FreeThink

Three Times Makes It a Trend – FreeWheel Gets MRC-Accredited Again

2012-01-10T16:14:53+00:00

Every day, customers, partners, media and analysts rely on the data and analytics from our flagship product, Monetization Rights Management® (MRM).

We’re happy to announce that MRM and its custom reporting extension, MRM Analytics (MRMA) have received Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation for the third year in a row.

MRC is the non-profit industry association which secures audience measurement services that are valid, reliable and effective for the media industry and related users.

MRC’s audit, conducted by a global auditor, has been a detailed and time-consuming review of every aspect of FreeWheel’s technology, ensuring that MRM and MRMA both comply with the MRC’s published standards and the IAB’s “Advertising Impression Measurement Guidelines.” MRC has awarded its official accreditation for both FreeWheel's display and video ad impressions.

We are obsessed with making sure our world-class technology, that powers the economics of distributed video for the largest media companies, complies with the latest and toughest industry standards for reporting and metrics.

The renewal of our internationally recognized accreditation means we are doing just that. Again.

Spotlighting FreeWheel’s Limelight Integration For Cloud-Based Video Ad Stitching

2011-12-20T23:52:07+00:00

Todd Spangler, technology editor at Multichannel News, today wrote a story about a couple of partnerships that FreeWheel has recently put in place to extend our clients’ reach into even more environments where their content is consumed. One of those integrations is with Limelight’s REACH platform.

While most video ads today are inserted at the “edge” of the network – i.e. by the player or a piece of code that an ad platform has running in the player – what our relationship with Limelight enables is the insertion of ads into the content before it is even delivered to the device. This server-side, or “cloud-based,” stitching can potentially offer our clients a few advantages:

- It removes the necessity to integrate with the play-out environment directly. In some cases, even when FreeWheel has the ability to insert ads at the edge (on an Android phone or iPad, for example), it may be easier and quicker to do so for a particular app or experience in the cloud.

- It allows us to serve ads to devices, which have limited on-board capabilities. For example, early-generation connected televisions have limited memory and processing power, so even if they could theoretically host our AdManager player component or parse our XML, it may be preferable for all parties to leave those resources free to focus on other important tasks, like buffering the stream or powering the device’s interface.

- Lastly, a server-side integration allows us to reach devices to which we simply don’t have and/or don’t plan to have direct integrations. Blackberry devices (sorry, RIM) and other legacy smartphones are an obvious example.

Limelight has a tremendous amount of expertise and experience in reaching these kinds of mobile and living room devices, as well as in preparing “high bitrate” content like video, and was thus a logical early choice to work with in this capacity. There are some limitations to this cloud-based stitching, most of which revolve around advanced metrics and forecasting, as we don’t have as direct a view into what’s happening with the player and the ads being played.

But, as the number of variety of devices that are used to access premium video increases, having a suite of options with which to “follow” that video wherever it goes and apply the best ad insertion solution to the best content/device/consumption combination(s) will become a solid asset for FreeWheel and our clients.

For more on our integrations with Limelight and This Technology check out the Multichannel story here, or read our press release with This Technology here.

MRAID Storms Mobile Standards Scene

2011-10-20T10:50:01+00:00

Hot off the presses, today the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) released its latest set of standards: Mobile Rich-media Ad Interface Definitions (MRAID) 1.0.

You may wonder, do we really need more standards?

In a word: yes. If ever the over-used term “wild wild west” was appropriate, it’s for the mobile space. Countless different platforms, technologies, applications, and environments make it very challenging for advertisers and agencies to achieve real scale with a single buy. Combine this with those same platforms, technologies, applications, and environments making it just as challenging to run a single piece of creative across that buy, and mobile growth hits major road blocks.

Enter MRAID.

The document released outlines a standard interface specification for mobile rich media ads. Put another way, it suggests a specific way to design and code mobile rich media creative such that it can then run freely across these disparate platforms, technologies, applications, and environments. This leads to lower creative costs, greater operational efficiency, and more advertising dollars allocated to mobile formats.

Why does FreeWheel care about this?

