Receives highest Clean Energy score amongst peers

Greenpeace International recently issued a report titled “How Clean is Your Cloud?”  Aiming to uncover the energy choices of the largest IT companies in the race to build the cloud, Greenpeace found that Yahoo!, Google and Facebook are leading the way by moving toward powering clouds with clean energy.

Yahoo! received the highest Clean Energy Index score amongst our peers, at 56.4% (Google’s score was 39.4% and Facebook came in at 36.4%), which was not lost on NPR who noted that we were the “only major Internet company in the study to get most of its electricity from renewable or clean energy sources.”

Greenpeace specifically noted Yahoo!’s environmental responsibility in the areas of site location decision-making and energy efficiency.  The report highlighted Yahoo!’s leadership in building some of the world’s most efficient facilities.

When Yahoo! identifies sites for our data centers, we take into account the presence of clean power, great workforces, and weather conditions. One of the reasons we love Lockport, New York so much is it was the perfect location for our unique “chicken coop” design. The temperate climate there lets us run the data center almost entirely on free cooling. The result is a data center that consumes 40 percent less electricity and 90 percent less water than a conventional data center. We’re now duplicating that design in our Quincy, Washington location.  As the report comments, we at Yahoo! are in a great position to help move the industry towards a clean and efficient energy future.

In addition to the recognition in the Greenpeace report, the Uptime Institute named Yahoo! a finalist in the Facility Design Implementation category of its 2012 Green Enterprise IT Awards, which recognize pioneering advancements for significantly improved energy productivity in IT and data center operations.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Read more about our commitment to environmental responsibility on Yodel Anecdotal.

by Jessica Roland

On March 20, Yahoo!'s Women in Technology group held its 2012 kickoff. We're a global group that, with 1100 members, is Yahoo!'s largest Employee Resource Group. We welcome Yahoo! women and men from across all company functions. Building on the successes of 2011, such as our Girl Geek dinners and partnership with the Anita Borg Institute, we enter 2012 with a great new executive sponsor, Yahoo! VP of Engineering, Cloud Services Elissa Murphy, and a full slate of planned activities. Co-presidents Kim Capps-Tanaka and Niru Anisetti opened the kickoff and introduced the keynote speakers, Tim Parsey, SVP of Design and Jessica Jensen, VP of Yahoo! Shine and Yahoo! Health.

Both speakers have a fabulous sense of humor and an easy way with the audience - it was very enjoyable and informative. We started out with some background: Tim talked about some highlights of his amazing design career, which has even included designing bobsleds for the US Olympic team, in addition to his well-known stints at Apple, Microsoft and Motorola. Jessica, whose current role puts her at the heart of creating vision, strategy and innovative content for women's initiatives, also talked about her experiences as a BCG consultant and as an entrepreneur.

Q: Why is it great for women to be in Technology today?

Tim: Industries get commoditized, so I try to always see what's next. As technology brings the power of personalization, the idea of one fit for all is fading. Yahoo! brings the power of big data to the game. This new frontier of consumerism requires empathy - listening, learning, responsiveness, inclusiveness. These qualities, which many women have in abundance, allow us to not only innovate things that enable feelings but then to elevate to meaning-based innovation, that aligns people in groups.

Jessica: During my years at BCG, I had a view into many different industries. The US technology sector today truly is a meritocracy, where the sky's the limit. Women can have a rich and varied career in technology companies - engineering, product management, marketing, finance, you name it. Color your own rainbow!

Q: Why is Yahoo! a great company for women?

Tim: Talking specifically about Design at Yahoo!: we cannot achieve our goal of radical personalization by designing in the traditional way. We need to innovate both the design context AND the concept, which requires understanding mindsets and hopes. Women have natural strengths that enable them to operate well in this new reality...and there are plenty of opportunities for them to exercise those strengths in our Design team.

Jessica: When I joined Yahoo! 3 years ago, I went through an interview process with 24 people, including lots of senior women. At a another company I considered, there were zero women in the interview process. Yahoo! is full of strong, successful women. It's important to look around the company and see if there are senior women there, women you'd like to resemble...and whether there is support for parenting, for both moms and dads. I've found Yahoo! to be such a place.

