The Search Monitor (“TSM”), an online monitoring service that tracks competitive advertising activity on paid and organic search, blogs, forums, news, and web sites, announces its release of a new affiliate tracking software that identifies affiliate marketers who are sponsoring paid search results pages.

This powerful new tool is the first and only way for internet marketers to gain insight into the scope, strength, and breadth of their competitor’s affiliate programs. The Search Monitor is able to identify affiliates who deploy direct linking tactics and affiliates who manage and operate individual web sites.

Uses for this new tool include:

Measurement of the reach and strength of competitors’ affiliate programs on paid search.
Policing affiliates for compliance with affiliate program terms of use.
Identification of competitor’s affiliates for potential recruitment opportunities.
“Affiliate programs are a smart way to gain maximum exposure on paid search,” says Troy Lerner of The Booyah Agency. “By using affiliate programs as a tactic in our arsenal, our clients can own more page real estate on SERPs. We like the new reports from The Search Monitor because it gives us incredible insight as to where our affiliate efforts are strong and where we need to focus more time. Our clients love it because it enables them to build strength in numbers, while at the same time protecting their brands from misuse by affiliate marketers.”

“We are excited to bring this information about the affiliate channel to internet advertisers and their agencies,” says Lori Weiman, CEO of The Search Monitor. “We are a strong supporter of affiliate marketing as a powerful way to optimize online advertising in a controlled and deliberate way”

The Search Monitor offers important information that can only be gained by careful 24×7 automated monitoring, and surfaces the information in 3 easy to use reporting sections:

Competitor Monitor gives insights into competitive bidding strategies, competitor market share and visibility, ranking on sponsored search, ad copy strategies, and promotions like free shipping, trials, or sales.
Trademark Monitor eases the tasks associated with reputation management by auto-detecting advertisers sponsoring branded keywords, use of trademarks and slogans in ad copy and display urls, and negative, positive, and neutral brand buzz on blogs, news, and web sites.
Affiliate Monitor simplifies oversight of affiliate programs by auto-identification of affiliates using sponsored search to detect violations of rank requirements, keyword restrictions, ad copy requirements or restrictions, and landing page copy requirements or restrictions.
Search engine marketing has become a critical component for advertisers. According to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), North American advertisers spent $12.2 billion on SEM in 2007 and that figure is estimated to more than double to reach $25.2 billion by 2011. The Search Monitor was developed to provide the tools necessary to optimize the sizable investments being made in this medium and to protect brands from competitive threats.

About The Search Monitor
The Search Monitor is comprised of a team of SEM enthusiasts who uncovered a need in the market for external automated monitoring of competitive activities on paid and organic search, shopping engines, web sites, blogs, social media, and press coverage. Automated monitoring is important for reputation management as it greatly reduces the number of hours and effort required to manage affiliates and competitors infringing on brands and misrepresenting products across the web. Further, automated monitoring reveals competitive marketing strategies that enable advertisers to benchmark their own performance, optimize ad budgets, detect successful ad copy combinations, and receive advance awareness of special offers like free shipping and sales dominating their verticals. The Search Monitor is offered as a web based subscription service. To learn more please visit www.thesearchmonitor.com.

About The Booyah Agency
Based in Colorado, The Booyah Agency is a full-service Online Marketing & Advertising team packaged in a boutique firm. Armed with a funny name, these former big-agency veterans drive strategy and deliver results more quickly and affordably than the big guys. We’re experts in fundamentals and best practices with a passion for discovering the newest techniques that keep our clients ahead. Clients include Mapquest, Vitamin Shoppe, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Gaiam, Tower Records and Little Tikes.

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The Search Monitor, an online monitoring service that tracks competitive advertising activity on paid search, blogs, forums, news, and web sites, announces its release of geo-targeted monitoring. TSM now monitors 17 countries, 6 languages, and most major regions, states, and cities in each market.

