Technology

Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that spun out to become a business under Alphabet, has hired former Netflix and Cruise Automation executive Tawni Nazario-Cranz as its chief people officer.

Nazario-Cranz will be responsible for hiring workers, shaping the companyculture and diversity initiatives. She will report directly to Waymo CEO John Krafick. The executive comes with a long background in human resources, including a 10-year stint at Netflix, Bausch - Lomb and FedEd Kinko&s. She was most recentlychief people officer at Cruise, GMself-driving unit, a position she held for eight months before leaving in April, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Nazario-Cranzhiring comes at an auspicious time for Waymo, which is poised to launch its first driverless service later this year. Waymo is alreadyshuttling a group of approved &early riders& in self-driving vehicles without a human test driver behind the wheel in the Phoenix area. The company has also been expanding partnerships with automakers. In May, Waymo said it would order up to 62,000 self-driving minivans from Fiat Chrysler for itsdriverless ride-hailing service.

Waymo has also formed a strategic partnership with Jaguar Land Rover, with plans to make the newelectric I-Pace part of Waymodriverless fleet beginning in 2020.

The burgeoning autonomous vehicle industry, which has exploded in the past two years, requires people with specific and highly sought skills. The limited pool of talent has made recruitment and retention of skilled workers a highly competitive process.

And while salary, benefits and perks can lure new talent, ita companyculture that often keeps them there.Nazario-Cranz has experience here, including co-authoring Netflixfirstculture document, whichFacebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said&may well be the most important document ever to come out of the Valley.&

Amazon, by more than one account, wants to become a big competitor in advertising against the likes of Facebook and Google, but its approach to how it will do this is something of a moving target, with pieces coming and going. In the latest development, the company has quietly announced that it is retiring by the end of September an ad product called CPM Ads. CPM Ads were first launched in 2014 and represented an early foray into display advertising for Amazon, allowing smaller web publishers that were a part of the companyAmazon Associates affiliate program to run banner and other ads on a cost-per-impression (CPM) model on their sites.

Amazon notified Associates with an alert on their dashboards today (see above) and it has also provided a note on the retirement in its help topics for affiliates. It notes that CPM Ads will be stopped onSeptember 30, 2018, with the last payments coming by November 30, and reports on ads getting discontinued on December 31.

Amazon does not explain why it has decided to phase out CPM Ads — we have contacted the company to ask — but one reason could be because the company is either moving more publishers to other ad units and/or these have not proven to be as popular as expected. The retirement note suggests publishers consider itsUnified Ad MarketplaceandNative Shopping Ads, if they qualify to use them.

Amazon describes the Unified Ad Marketplace as another display ad product that brings together Amazon and supply-side platforms (which aggregate ad space from many publishers; examples include AppNexus, DoubleClick and the Rubicon Project). But it appears that it seems to be geared to larger sites, rather than smaller publishers, as CPM Ads were.

Native Shopping Ads is another Associates product, and as such it is aimed at the same publishers that were using the CPM Ads. But (as with all native ads) these don&t come in the form of banners, but as product placements either within or just below text, and are meant to be for products that are triggered by content on the page.

Amazonretiring of CPM Ads comes at a time when many are predicting that the company wants to take a bigger, not smaller, step into the ad world.

There have been reports that Amazon is gearing up to launch a retargeting ad product aimed to compete against the likes of Google and Criteo. Retargeted ads are based on your browsing and follow you around the web in the hopes of bringing you back eventually to buy products, in this case on Amazon.If you have spent five minutes on Amazon or another e-commerce site, and have then seen your browsing history from those sites presented back to you in the form of ads for days afterwards, then you know what retargeting is. Amazon was a big user of retargeting ads on other networks; now, it seems, it wants to run ads like this on its own network.

Others have predicted that the company is planning more search and video-related advertising formats on its own platforms; and that the company is looking to work with third parties to develop ad products for mobile and TV screens.

Amazon made some $4 billion in advertising revenues in 2017, and it is projected to make $9.5 billion this year. These are still modest numbers: as a point of comparison, Google pulled in $95 billion in 2017.

Nevertheless, Amazon remains a huge competitor to Google in other areas, and since a leadership position can sometimes seemingly evaporate overnight, Google is not sitting idly. It has been working on ways of improving its own direct shopping links in areas like search, bringing its platform (and its advertising) a little closer to how Amazon does business.

An app like Bannersnack is something you never think you need — until you do. Designed by a digital marketer from Romania, Gabriel Ciordas, the app was originally called FlashEff and was used to create Flash banners for online marketers. Over time, however, HTML5 and graphics overtook Flash and the company pivoted to offering easy-to-use design tools for marketers and business owners.

The service is free to try and costs $7 a month 30 static images; $18 a month gets you embedded banners with full analytics. The company is completely bootstrapped and has been working in the space since 2008.

&Bannersnack has always been self-funded. We built our resources step by step, as our business grew together with our efforts. We think itfair to say that we worked for every penny we&ve ever gotten and further invested it back into growing our business,& said Ciordas.

The service has 100,000 monthly users who create 180,000 visuals a month. They offer standalone graphics as well as responsive HTML5 images. The most interesting tool, the Banner Generator, creates banners in multiple sizes instantly, freeing business owners up to do what they do best: sell stuff.

Again, it is rare to see a product so focused on a single, important niche, and Bannersnack fits the bill. While you could fire up Pixelmator and try to make your own banners, this tool is surprisingly pleasant to use and works quite well.

&Our main objective is to empower marketers, designers, and business owners, while reshaping the way agencies and businesses create visuals for their marketing purposes,& said Ciordas. After all, not everyone has the skills or talent to create flashing banners featuring exciting mortgage reduction opportunities and free iPad sweepstakes.