Q: What qualities have made you successful at Yahoo!

Tim: In my career, I have had to go through failure and shock and just pick myself up...these things help you empathize with others. Another key is to always think forward. I focus on next-gen design strategy and on building a work culture that allows the team to get into a "flow state".

Jessica: So much is serendipity and timing! From back when I was in college and basically made up my own degree to combine my interest in Japanese, art and history, I've known that you have to go after what you love and what excites you, focus on your strengths , and be open to serendipity.

Q: What do you do to coach and inspire women in your team?

Tim: I try to coach and inspire ALL my team , and show sensitivity to their values. In the overall business landscape, though, I do think women have not been encouraged to lead, except in imitating men, and this has led to a kind of suppression. I work to avoid this in my own teams.

Jessica: I encourage them to get a good support system. As Sheryl Sandberg has been pointing out in her recent speeches, women need partners that will meet them at least halfway on the housework and childcare front. When you have this, you can then "lean in" to your career, to show you can take on more responsibility. "Life is short but work is long" - you have to have a lifestyle that makes your pace sustainable and keeps you from burning out. And while I require top performance from all my team members, I am very flexible with where the work happens, to accommodate family needs.

Q: What's your advice to new employees on how to get things done at Yahoo!?

Tim: Create hope, focus and urgency in that order. Many people do the opposite. To get started on this myself at Yahoo!, I traveled to visit teams and customers, listened, detected excitement...and used that to get to the first step of building hope. We're also really feeling the energy from our team's new cross-functional project studio, created to bring that sense of focus and urgency to everything we do.

Jessica: Particularly for women employees, you need to make sure you speak up, that you voice your opinions. You also need to be analytically rigorous -it's not enough just to have a good idea; you must bring solid data on what the benefits are for Yahoo!. And if you're trying to fit in with a primarily male team, you don't have to be a sports expert, but you do have to learn to use humor and find pockets of shared interest to create camaraderie. It also really helps to understand different parts of the business; for example, by "job mirroring" where you spend a day with an employee in another department.

Q: What sources do you draw inspiration from?

Tim: I learn most from people, not books. I watch what's happening in politics, for lessons on how to build hope on a bigger scale. I also am inspired by the jujitsu idea of little changes that let you leverage a greater force. As a designer, I'm poised in the middle between artist and engineer. What I've found as my experience has deepened over the years is that I'm able to intuitively sense what to do, rather than having to think through step by step. I listen carefully, pick up the essence of the issue, broaden it, and then see the gaps and the potential for hope. It's a lot like my flute playing - when you have practiced enough, you stop thinking through each step and start sensing.

Jessica: Women's networking groups provide a level of professional camaraderie, feedback and partnership that is priceless. When I was based in Southern California, we had a very active BCG women alumni group. When I moved up here, there wasn't a chapter, and I missed the support so much I had to start one! It's very important to seek out networking opportunities, and WIT is a great vehicle for that at Yahoo!.

Q: How do you think about Yahoo! on the global front - what lens do you use for your global view?

Tim: As part of Yahoo!'s focus on personalization, we need to reflect the essence of different cultures around the world. We need to understand what's magical about each place. When I go to visit my India team, one thing we always do is take a motorcycle ride together, out of the city and into new and wonderful places. I get so enriched by this immersion. This is the feeling we want to bring back to our customers.

Jessica: Having studied and worked abroad, I definitely agree on the importance of a global view. I would encourage you all to get some kind of international work experience. It helps your career, and at Yahoo! it definitely helps us understand our customers better.

Thanks to Tim and Jessica for a wonderful session!

Editor: please visit our Yahoo! Women in Tech blog for the original article and more!

This spring marks the fifth anniversary of Yahoo! Sports’ acquisition of the Rivals.com business. It’s a big milestone, and one I’m very proud of as the head of Rivals.com. So I want to share with you where we’ve been along the road, where the business is now, and where it’s going. Rivals.com is a subscription product that blends content and community. Our business offers a place for hard-core football and basketball recruiting fans to consume, discuss and share content and analysis about their favorite teams.