Pittsburgh, PA September 9, 2008 – The Search Monitor (www.thesearchmonitor.com) (“TSM”), an online monitoring service that tracks competitive advertising activity on paid search, blogs, forums, news, and web sites, announces its release of geo-targeted monitoring. TSM now monitors 17 countries, 6 languages, and most major regions, states, and cities in each market.

Geo-targeted monitoring enables companies to watch their competition and affiliates, and to manage their reputation and brand use locally. With this launch, interactive agencies, marketers, affiliate managers, and compliance teams are able to monitor paid search, blogs, forums, news, and web sites around the world from a local point of view in countries including: USA, UK, Canada, Australia, Argentina, Chile, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, Mexico, Spain, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and many others. Monitoring can be conducted in English or in the language native to each country.

By gaining visibility into global search markets, companies will be able to overcome a key challenge in analyzing activity in their extended markets. Prior to the geo-targeting capabilities of TSM, an agency with clients worldwide could not effectively monitor locally targeted ads because its visibility was limited to its home base. TSM’s new capabilities provide the insights needed at the local level to protect brands and optimize search campaigns on locally.

The Search Monitor offers important information that can only be gained by careful 24×7 automated monitoring, and surfaces the information in 3 easy to use reporting sections:

1.    Competitor Monitor gives insights into competitive bidding strategies, competitor market share and visibility, ranking on sponsored search, ad copy strategies, and promotions like free shipping, trials, or sales.

2.    Trademark Monitor eases the tasks associated with reputation management by auto-detecting advertisers sponsoring branded keywords, use of trademarks and slogans in ad copy and display urls, and negative, positive, and neutral brand buzz on blogs, news, and web sites.

3.    Affiliate Monitor simplifies oversight of affiliate programs by auto-identification of affiliates using sponsored search to detect violations of rank requirements, keyword restrictions, ad copy requirements or restrictions, and landing page copy requirements or restrictions.

Search engine marketing has become a critical component for advertisers. According to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), North American advertisers spent $12.2 billion on SEM in 2007 and that figure is estimated to more than double to reach $25.2 billion by 2011. The Search Monitor was developed to provide the tools necessary to optimize the sizable investments being made in this medium and to protect brands from competitive threats.

“Monitoring both globally and locally is critical in benchmarking competitor advertising strategies and for watching affiliate activities online,” says Shaun Martinec, a TSM founder. “Many affiliates will carefully craft their campaigns at the local level in order to take advantage of better priced keywords or to avoid merchant detection when they are not in compliance with affiliate program terms. We find that major brand marketers are often outbid by competitors and affiliates on top terms at the local level.”

About The Search Monitor

The Search Monitor is comprised of a team of SEM enthusiasts who uncovered a need in the market for external automated monitoring of competitive activities on paid search, web sites, blogs, social media, and press coverage. Automated monitoring greatly reduces the number of hours and effort required to manage affiliates and competitors infringing on brands and misrepresenting products across the web. Further, automated monitoring reveals competitive marketing strategies that enable advertisers to benchmark their own performance, optimize ad budgets, detect successful ad copy combinations, and receive advance awareness of special offers like free shipping and sales dominating their verticals. The Search Monitor is offered as a web based subscription service. To learn more please visit www.thesearchmonitor.com .

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Record both audio and high-quality video to compressed mpeg4 format, upload video to Youtube from iPhone.

May 12, 2008 — DreamCatcher today announces the release of iPhone Video Recorder, a powerful iPhone oriented video recorder. iiPhone Video Recorder is a powerful iPhone oriented video recorder produced by DreamCatcher. iPhone Video Recorder records audio and video to the compressed mpeg4 format, so the recording is space saving, an-hour-high-quality recording will be a file as small as 60MB. iPhone Video Recorder boasts a frame rate up to 15fps which guarantees better recording performance. With iPhone Video Recorder, recording is easy and enjoyable, you may play back the video, download it to a computer, upload to Youtube, or send it out by email as you wish.