Given that our customers are the largest entertainment companies, many of whom are releasing TV Everywhere solutions intended to allow consumers to watch TV content (and ads) on their favorite mobile devices, we care a whole lot. We want the operations of advertising in mobile environments to be as friction-free as possible – so that advertisers and agencies can spend more, operations teams can better manage the campaigns, and the space can continue to scale. We have worked closely with the IAB in the past months to help create this standard, and we’re proud of the outcome.

Want to read more?

Visit the IAB website.

TV Advances One More Step Toward Everywhere

2011-07-26T13:41:13+00:00

Today we release yet another component critical to successfully executing our customers’ TV Everywhere strategies. The latest feature in our Monetization Rights Management® (MRM) product allows enterprise-level media companies’ to dynamically and seamlessly merge mid-roll video ads into live-stream and simulcast videos on mobile Apple devices, including the iPad and iPhone.

This live serving feature makes it possible for our customers to adhere to Nielsen ratings ad load requirements for the first three days following initial broadcast, then automatically transition to dynamic ad serving on the fourth day and beyond. The fixed, C3 ad load allows them to capture full Nielsen ratings credit, and the switch to dynamic serving allows them to take advantage of everything digital advertising can offer, including geo-targeting those linear video ads on Apple mobile devices.

Previously, content companies were required to manually insert ads. This method could result in interrupted video content and compromised user experience, and could also take a toll on bandwidth and device resources. This live serving feature actually merges the ads into the video content without interruption, making serving into mobile environments more seamless, creating less strain on Apple devices, and making content companies’ ad delivery technology on par with Apple’s industry-setting standards.

In short, we’ve never been closer online to mimicking the way linear ads are placed into TV content than we are today.

We plan to support Video on Demand (VOD) by late Q4 and stay tuned for Android support in the coming months!

So, Tell Us What You Want, What You Really Really Want

2011-05-04T12:36:56+00:00

We know, we know, the Spice Girls may be a bit over-the-top and outdated, but we took an internal poll and we still have some fans (ok, one, but she still counts…). The analogy is relevant, we promise!

While you’ve been enjoying the latest in Dancing with the Stars or 30 Rock’s 100th episode, we’ve been hard at work on some milestones of our own that include the Spice Girl’s hometown and reflect one of their most popular songs.

We’re officially advocates of the ‘English Breakfast’

Yep, we said it. Last month, we officially expanded to the U.K., opening our FreeWheel London office. Our newest customer is British Sky Broadcasting (Sky) and we couldn’t be happier to be their exclusive video ad management provider. Sky chose to work with us in large part due to our mobile experience and capabilities. This isn’t our first customer across the pond as we’ve already been working internationally with ESPN, Discovery, Warner Music and Diagonal View. Stay tuned for more news on this front over the coming months – hope you enjoyed the Royal Wedding (on our customer, CNN.com)!

Back to the Spice Girls…

Whether you loved them, hated them, hated that your sister, friends, boyfriend or girlfriend loved them or never heard of them, one of the Spice Girls’ hit songs involves the group asking people to tell them what they want so they can ‘zigazig-haaa.’ In this case, we will assume the role of the Spice Girls asking you – our amazing customers – to tell us what you want so we can, you guessed it, ‘zigazig-haaa,’ in other words: make product enhancements that make your life significantly easier and more enjoyable.

Well, you told us, we listened, and last Wednesday we released MRMA 2.0 and MRM 3.9.

Check out what’s new with our latest releases:

MRMA 2.0: Reorganized UI and navigation to enhance usability
- -- Simplified with just two main tabs: reports & templates
- -- To export or delete a report, simply check the box (rather than click a link)
MRMA 2.0: Overhaul of the “Create New Report” workflow
- -- Previously an eight step process
- -- Now, all options needed to create a new report are on ONE page
MRMA 2.0: Improved usability features such as auto-email reports and filter improvements
- -- Ability to email a report to MRMA or non-MRMA users
- -- Wild Card Search – search functionality now includes “wild card,” – allowing you to search for a word in a specific placement
- -- Incremental Search – instead of having to type in an entire word to search for a specific word, the search results list updates as you type each letter
MRM 3.9: Yet more mobile features
- -- HTML5 video ad serving in Android browser – joining our features for Android in-application environments – to read about our full mobile capabilities, click here
- - - Includes video ads, overlay ads, and display ads

So, did we listen well enough? You tell us. And if you’re in the U.K., we’re looking for some new restaurant recommendations!

