The cookie directive is an ill-conceived piece of legislation. The EU seems hell bent on destroying its nascent digital media industry, as the new law requires an opt-in for every cookie dropped on a user. If my business depended on behavioural targeting for survival I'd be looking for a "cookie-friendly" country to operate in. Why are the trade bodies not lobbying the legislators hard on this? At least suggest some kind of stringent self-regulation to appease legislators. In an effort to highlight all of the above, Yieldivision has done an interesting blog post on the subject of the "cookie directive". It looks at the consequence for the European online advertising industry - and gives some good examples on how anonymous pixeling can benefit users as well as the digital economy. The post also goes into how innovation will suffer, and the effect the law will have on user experience. Imagine how annoying it would be for a user to receive 50 odd requests to have cookie dropped on their machine while surfing the web. Do you know what they'll do? They’ll head off to sites that don't irritate with incessant pop-ups - which will probably benefit US-based web properties. And what if sites outside the EU don't comply with the law? Will they be blocked? If not, I can see a mass exodus of European digital media companies to cities outside the EU’s jurisdiction, like Geneva and Oslo. The blog post is an excellent overview on the current EU legislation and its possible repercussions. [Yieldivision]

I don't normally blog about hires, as I feel it's an irrelevance better left to the gossiping trade mags. But a hire in the industry did catch my eye this week. Venky Vemparala, a seasoned Wall Street tech veteran, has joined AppNexus to head up its engineering team. Vemparala has worked as a technology architect at a number of large investment banks including Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, RBC Capital Markets and Lehman Brothers/Barclays. This tells me that AppNexus is looking to seriously address the scalability issues, as pointed out by Mike Nolet on his excellent blog, associated with real time ad trading. Bringing in a financial tech guy who has tons of experience working with real-time infrastructure is a good move by AppNexus - and further illustrates how this space has evolved in such a short space of time. One word: fascinating. [PRNewsWire]