Just read Tom Chavez’ AdExchanger post on his new company, Krux Digital.
Tom and I go way back. Tom ran Rapt, an innovative yield management technology company. As part of my role at Yahoo! in early 2003, I helped Rapt make the transition from the computer hardware market to the online display media market. This transition ended well, as Rapt’s market leading online media capabilities resulted in an acquisition by Microsoft 5 years later for a figure rumored to be nearly $200M.
Tom’s a smart guy and seems like he’s onto another smart concept here.
As we have written, there are really two separate and distinct burners under the increasingly bubbly cauldron of online media data issues: privacy and data ownership. Starting on the data ownership side, as it appears Krux is doing, seems like the right answer. Strikes me that it’s tough to have a market driven mechanism for managing privacy without any scalable way of enforcing property rights in the relevant data. Most in the BT industry seem to really want the former, but don’t seem to want to talk about the latter.
Kudos to Tom and Krux for giving publishers the tools to keep the dialog honest. I wish them luck!
Andy's Blog 
Thanks for the kind words, Andy!