To learn more about MRMA 2.0 or MRM 3.9, reach out to your account manager.

A CTO’s Thoughts about Amazon’s Cloud Crash

2011-04-28T19:34:30+00:00

As CTO of FreeWheel, I was often challenged by my decision to have our global operations team run and maintain our own colocation data centers. Why not put everything on a cloud? This question has come up during all stages of FreeWheel’s development, and my answer varies as we grow.

During the early days of FreeWheel, we didn’t pick a cloud solution like Amazon EC2, because they were not mature enough and weren’t proven in the market. We were very small when we first launched; if the Amazon cloud had been as big as it is today, I would have thought very hard before deciding to rent a colo. The cloud actually is a perfect choice for a small start-up. You can quickly launch your own website or service without much capital commitment, and speed and minimum capital commitment are critical factors when launching a business.

After FreeWheel's Monetization Rights Management® product launched, we quickly grew and signed up many brand name customers. As part of those contracts, we would sign Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and when you are talking about a few 9s in your up-time requirement, a cloud solution no longer works. To put everything in a cloud would mean you are competing for resources with small businesses or personal blogs that never worry about speed-to-response nor up-time - as long as it doesn’t go down all the time, it is good enough for them. However, it is not acceptable for us. When you have a customer portfolio like ours, I would fire myself if I were to put everything on a cloud, because that means I am not taking the quality of service for our customers to heart. A cloud service is not good enough for mission-critical business. It can, however, be a perfect alternative for non-mission critical pieces of your business, and a perfect solution to handle spiky traffic overflow.

Just recently, I was talking to our Chief Architect, asking him to investigate what it would take to expand our testing environment on the Amazon cloud. Even today, when everybody is talking about the Amazon cloud crash, it still doesn’t change my opinion. The fact that you choose the cloud means it is no big deal if your data is lost permanently or if the service goes down for a few days. When you make the choice of going with the cloud, you know whole-heartedly that this is going to happen one day, and you have to be ok with it. Test and development environments fit these characteristics.

I find people often blame technology for problems when in fact it is the decision of where to apply the technology that should be blamed. There were people that came to me and asked, “Why do you choose Ruby on Rails (ROR)? We have had so many problems with it, it is crappy.” I would ask, “What do you use ROR for? We chose ROR for speed of development in UI, not for high-performance applications.” ROR should not be chosen for high-traffic website development, nor high-performance servers. If I were to choose ROR for our ad server development to support billions of daily transactions, then it is my crappy choice to blame. ROR is not at fault. Same thing if you were to put all of your mission-critical data or service on a cloud, and one day you find that you just lost all of your data or the service is completely down. It is the decision of doing so to be blamed.

Am I arguing Amazon is not at fault? No. The fact that they claim perfect data back-ups and guarantee no data will be lost in their state-of-the-art cloud and couldn’t hold their promise is indeed Amazon’s fault. I do find it hard to believe that they don’t have “near-real-time” off-site data back-ups. In order to prevent a complete data loss should anything happen in one data center, a redundant data center should be set up to copy that data. This is how we set up our technology at FreeWheel. If our main site goes down, we can use the data copied to another data center to recover.

What I suspect happened with Amazon’s data loss is that the corruption of the data in one site was replicated to a remote data center before they caught it, hence the remote back-up was not good either. If this is true (Amazon has yet to offer an official explanation), then their monitoring of the data integrity system is to blame.

UPDATE: Amazon has since responded to explain their cloud crash. You can read their comments here.

FreeWheel Releases New Product: Revenue & Payments Management

2011-02-03T09:59:01+00:00

The well-known efficiency metric for motion now becomes the acronym for our newest product: Revenue & Payments Management (RPM). Designed to create a world of efficiency of its own, RPM was created to decrease operational costs by managing the complex world of billing and payments across partners, advertisers, and revenue models.

We figured you’d have a few questions about that.

What is RPM?

RPM joins Monetization Rights Management® (MRM) as our second core product. It provides infrastructure that combines contract and order management with invoicing and payables for professional content. It has two components: Advertiser Contract Management and Partner Contract Management. The Partner Contract Management component is what we just released; the Advertiser Contract Management component will be released mid-year.