Rivals.com is a consortium of 160 local team sites, including Orangebloods.com, TheWolverine.com, Warchant.com, TideSports.com, IrishIllustrated.com and more.

This incredibly engaging mix of content and community tools for avid fans is why Yahoo! initially partnered with—and ultimately acquired—Rivals.com.

At the core of the deep slate of free and premium content we deliver to Rivals.com subscribers is our Prospect Recruiting Rankings. The ranking of the country’s best high school football & basketball players via the Rivals100, Rivals150 and Rivals250 dates back to the 2002 recruiting class and is highlighted by a decade’s worth of current and future NFL and NBA players first ranked and discovered by Rivals.com—that’s a lot of players, and the result of a lot of hard work.

Rivals.com also has the most in-depth Recruiting Database available, with more players, photos and videos of top high school prospects than any other site, once again dating back to 2002. Subscribers to Rivals.com can look back and follow the recruiting process of numerous current NFL players like Adrian Peterson, Percy Harvin or Tim Tebow.

Similar to our player rankings, we deliver historical, accurate and in-depth Team Rankings dating back to Texas’ No. 1 class with Vince Young in 2002, which won a national title. In fact, one of the things we’re so proud of is that each team ranked No. 1 in the annual Rivals Team Rankings after National Signing Day went on to win a national championship within the next few years of that ranking. Texas (ranked No. 1 in 2002), LSU (2003), USC (2004, 2005 and 2006), Florida (2007) and Alabama (2008 and 2009) won national titles in large part because of their recruiting effectiveness, and our rankings speak to that. No other site can boast such accuracy.

Exclusive video is another key Rivals.com offering, and a big draw for any football recruiting fanatic like myself. If you want to see a player such as Andrew Luck, the likely No. 1 pick in the upcoming NFL Draft, work out at a U.S. Army All American Bowl practice, a NIKE camp or the VTO Camp, Rivals.com is the place for amazing video of today’s college and NFL stars back in their high school days.

Our video is part and parcel of the huge amount of multi-media content that Rivals.com produces.As most everybody knows, Yahoo! Sports Radio launched in August 2011, and we are broadcast by 200 radio stations across the country, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Rivals.com has its own radio show six days a week: Rivals on Yahoo! Sports Radio, which is a three-hour nightly show that gives our network of 300 publishers and staff a chance to discuss recruiting and team site coverage. Each player, coach, and analyst audio interview is available online on the Rivals.com network.

I don’t mean to brag (ok, maybe a little), but it’s no secret that Rivals.com produces far more national, regional and local content than the competition. In the first two months of 2012 alone, the Rivals.com football recruiting team has produced 1,178 stories –an average of more than 18 stories per day. In that same time span, our video team has produced nearly 250 original videos, mostly writers and analysts providing commentary on certain player signings, coaching changes or spring football, in addition to the enormous volume of player highlights we’ve secured.

Rivals.com also has the distinction of being a selection partner with the U.S. Army All American Bowl, the premier football all-star game in the country, helping select the 100 players. If you’re not at the game, or don’t catch it live on NBC, Rivals.com gets exclusive access to the 700 recruits and all events so we can bring you the most in-depth coverage. Our team produced 250 editorial pieces and 120 original videos over a seven-day stretch this past January’s event (combined and all-star game).

Looking ahead, in the next two weeks, I will be proudly announcing the first-of-its-kind Rivals-branded Football Camp, the premiere camp and combine focusing on the Rivals100 and Five-Star recruits. I hope you’ll stay tuned for the announcement.

With the content value of this deep slate of offerings and its pay wall business model, Rivals.com is re-shaping the sports “premium content” business. Rivals.com has proven to be an incredibly unique offering for Yahoo! that no competitor has replicated and we continue to grow our paying audience year over year—and I am honored to be managing a fantastic group of professionals.

Thanks,
Eric Winter

Senior Director, Sports & Entertainment

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series entitled, “In My Own Words,” on Yodel Anecdotal that gives employees the opportunity to share their own stories about Yahoo!. Feel like yodeling your own? Post your Yahoo! story on your social networks using the hashtag #myYahoostory.