Because of the CPU overhead, iPhone Video Recorder encodes at the end of a recording session, and the encoding can be paused anytime and then resumed when you are convenient. It is possible to record on-the-fly, the sound is good, yet the frame rate will suffer. Besides, we offer some important settings which are configurable, such as the audio input amplifier and the video size mode settings. You can also customize the image quality, the brightness and the audio bit rate options.

We are going to update this app as iPhone firmware upgrades, and it will be made to smoothly run on 3G iPhone. We are also preparing for listing in AppStore. Registered users are entitled to permanent free upgrades.

* “Awesome work on the iPhone Video Recorder. It works really well and its great to see someone put our a smooth video recording app for iPhone.” – jmso

* “Cool! I’m indeed one of those who found it ludicrous that Apple did not include recording features on the iPhone. At $19.95, I think it’s a small price to pay considering I almost NEED this feature (for my own purposes).” – Kat Marion

iPhone Video Recorder works on iPhone firmware 1.1.x, 1.2.x, 2.0. A limited-functional trial version (recording up to 30 seconds) can also be downloaded from this web site http://www.iphonevideorecorder.com.

DreamCatcher Software Co., Ltd., set up in 2007, specializes in developing and marketing iPhone related software.

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On Friday, 30 May 2008, FreeSMUG.org will be hosting an event in Milano, Italy. At that event, the developers of NeoOffice – Patrick Luby and Ed Peterlin – will give informal presentations and host discussion sessions on NeoOffice’s future plans and other topics of interest to NeoOffice users.

The goal of NeoOffice is to provide an entirely free and complete Mac OS X office suite based on the international OpenOffice.org project—only with the look-and-feel you’d expect from any Macintosh application.

The OpenOffice.org project is a large open-source effort to create the ultimate office “suite” including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing software, database, and much more. With OpenOffice.org, you can easily import, edit, and exchange files with users of other office programs, such as Microsoft Office or WordPerfect.

While OpenOffice.org is developed primarily for Windows and Unix systems and has a user-interface geared for those operating systems, NeoOffice has made tremendous breakthroughs in offering the same office features to Macintosh users and making it look just like a Mac application!

How does it do this? Get ready for a pretty technical explanation — NeoOffice replaces OpenOffice.org code that uses the X11 windowing system with Cocoa and Java code (leveraging Mac OS X’s cool Java integration with Aqua) to provide traditional Macintosh user-interface elements. The result? An office experience that feels like any other application on your Mac.

At least that’s the goal. At present (December 2007), NeoOffice has integrated dozens of native Mac features, including a Mac installer, native menus in the white bar at the top of the screen, Aqua scrollbars and buttons, native print dialog box and printing, Mac-like keyboard shortcuts, mousewheel support, access to all your Mac fonts, and much, much more! It’s probably localized into your native language, too.

Best of all, NeoOffice is already remarkably stable at version 2.2.2. It’s actually ready to use right now. Thousands of people and organizations use NeoOffice to do their daily work!

Here’s a caveat though — while NeoOffice is quite stable and feature-complete, it has not entirely adopted the Mac look-and-feel. There are still some bits of the old Windows/Unix interface in there. For example, the toolbars and dialogues don’t have that familiar, consistent Mac look. Many of the 12,000 icons used in the application look more like Windows icons than Mac ones. Other bits of the interface may look “just a bit off”.

We’re working on all this. Slowly but surely, and with your help, NeoOffice is moving closer and closer to being indistinguishable from any other Macintosh application. Patches are being released constantly that replace an old Windows/Unix-feature with a nice shiny Mac one.

So if you think $300+ is a bit much to pay for an office suite, we encourage you to try NeoOffice for free and let us know what you think. There’s no catch—like its parent, OpenOffice.org, downloading and using NeoOffice doesn’t cost a penny. Copy it as many times as you wish.

All we ask is that you report any bugs you find so they can be fixed. If you are a developer, we’d love to have your code. Or, if you are willing and able to support the development effort via a monetary donation, your contribution will be very much appreciated. You can do so via Paypal at the NeoOffice web site. There are other ways you can contribute to the project, too.