So, what does it do, exactly?

It will allow our current and future customers – the largest producers and distributors of TV, movies, music, and sports – to accurately manage the flow of contracts (between agencies, advertisers, artists, partners, vendors), issue invoices that account for those contracts, and make payments across partners and revenue models (advertising, subscriptions, rentals, PPV, purchases).

In short, it takes all of the relevant contractual inputs (payment terms, campaign terms, requirements, stipulations), combines that with all of the delivery inputs (ad delivery, new subscriptions, videos rented), and gives our customers the accurate numbers they need to then invoice and pay all parties involved. If RPM does its job right, the word “discrepancy” could incite far less fear in the minds of our customers.

Is that hard to do now?

This is no small task. RPM is solving for a tangled web of technologies – publicly available and proprietary – that time has only made more painful to manage.

Our clients face innumerable challenges from the necessary complexity in the contracts involved in growing their professional content businesses. Agency and advertiser insertion orders come riddled with stipulations. Content owners and distributors often have contracts with resellers that have different deal terms, payment terms, schedules, and requirements. They frequently have internal business units with their own sets of rules, payment terms, timing, and price models. And then there are multiple other parties involved – artists, guilds, anyone else involved in the production and monetization of this content – with different pay-outs by video, sequential pay-outs, the list goes on. And all of the changes to the video economy that created a need for MRM are exacerbating the pain involved in managing all of this complexity – creating the need for RPM.

Understood, it’s not easy stuff. What makes FreeWheel the right company to fix it?

Our co-founder and co-CEO Jon Heller, served as CFO at Visible World, and got a first-hand view of the complex world of finance. Since releasing MRM years ago, we have become acutely aware of how challenging the world of contracts, invoices, and payments is to manage for our customers. We’ve been designing RPM for over a year with copious input from the same customers who have been requesting we build it all along. In its simplest form, RPM is technology built to handle massive amounts of data and money flowing in and out – something we think we’ve gotten to be pretty good at.

Makes sense, but FreeWheel has always been about video ads. Are you shifting focus?

No way! Our mission today is exactly the same as when we founded the company: to help the largest media companies make the most money possible from their professional content. We remain resolutely focused on helping the creators and distributors of TV, movies, music, and sports make money, decrease costs, and build more profitable professional content businesses. MRM at its core is about generating revenue from advertising, and RPM at its core is about decreasing operational costs. Together, we are helping our customers manage the economics of their professional content.

It’s a big job, but we’re ready for it.

To learn more about Revenue & Payments Management or any of our solutions, reach out to your account manager, or drop us a line at sales@freewheel.tv.

FreeWheel Technology Is Positively Certifiable

2011-01-21T14:43:54+00:00

Adhering to industry standards is one thing, but participating in year-long audits conducted by world-class companies to receive independent certifications is quite another. In early 2010, our flagship product, Monetization Rights Management® (MRM) received its first accreditation from the Media Rating Council and our SAS 70 Type I process audit.

Today we are announcing that both MRM and its custom reporting extension product, MRM Analytics (MRMA), were just given continued Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation, as well as the SAS 70 Type II certification.

So, what the heck are those?

Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation means MRM and MRMA both comply with the MRC’s published standards and the IAB’s “Advertising Impression Counting Guidelines.”

The SAS 70 Type II standard, established by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) evaluates a service organization’s controls and procedure over information technology for at least six months (in our case, nine months). The result of this evaluation can be varied, but we received the certification with “no exception” – an exemplary result.

So, what?

For us, this just reinforces our unyielding commitment to operational and technical excellence. We realize that to successfully manage video advertising businesses for the largest media companies, durable internal controls are critical. These certifications offer internationally-recognized, third-party assurance that our technology and operations process is secure, stable, and accurate.

Since our earliest days, we have built our systems to ensure that they adhere to the toughest standards available. This is proof we’ve succeeded.

FreeWheel Releases MRM 3.5

2010-11-04T11:48:15+00:00

Today FreeWheel is releasing the 3.5 version of our flagship product, Monetization Rights Management® (MRM), and it’s packed with dozens of new features, many of which were designed to further enhance our support for portable devices and cross-platform syndication.

