The 4th of July is approaching fast and we’d like to update you on what’s happening at next week’s OpenX Seminar in Cologne. There’s been a lot of interest and we’re really happy we have had lots of submissions on what you want to hear about.
The session will start with an introduction on OpenX, a tour of the new stable version of the OpenX ad server (currently in beta) and our roadmap. In the afternoon we’re going to go into details based on the topics proposed by participants including scalability and performance. We’ll finish up with a Q&A session with a panel of experts.
If you’re coming you’ll get to meet Simon Bailey, our Senior Product Manager, who will talk you through 2.6 demo, roadmap and plugins. Simon has a comprehensive knowledge of OpenX and future product developments.
Heiko Weber and Tobias Schwarz, active community members and OpenX consultants, will be joining us on stage to discuss scalability and performance. You may know Heiko and Tobias from our German forum and from their work as OpenX consultants.
They say the devil is in the detail so here’s some useful info:
- Location: KonferenzZentrum – Plenum 2,
Josef-Lammerting-Allee 17-21, 50933 Köln (directions)
- Date: Friday, 04/07/2008
- Time: 10:00-16:00
Please take a moment to register if you are planning on coming.
We hope to see you there!
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Event resources:
FAQ’s on the event
- Q: I don’t speak German - can I come?
- If you speak English, yes! The format should allow for both English and German speakers to stay fully involved in the discussion.
Jon Miller, the former CEO of AOL, has joined as chairman of the OpenX. I could list a million things that Jon accomplished in his career, but one stands out: every person I have spoken with that has worked for Jon would enthusiastically work for him again, and many consider him their mentor. To me, that one thing says the most about a person.
Why do we need Jon for OpenX? What does it mean for our publisher community?
Jon has much experience working with major advertisers, as well as large and small publishers. He understands how difficult it is to provide software, service, and media to medium to small publishers, which is the core user base of OpenX. He can help us grow from a small company to a larger one. He understands our need to continue to focus on making OpenX simple, scalable, and extendable. He is a true believer of open source (like our other investors).
The vision of OpenX is to help our publishers make more money online. Jon will help us do that.
Please help me welcome Jon to the OpenX team!
Media coverage snapshot
Reuters: “The titans are doing fine, but there’s a whole new generation. I believe Openads is one of those,”
Cnet: OpenX, one the industry’s largest ad networks and the dominant open-source ad server company
Clickz: Jonathan Miller was appointed to the new position of chairman of open source ad serving platform OpenX.
Silicon alley insider: Former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller has joined online ad firm OpenX as chairman
Today we announced a version of our ad server that is hosted. What this means is that a publisher will have the option to use Openads without downloading and installing on their own web server. This will be useful for small publishers, who do not have the time, money, or expertise to use the downloaded version. Equally, large publishers may prefer a hosted version of Openads if they do not want to configure a server cluster that will handle large amounts of traffic.
Obviously this is a gigantic effort - there are more websites using Openads than all other ad servers combined. If even a small percentage of our community chooses a hosted version rather than a downloaded version, we will be serving billions of ads per day. The planning involved with this has been in the works for months.
What does this mean for publishers?
- Choice. Publishers will now be able to choose between a downloaded and hosted version of our ad server. Openads will continue to provide a download version of our ad server.
- Open. Openads will continue to be open source, licensed under the GPL.
- Free. Both the downloaded and hosted version of Openads will be FREE.
We are starting to roll out our hosted product at the end of January. During the first couple of months, the service will be in private beta, and we will be opening the beta to more and more publishers throughout 2008. If you would like to sign up for the private beta process, please sign up here.
Please realise that it will take some time for us to roll out the beta across our entire community. I encourage you to continue to download and install Openads - we will keep you up to date and invite you to join in with beta testing as soon as we are able.
I cannot emphasise enough how much I appreciate our team’s effort in preparing for a hosted version. I also thank everyone in the Openads community for using Openads, and for continuing to give us feedback so we can make our products better.
Thanks,
Scott
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Related articles:
Openads announces $15.5M funding and a free hosted ad server
We have prepared a new patch release of Openads 2.4 which includes bug fixes, security enhancements and new database pruning techniques.
A big thanks to everyone in the Openads community who helped identify and resolve issues in this release.
Find out more in the release notes or download the latest release of Openads today.
A massive thank you to all the developers who have worked extremely hard over the last week to get the new 2.3.37 beta release out.
This version contains the following updates:
- Conversion of Flash hardcoded links was not working on some setups.
- Fixed fatal errors in lg.php, avw.php.
- Fixed ability of Agency accounts to use Targeting Statistics.
- Fixed past statistics migration from MMM v0.1.
For full details on the new version, please see the Openads 2.3.37 beta release notes.