At present, there are very few NeoOffice developers, so every contribution helps.

Sources: www.neooffice.org

Provided by

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Free report helps marketing professionals of mid-sized companies understand the changing world of organic search engine optimization.

January 24, 2008 — MidMarketer.com, the online resource for best practices in marketing for mid-sized organizations, released a new report today entitled “Organic Search Engine Optimization- Fundamentals and Processes.” The report gives readers a more holistic view of the rapidly changing search engine landscape.

Dan Swartz, Executive Editor of MidMarketer, notes “Many mid-sized companies feel like they are always behind the eight ball when it comes to optimizing their Web sites for search engines. This report focuses on solid marketing fundamentals and processes, rather than short-lived magic bullets to search optimization.” Swartz adds, “This report helps marketing people in mid-sized companies understand how search is changing. It gives practical advice on how to optimize based on understanding those changes.”

The report discusses the increasing complexity of search engines, proposing a more holistic view of an organization’s content and online communication needs to be considered in organic search optimization strategy and processes.

Perspective reports from MidMarketer are designed to help inform mid-sized companies on effective marketing practices. Says Swartz, “Each Perspectives report includes real-world, actionable items that a mid-marketer can take and use that very day.” Perspectives reports tackle strategic, creative and tactical topics. Two new reports are published each month. MidMarketer also offers marketing templates and tools designed specifically to help mid-sized organizations take action on achieving better results from their marketing.

The new MidMarketer perspective report “Organic Search Optimization- Fundamentals and Processes” can be found at www.midmarketer.com/perspectives/

About MidMarketer
MidMarketer provides content developed from industry experts that are passionate about marketing for mid-sized organizations. It includes certified resources that are handpicked to help a mid-sized organization, as well as events focused on topics specifically for mid-sized markets. Everything has the mid-marketer in mind, with results focused on insight and direction that enable marketing professionals of mid-sized companies to take action and drive success.

Website: www.MidMarketer.com

Provided by gh consulting – gordian hense

iomart, the datacentre operating and web hosting business is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a contract to handle all aspects of the customer web platform service offered by business broadband provider UK Online.

Glasgow, UK January 16, 2008 — iomart, the datacentre operating and web hosting business is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a contract to handle all aspects of the customer web platform service offered by business broadband provider UK Online.

Under the three-year contract, iomart will provide hosting, infrastructure and ongoing management of a web services platform to UK Online, to allow the BSkyB-owned business to offer a comprehensive range of domain name, web hosting and related services to its small business and professional user customer base.

iomart’s own data centre network – with state-of-the-art facilities in Glasgow, Nottingham, Leicester and the City of London – will guarantee UK Online a fully secure and resilient hosting services platform. This managed web service platform will allow UK Online to offer its customers a complete end-to-end e-commerce solution.

Using a secure web-based control centre, UK Online’s customers will be able to purchase everything that they need to build, host, maintain and market professional websites. The services that iomart will provide UK Online include domain name registration, web hosting packages, easy to build web sites and search engine marketing tools.

“It’s becoming essential for a business of any size to have a web presence as the majority of people now look for services online,” explained Chris Stening, managing director of UK Online. “We have chosen to partner with the experts in this area, iomart, as we want to give our customers, particularly those who are sole traders or running their own business, a head start by providing them with a professional looking web presence at an affordable price.”

Angus MacSween, CEO of iomart, said: “We are delighted to have won this prestigious contract from one of the UK’s leading internet companies and we look forward to repaying the confidence that UK Online has placed in us by helping them to enhance their internet services over the next three years.

“Today’s requirements for web hosting services are becoming increasingly complex with service uptime deemed a vital component, web sites and email services must be available 100% of the time. iomart recognised that business continuity coupled with the online customer experience were the critical factors for securing the UK Online contract and we were confident that our proposed solution would deliver on both fronts.

“Winning this contract further validates the Group’s recent strategic move into the datacentre and managed services market.”