Here are a handful of the newest developments:

Android SDK: What the heck does that mean? It means our MRM customers will be able to manage ad sales rights, forecast inventory, deliver commercial break patterns, and serve multiple ads within a single pod – ALL within Android applications. With Android platform growth rates on the rise, gaining on Blackberry and Apple, this SDK lets our customers serve ads into video content within Android apps.
Location-based targeting: So what, geo-targeting has been around for a decade, right? Not like this. MRM takes cues from your phone to target by latitude and longitude in the U.S., allowing for a whole new level of precision in geo-based targeting for video ads.
Platform targeting: Want to target just iPhone users, or just iPad users? Done. With MRM 3.5’s release, our customers can now deliver platform-specific messages or ad formats based on what type of operating system is on your target audience’s device.
Mobile ad network support: Do you have app ad inventory you can’t sell? MRM now supports both AdMob and iAd, allowing customers to monetize that inventory with two of the most popular third party ad networks.
More ad formats: We’re now delivering mid-rolls to the iPhone and iPad browser (Safari), companion ads (display ads that are designed to accompany a video ad) in iPhone and iPad apps, and Pointroll mobile display ads in apps and HTML5.

So why does all of this matter so much? FreeWheel is all about giving the largest media companies the technology they need to confidently syndicate and distribute their most valuable content across partners and devices. MRM 3.5 is yet one more step forward and is powering many of the cross-platform, heavily syndicated publishers you read about today.

Calling All Future FreeWheelers

2010-10-20T15:56:23+00:00

This week our team in Beijing is busily recruiting the newest talent fresh out of Tsinghua University and Peking University. Below are letters our alums from each school have written to tell potential hires why FreeWheel is such a fantastic place to work. Happy reading from our happy employees!

ALUMNI FROM TSINGHUA UNIVERSITY

Wang Yuantao 王元涛, Software Engineer DEV, Forecasting Team

Hi, I am Wang Yuantao. I majored in Computing Mathematics at Tsinghua University in 2003, graduated with a masters degree in 2009, and joined FreeWheel. I'm a developer on the forecasting team now. In the autumn of 2008, I sat in the room for FreeWheel recruiting, thinking that the work was interesting and that the business model made sense. I thought it was interesting because I worked in the Student Network TV of Tsinghua University when I was an undergraduate, and was a Media Operations volunteer at the International Broadcasting Center in Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. So I, as a student, I knew the international TV industry and was familiar with online video technology. FreeWheel sat right in the center of my mind. I thought the way the company makes money was reasonable because I have some friends trying to provide other technical services for online video, so I know how the industry value chain works and why they are hard to get profitable. After the recruitment, I submitted my CV and passed the writing test. When I got the final interview, I had received some offers from other companies. Some run like huge stale machines, while I'd like to work with young people in a young company. Some offers did not compete with FreeWheel's, so I gave them up. When I received FreeWheel's offer, I was still waiting for another one. However, a rational person considers marginal profit: the marginal cost of giving up FreeWheel was far larger than the marginal revenue of the next one on the way. So, I chose FreeWheel finally. Now, I feel my decision was correct. As a developer, I find QA here is very smart, friendly, and easy to communicate with. We play badminton and practice yoga every week. Also, engineers often hold tech salon, learning new techniques together.

Wei Wei卫伟, Sr. Engineer, Video Integration

FreeWheel was my first job, and I have been working here for almost 3 years. Before joining here, I did internships at five other companies, including huge ones such as IBM and Bosch as well as small start-ups. Experiences with various companies told me I should work in a good start-up, and FreeWheel is the one. From my individual experiences at FreeWheel, I would like to state a few advantages to work here:

Fresh challenges. I started my job in the UI group without any Ruby on Rails experience. After two years I was transited to the Video Integrations group to work on ActionScript and Flash, another totally new field for me. Recently, I began a rotation program to work as a Sales Engineer, flying between New York and Beijing to help build a bridge and exchange knowledge. As a Sales Engineer, I have more direct communication with clients, which is precious practice for me.
Real and fast. When I worked in a big research lab of a huge company, I found my project probably would go to nowhere after six to twelve months. But at FreeWheel, the codes you're writing today will sometimes be released several days later to satisfy eager clients, and will be running on some of the biggest video sites in US. This is totally thrilling.
Working closely with US people. Why do Silicon Valley and so many great companies exist in the US? In my opinion, a very root reason is the nature of the American culture and entrepreneurial spirit. By working with US people, we can learn from them about this.
Nice environment. Besides boosting and showing your own personal value, our company is also a very nice and flexible place to work. We're in very good business district. Our office is nice. Food is awesome. And you can find lots of friends to play with. (For board game, contact me please...)