Thank you to all of you for your continued feedback. Please continue to report back your experiences in the forum. Thanks!
Download the new version now »
Continuing in our march towards a non-beta release of Openads 2.3, we have worked hard squashing bugs and improving performance of the beta over the last 2 weeks.
Therefore, we present to you the release of Openads 2.3.36 Beta. This version contains the following important updates:
- Improved support for PHP running as CGI/FastCGI
- Installation allowed for PHP 4.3.10, however please see the FAQ entry
- Fixed delivery of HTML banners in Javascript Zone Invocation Tags where the banner contains “” characters
- Improved the user interface for how email zone linking is handled
- W3C validation in Javascript Zone Invocation Tags
For full details on the new version, please see the Openads 2.3.36 beta release notes.
It’s your feedback that drives the direction of the Openads platform. So keep it coming! A big Thank You to all of the community users who have helped us improve 2.3-beta.
Download the new version now »
Following great community feedback on the launch of Openads 2.3 Beta, we’ve been working hard over the last 10 days to incorporate these bug fixes into a new release.
As a result, I’m pleased to announce the release of Openads 2.3.35 Beta. This version contains the following important updates:
- Fully functional password recovery
- Ability to migrate geotargeting data when upgrading from Openads 2.0
- Fixed cache problems experienced by people running multiple hosts
- Compatibility for database table prefixes containing capital letters
For full details on the new version, please see the Openads 2.3.35 beta release notes.
We’d be delighted to hear what you think of the new version. It’s your feedback that drives the direction of the Openads platform. So keep it coming!
Download the new version now!
It’s only July and already the summer has been very exciting for the team here at Openads. In early June we were proud to announce our successful fund-raising of $5M to help us build the Company. Yesterday, on July 4th, we announced the beta version of the newest Openads software which has already been downloaded by an amazing number of users. Today I am happy to announce the latest big news here at Openads which is the hiring of James Bilefield as our CEO.
We were introduced to James as an experienced executive who could help us take the early steps of building a company from our existing open source project. We found James to be a very thoughtful and engaging individual. Over time we also came to recognize that James’ experience at Skype running all of their Europe operations and at Yahoo made him a great fit for Openads. Our goal over the next year, with James’ experience and guidance, is to build an active publisher community that loves Openads.
The PR announcement is here.
Welcome James!
Last week we told you that a new release was coming…true to our word and bang on schedule, yesterday we released Openads 2.3 Beta to the public!
I’d like to thank the people that have worked tirelessly to get us here which include our development team, our private Beta users but also the thousands of users and developers in the Openads community who have contributed bug fixes, code and ideas for how we could all make Openads better.. We couldn’t have done it without all of you.
Both phpAdsNew and Max Media Manager users can take advantage of the new install and upgrade wizard. This important feature manages the entire process for you and takes on average less than 15 minutes to complete.
The new version has a number of exciting new features and enhancements. For full details, check out the product page on the website
We’re committed to making Openads bigger and better than ever BUT we need your feedback! You can let us know your thoughts through the new 2.3 section on the Forum, by posting a comment or just email us (hello at openads dot org).
Download Openads 2.3 Beta today!
Over the last four years, my team and I have been tirelessly building what we consider the best - and most widely used - adserver on the web. It is a huge responsibility to build the software that powers such a large percentage of all online advertising.
Today we are announcing that we have taken a huge step forward in the lifecycle of Openads. We have agreed to partner with some of the industry’s best investors - Index Ventures, Mangrove Capital Partners, and a number of incredible angel investors - to help Openads realise its vision: to become the platform that all websites use to make money online.
One of the major reasons that we chose Index as our lead investor is that they have a deep understanding of open source companies (as investors in MySQL, Zend, and Pentaho), as well as community products (both Index and Mangrove were investors in Skype, and Index also invested in Last.fm). That is a huge level of relevant experience that is backing Openads. I cannot tell you how excited I am to have them on board.
What does this mean for Openads? Openads will always remain a free, open source adserver. Openads will continue to focus on building features that the community wants, so that we have the simplest, most powerful, and most widespread adserver on the planet. The investment means that new versions of software will be released faster than ever.
There are so many people who have been involved with Openads over the years. Our team has done amazing work on our new version of software. The Openads community has provided us invaluable insight into what features to build (and what bugs to fix!). We have received lots of patches from developers worldwide. Community moderators tirelessly answer questions on the forums and IRC. We have security experts from every corner of earth ensuring our software is bulletproof. Openads is truly a community effort - built upon the efforts of those before me (Niels, Matteo, and many others) who have spent many hours per day developing, answering questions, educating others, etc.
The PR announcement is here.
Thanks to everyone involved - this next step promises to be an exciting one for Openads.
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