Provided by gh consulting – gordian hense

Revolutionary new rapid payment processing lets businesses get their money the very next day, improving cash flow

Thousand Oaks, CA January 15, 2008 — Paymentmax announced a new feature that lets business owners charge a customer’s credit card, then have access to the funds the very next day. This is a major advancement over traditional credit card processing services that take 2 to 5 days before funds become available to the merchant.

“The length of time that it takes for credit card funds to land in a merchant’s bank account has always been a big issue with businesses,” said Tony Shap, President of Paymentmax. “A business can have all kinds of sales on the books, but still have to wait a week to get their money. That can cause cash flow problems. Paymentmax’s new Next Day processing solves that problem,” Shap said.

Paymentmax’s Next Day processing is being made available to the Internet’s millions of online businesses that need to accept credit cards. Paymentmax serves as a single source for capturing and processing of receivables. “In the past, your sales were captured by one provider, then your funds were processes by two or three others. Not only did everybody get a slice of your sale, but every service had to work together and long delays were frequent. Paymentmax speeds up the entire process to a single day with one of the lowest costs in the industry,” Shap said.

Paymentmax delivers businesses credit and debit card funds directly into the merchant’s existing bank account the next day — or in as little as 12 hours. “We constantly strive to offer the best quality solutions in the industry while keeping our prices well below average. Business owners are constantly telling us Paymantmax gets the job done far faster and costs them far less,” Shap said.

About Paymentmax Processing

Paymentmax Processing is a Thousand Oaks provider of merchant accounts Powered by First Data® Corporation. Paymentmax offers a comprehensive line of payment processing solutions for business. Their most popular services are credit card, debit card, contactless payments, and check acceptance.

Paymentmax provides merchant services across the United States for all types of businesses including retail, restaurant, service delivery, wireless, mail-order, telephone-order, and Internet merchants. See the Paymentmax web site at www.paymentmax.com .

Provided by gh consulting – gordian hense

Strategic Marketing Agency Offers Expert Tips to Improve the Content of Corporate Web Sites

East Northport, NY January 14, 2008 — Does your web site content reflect your company’s brand story today? Or does it just use the same content as your old brochures? Are you greeting your site visitors with the tone you want to reflect your corporate personality? Communication Strategy Group, a strategic marketing agency, enables marketers and web designers to develop strong brand content for web sites and other collateral, so your content matches the design of your web and marketing materials, providing a more compelling brand experience for your customers.

The agency has also developed a set of Expert Tips for Marketers and Web Designers to Make Corporate Web Sites Tell a Better Sounding Story to help marketers and web designer build a better web site experience.

“Communication Strategy Group supports growing technology and professional services companies through strategic public relations, marketing collateral development, brand evaluations and executive media and presentation coaching. We help companies develop and deliver strong brand stories – We call it Brandtelling™,” says Arthur Germain, Communication Strategy Group principal. “In our work with marketers and web designers we have been able to develop content that creatively articulates brands to more strongly reflect their visual elements.”

Three Expert Tips for Marketers and Web Designers to Make Corporate Web Sites Tell a Better Sounding Story:

Tip #1: Sell it the way your customer wants to buy it.
You may like calling your product an “air and brush-driven consumer cleaning technology” but your customers call it a vacuum. Use terms your customers expect to see when they come to your web site.

Tip #2: Skip the jargon.
Take time to explain your TLAs (three letter acronyms), industry terms and jargon when describing products and services. Use terms that your customers understand and can remember.

Tip #3: Use your voice to show you care.
Make sure your site copy reflects the language that you would use in a corporate office setting. Use adjectives and other descriptive language that help creatively articulate and express your brand.

Companies interested in learning more ways to develop stronger web content and the powerful brand stories that can accelerate their marketing may visit Communication Strategy Group web site at www.GoCSG.com or email info @ gocsg.com.