Yu Bing 于冰, Video Integration Team

What I did before FreeWheel: My ID is trueice@newsmth. I'm the creator of the trueice ftp and "zixia" music online (famous music sharing website at Tsinghua University.) I have been the manager of the Pop Music/Linux Boards on SMTH BBS (Tsinghua Alumni BBS), and I co-founded and served as tech director of the TVie project (online time-shifting TV).

What I do at FreeWheel: I am leading the Android platform integration development project on FreeWheel's Video Integration Team.

My background: Today I returned to Tsinghua University to share with you some of my experiences and personal reflections about the online video industry and the work in start-up companies. My major at college was not computer science, but fluid dynamics. However, in the first year of my college life, I got interested in Linux/internet technologies, and then started doing network administration work in the student science and technology association. One year later, I bought a server by myself and began to set up the biggest online music sharing/streaming service in CERNET. I enjoyed sharing music with the students and playing with Linux servers. At that time, streaming video was not widely used, due to the bandwidth/hardware limit. However, streaming music was quite popular.

In my post-graduate study period, my major was changed to Storage Systems in computer science, and I took part in a lot of storage systems-related projects at Tsinghua University. In early 2006, I went to 1verge Inc. and worked for a short period with two fellow FreeWheelers, Free (Du Song) and Kevin Liu, to build the early version of youku.com. After that, I also helped with another start-up company called Mojiti, which turned into Hulu after a year. These work experiences activated my interest in online video streaming technologies and pushed me into the industry. In late 2006, I decided to work with one of the Mojiti co-founders to create world's first online time-shifting TV product, TVie. After three years of hard work, our product has been used in a lot of TV stations throughout China. Also, our technology powered several massive live events for video sharing sites such as youku/ku6. At a start-up company, you may enjoy the innovation environment, building a product from ground up, and designing the architecture all by yourself. Even you can participate in the operations of your company. However, in China, start-up companies have trouble getting well funded, and just have limited resources for R&D.

It's hard to build high tech safe-guards, and your product would be copied easily if your sales and revenue cannot grow fast enough. I gradually realized that technology start-ups are quite hard to grow in China. You won't get rewarded if your just have good technology. Start-ups' advantages do not make much sense in China's market environment. When I started feeling tired about working in a start-up and got worried about the future of my career earlier this year, FreeWheel contacted me. I've been paying close attention to FreeWheel's growth in the market for years, and knew well about this company's success story. After several close conversations with our CTO, Diane, I finally made the decision to join FreeWheel and started to work with Du Song and Kevin again. Furthermore, we have Jack and Wang Di and a lot of THU/PKU alumni here. Two more reasons why I chose FreeWheel are:

FreeWheel's product is solving the key problem of the online video industry. TVie and like products just enable the streaming infrastructure, however, it cannot get all the participants paid enough as content goes online. So, it's hard to make high and long-term margin in this unhealthy industry. FreeWheel's flagship product, MRM, links all of the stakeholders and makes them successful with their online video business.
FreeWheel has a top-down nice, human-centric culture. As Diane says, "Have the best people to build the best team and ship the best product." That's my dream!

ALUMNI FROM PEKING UNIVERSITY

Cheng Li 李成, Software Engineer DEV

Who am I: I am a software engineer at FreeWheel, graduated in 2009 from Peking University in China with a master degree of computer science.

Why I chose FreeWheel: Back to more than one year ago, when I was making the decision for my first full time job, I chose FreeWheel after thorough consideration. The main reason a fresh graduate like me chose FreeWheel were:

FreeWheel is in the right business, and our CEO and CTO made that very clear. All of the interviewers were very happy to see my interest in business, so I thought I could learn something beyond engineering.
FreeWheel is agile. Another company that also offered me a job was doing one major release per year, while FreeWheel is doing this almost once per month. Ten times more production release per year means ten times more challenge and opportunities for me to learn.
FreeWheel is in an emerging industry with a promising future and potential for market growth. And in the video monetizing industry, they are on the cutting edge.

