now be used to link banners with zones and retrieve ad tags
• Distributed Statistics is now able to run more efficiently
• Key features including companion positioning, geotargeting and flash banner conversions have been improved.

See the release notes for more details or download the latest OpenX beta today!

The OpenX Day in Ancona, Italy was a great success and we are already planning the next event. We have short listed some possible locations and we’d like your help to decide which city we visit next.

Please vote and tell us which of these locations you would consider attending an OpenX Day event at.

Once we have a winning city, we will email out invites everyone who voted.

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Update: We’ve added San Francisco to the list. Please feel free to vote again (we’ll remove duplicates when we make our final assessment).

My role at OpenX is to lead the OpenX community, and drive the product vision, while my title remains ‘CTO’. A ‘true’ CTO would spend more time on the OpenX architecture, designing and leading development of a next-generation technical infrastructure. A better title for my job will be ‘Community Leader’.

We need to hire a CTO who can own the technology vision, and lead our excellent team of engineers to build OpenX to greater levels. As you can imagine, this is a very important position, and one that I personally will take a lot of time and effort to find the right person.

More details about the kind of person we are looking for are below. In summary, we are looking for an experienced, practical, energetic person who has previously built a huge global internet application, who wants to truly change the online advertising world.

Working at OpenX is a unique experience. We are a start-up that has tens of thousands of businesses globally depending upon us for their core revenue. We are positioned to transform a confusing online advertising marketplace into one that is transparent, efficient and open.

OpenX CTO Job Description

Responsibilities:

The CTO is the owner and driver of OpenX’s global technology vision and execution

Ideal Characteristics:

• Proven track record building and leading a world-class technology team
• Ability to develop and clearly articulate a compelling technology vision and inspire the team and community
• Strongly architectural mindset and approach. Ability to see the forest through the trees
• Global operating experience and outlook
• Experience building products for large communities of users
• Experience managing multiple parallel development work streams from concept to design and implementation and ongoing refinement
• Direct experience of deploying architecture and systems at great scale (e.g. 10K+ transactions per second) with very high availability and low cost
• Experience managing individuals and teams conducting complex, science-based algorithmic and optimization work
• Strong business partnership. Our executive management team need a real partner, not a requirements ‘order taker’! This means that the CTO must be very commercially “aware” and able help shape our business direction
• Experience in the online advertising space, especially: ad serving, ad targeting, marketplace design, yield optimization, self-serve participation, large scale transactions infrastructure etc
• An Open Source guru who is comfortable working with and managing developers around the world is a major plus
• Deep passion to transform the game and win

Please let us know if you know someone who fits the bill. Please send inquiries to hr@openx.org.

The OpenX team has released an update to our open source ad server.

This release (v2.4.5) includes improvements to the campaign delivery algorithms, SWF support, distributed statistics and more. We’ve added support to block impressions from selected User-Agents too.

As always, we’d like to send out our thanks to everyone who has helped us to identify and resolve issues.

Find out more in the release notes or download the latest release of OpenX today.

The OpenX Team has been quietly working away on an OpenX plugin for Joomla!. In fact, we now have a working prototype and we need feedback. With this in mind, we are planning a live demo next Wednesday at the OpenX office in London.

Who is invited?
We would love for London based publishers to come and visit our office and attend the session. For those who can’t come in, we also have a limited number of seats available to join the session online.

How do I register?
Please complete this short registration survey. We’ve included a couple of questions about what you would expect from an OpenX plugin for Joomla!

What other ways can I get involved?
There will be lots of other opportunities to help out. Please join the OpenX Publisher Feedback group if you would like to help the product team develop new products and features.

How can I track your progress?
Keep an eye on our blog or join our mailing list to keep up to date with OpenX product news and community announcements.

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Related News:
Joomla! recently interviewed Scott and discussed how Joomla! and OpenX are working together. Read the full interview here.

Today I am very excited and privileged to join the OpenX team and community as CEO. I am excited for all the normal reasons one joins a start-up - a small, fast-growing company driven by a compelling set of customer needs and a passionate, energetic team of people with lots of big questions to answer.

But, I am truly excited for a couple of reasons more specific to OpenX.

First, I believe OpenX has the potential to substantially improve advertising in a truly accessible, open and controllable way for an increasingly wide array of publishers and advertisers.

So what? Well, to me, the most exciting thing about the online economy has been the way it helps more businesses flourish around the world - genuine macro-economic value creation if you will. For example, when I was at GoTo.com in the early days, we were on a clear mission: to help drive the growth of small businesses by enabling them to affordably reach their customers online. We aimed to do this through the simple yet powerful idea of providing pay-for-performance, auction-priced CPC search ads to anyone. At the time (particularly 1999-2001), plenty of people thought we were nuts… but over time the model proved itself and now CPC search ads are the foundation for much of the online economy.

I think OpenX can do a lot to help drive another similar explosion of value creation in the online advertising industry. It has the potential to open up the advertising marketplace through a genuinely transparent, participatory ad infrastructure for publishers, advertisers and ad networks.

Which leads right into my second, very related, source of excitement: the open community participation model OpenX thrives on. I think this community involvement can help us more rapidly understand, develop and deliver compelling products for publishers around the world with customers engaged every step of the way.

So what am I going to be doing? Over the next few weeks I am going to be primarily focused on 3 main areas:

1. Further building out our great team.

<start shameless recruiting plug :-> In particular, if you are a great, highly motivated technologist interested in working at the intersection of advertising technology, open-source and new advertising business models, we’d love to hear from you. Please contact us at: hr@openx.org

2. Fully understanding our customers’ needs and how to create the best possible way for our community to participate.

If you use our products, have considered using them, want to contribute ideas or time to the further development of OpenX or just have feedback of any kind, please don’t hesitate to email me at tellme@openx.org

3. Expanding and accelerating our product roadmap to deliver more value to our community of publishers faster.

Yup, alongside some of the big future plans we have, we also know we need to go faster to get the basics right. Therefore we are very focused on the stability and performance of our core products. See also Scott’s recent post on our priorities.

I very much look forward to all your input and dialogue.

Tim Cadogan

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Related links:
Find out more about Tim Cadogan
Press Release: Former Yahoo! advertising executive Tim Cadogan Joins OpenX as CEO

Today we are announcing some big changes at OpenX. We have hired Tim Cadogan as our CEO, and are adding a shiny new office in the USA! Tim has deep product experience and has been in the advertising world a long time (remember Goto.com???). Together we will really be able to accelerate the product roadmap, and make OpenX a website publisher’s favorite tool.

Welcome Tim!

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Related links:
Tim’s blog post: Why I’m Fired Up to Join OpenX
Press Release: Former Yahoo! advertising executive Tim Cadogan Joins OpenX as CEO
Find out more about Tim Cadogan

As you’ve no doubt noticed, we’ve updated the OpenX website template. The most important change is the new navigation system but you will also see other changes as you move around the site.

Why the change? Feedback on the old design was that the navigation system was difficult to use, we hope this new navigation system will improve this. Thanks to everyone who gave feedback and helped us come up with a more usable design.

As always, we’re keen for feedback and we are always looking to improve. Please send in your thoughts and feedback.