About Communication Strategy Group
Communication Strategy Group (www.GoCSG.com) helps your brand story become remembered, repeated and rewarded. We focus on building and supporting a strategic plan for client communications in order to create strong, consistent messages and presentations that have the greatest impact. The Communication Strategy Group team comprises senior level communications professionals – writers, journalists, technology marketers, public relations executives, media trainers – who work directly on client accounts to achieve results. Our clients include growing companies in technology, media and professional services industries. For more information, please call 1-631-239-6335 or visit us at www.GoCSG.com

Internet Retailer chooses LakeChamplainChocolates.com as one of it’s top 100 Web sites for 2008.
The Lake Champlain Chocolates web site, developed by Timberline Interactive, was chosen by Internet Retailer magazine for its annual “Hot 100″ list.
Middlebury, VT January 13, 2008 — Timberline Interactive is very pleased to announce that a long-time e-commerce client received national recognition as a Hot 100 Internet retail site for 2008. The Lake Champlain Chocolates web site was developed by Timberline Interactive and was chosen by Internet Retailer magazine for its annual hot picks issue.

“This is a tremendous honor for our development staff as well as for the team at Lake Champlain Chocolates,” notes Timberline Interactive president Bud Reed. “To be recognized as one of the best by the industry’s leading publication is the best validation we could receive.”

Internet Retailer is noted as a leading authority in online retailing. With a subscriber base of more than 40,000 merchants and direct marketers, the monthly publication is one of the first to deliver content specifically targeted to the online merchant. The Hot 100 sites “reflect the best of what’s happening in retail on the web,” according to Editor in Chief Kurt Peters.

LakeChamplainChocolates.com, which originally launched in1998, was noted for its site speed, its search and navigation, and its overall visual appeal to the chocolate lover. According to Nikki Baird, managing partner with research and consulting firm RSR Research, “LakeChamplainChocolates.com is a very professional site that is not at odds with the company’s small-town feel. And not only are visuals great, they load fast.”

Headquartered in Burlington, Vermont, Lake Champlain Chocolates has been making fresh, all-natural gourmet chocolates and chocolate gifts for almost 25 years. The company’s hand-made specialties include milk and dark chocolate truffles, gourmet hot chocolate, Valentine’s chocolates, Easter gift baskets and their popular Chocolate of the Month Club.

Timberline Interactive is New England’s leading online marketing and web development company specializing in comprehensive and intelligent Internet solutions for direct marketing companies and catalogers. Timberline’s clients include Lake Champlain Chocolates, Gorton’s Fresh Seafood, American Meadows, Teachersource.com and others.

Shoplet.com, a leading e-tailer of discount office supplies, discount office furniture, computer hardware and peripherals, ink and toner supplies, and janitorial and cleaning supplies, headquartered in Silicon Alley, New York, has launched its new File Folder site enhancement.

New York, NY January 10, 2008 — Shoplet.com, a leading e-tailer of discount office supplies, discount office furniture, computer hardware and peripherals, ink and toner supplies, and janitorial and cleaning supplies, headquartered in Silicon Alley, New York, has launched its new File Folder Finder site enhancement.

With a loyal customer base of over 2.5 million subscribed users, Shoplet’s new File Folder Finder makes finding the correct file folders simple. It is a further enhancement to Shoplet’s already user friendly site that helps customers quickly get the products they need for their office. All the customer needs to do is provide a few simple details, such as color, and type and within moments, a list of all of the applicable file folders are presented for the customer’s viewing and quick selection.

“The File Folder Finder is yet another tool that Shoplet has created to assist its loyal customers in obtaining the products that they need. Provide Shoplet with the answers to a few standard questions and the File Folder Finder provides the results that best meet your needs, and with no need to look further,” said Tony Ellison, founder and President of Shoplet.com.

About Shoplet.com

Founded in May 1994 and profitable since 1997, Shoplet.com has positioned itself as a leading e-marketplace. Our award-winning web site functions as one of the world’s largest online office products and office furniture superstore, with over 2.5 million subscribed users, and over 200,000 products and equipment for the office. Our specialty stores include office supplies, computer hardware and peripherals, networking products office furniture, ink and toner supplies, janitorial supplies & cleaning supplies and paper center.

Website: www.shoplet.com