What I have learned and experienced at FreeWheel: In the past year, I worked on the MRM ad server team as a developer. With the help of senior members of the engineering team and the industry knowledge from the product management team, we pushed a bunch of great features to production, making our MRM system the most advanced of its kind.

Meanwhile, keeping our system in top form is a fun challenge as our volume keeps growing. The most exciting moment are the times when we successfully support the ad serving for the most popular live events with very high traffic peaks. A good example was the 2010 World Cup games, which is also my favorite sports event, too.

In the mean time, our business keeps growing dramatically. The volume increase is beyond everyone's expectations. When the hockey stick-style volume trend chart that I drew appeared in our CEO Doug's slides for the board, I was so proud - both for FreeWheel and for me!

And from the short period of time I've worked for FreeWheel, the most valuable thing I have learned is that pursuing data accuracy and integrity is the most important and most rewarding thing to do.

Yu Xiaoqian 于小倩, Core QA

I am Cathy Yu (Chinese name: 于小倩). I joined Freewheel in 2009 after graduating from Peking University. Now I am a QA engineer in the Core team. After more than one year working on QA team, I found that I love this job!

Why, you may wonder, could a QA position be one of the best choices for graduates who are seeking for their first job? Because the QA role at FreeWheel is full of challenges, including some things that do not exist outside of FreeWheel. As you may know, FreeWheel built the best system in the world for monetizing syndicated video across all sites and partners through dozens of devices and environments. QA engineer cultivate solid logical thinking to understand the whole system with both internal and external aspects. We also support our customers to handle thousands of different kinds of requests. It requires that a QA engineer have good trouble-shooting and communication skills from your experience, business/technical knowledge, oral/written English skills and so on. Moreover, unlike the other positions, the QA position gives you many options to transfer to a broad set of other types of positions, including back-end development, consulting, management, etc. FreeWheel is also a place of warmth. We have lunch brought in from several famous restaurants, including the wonderful "Hai Di Lao Hot Pot." There is a party for everyone's birthday each month, and we practice yoga twice a week. All of these make us feel very comfortable. Our objective is not only working hard, but also playing hard. It's enjoying life. Come and join us!

Jared Liu 刘晓利, Operations

Hi, I'm Jared, and I'm very happy to join FreeWheel 2010 Campus recruiting.

I joined FreeWheel Ops - aka Operations - on January 8, 2009. If you guys have watched the TV show, 24, and still remember the character named Chloe, you will definitely know what ops does. In Ops at FreeWheel, you will be in charge of the hardware, software, accounts, and have access to all those resources. There are also N+1 data centers in the US and a smaller one in our BJ office for FreeWheel. We have HP servers, Citrix load balances, Cisco Network gears, and 3PAR central storage, all the most advanced technologies in their field. So,0 if you play around with Linux a lot, including all kinds of applications that run on the platform, e.g. MySQL, or if you're experienced with Shell or even more languages, please do not hesitate to apply for Ops at FreeWheel. You could be equipped with latest model of a Macbook Pro!

When I was looking for jobs just as you are right now, I had three choices to consider: P&G, PwC, and FreeWheel. For the first two choices, I was thinking, "Suits and shoes every day? Working as a cog, executing my job every day? Sitting in a small, sealed cube all day long?" So, I finally chose FreeWheel. Almost two years have passed, I can confidently proclaim that I made a right choice, and I have no regrets.

At FreeWheel, you can wear flip-flops in the summer if you're hot and you can be bald if you want in the open wide office since your personal style is not limited at all. As for the work at FreeWheel, you can talk to your team leader or supervisor directly when you have to, and you're encouraged to voice your own options/ideas/thoughts about the problem. If you can prove it right and doable, you will be able to develop it until it becomes part of our product, running on production, serving our client, and making the money. It makes you feel like you're really doing something. And after work, you have a good salary; many colleagues have purchased their own apartment in BJ city, or you can rent your own room in the most fantastic area you choose.

So, mark my words: if you still have a dream in your career, FreeWheel is the place you want to be.