London – Techlightenment, an Experian company that develops social media technology, has partnered with Adknowledge, the leading long-tail advertiser marketplace, to launch a social research platform for Facebook, giving brands a fast, cost effective way to gather market intelligence from Facebook’s 500+ million users around the world.  The Social Research Platform (SRP) can layer opt-in social data of a consumer’s interests and demographics on top of survey responses.  Armed with this knowledge, brands can make more informed decisions about advertising campaigns, marketing strategies, product development roadmaps, and competitive positioning.

“In the same way that Hollywood studios screen movies to gauge consumer reaction prior to general release, companies can use the Social Research Platform to test and refine brand messaging or get feedback on products,” said Ankur Shah, co-founder of Techlightenment. “And with the social research platform, we can reach more than 10,000 people, online, in a day.”

Peter Read, former president of Nielsen Entertainment, said, “Unrivalled depth and insight, massive scale and a tenth of the traditional cost – Techlightenment’s social research platform is leading the way in real-time market research on social networks.”

Adknowledge will reward consumers for taking part in surveys by offering virtual currency and in-game points that can be used on a variety of Facebook games.  Brands can also promote surveys on their Facebook pages and websites.  Companies using the SRP have immediate access to survey results and analysis, rather than waiting weeks or months to see any significant data. This can be used to quickly adjust and optimize campaign strategies.  The SRP is not meant to replace traditional market research, but will provide a new level of consumer insight at cost points and in timeframes that were not previously possible. The Social Research Platform is fully compliant with Facebook’s privacy and social game playing guidelines

“Adknowledge connects advertisers with consumers where they spend their time. With the Social Research Platform, we offer virtual currency in exchange for completing surveys,” said John Cole, Managing Director of Adknowledge Europe. “There are hundreds of millions of social gamers in Facebook, 80% of which play at least once a day, and we’ve seen that they are happy to trade their time and attention for rewards in the games they play.  This gives us enormous reach to gather opt-in data for brands, resulting in immediate, customized information on any topic. We’re very excited about partnering with Techlightenment on this project.”

Doc Martens recently tested the product and the company’s CEO, David Suddens, said, “Techlightenment’s social research platform gives us more data and insight about our consumers than we have ever had access to before.”

The SRP represents the increasingly data-driven approach to online and offline advertising giving brands detailed information on whom the customer is and what he or she wants. This increases the conversion rate of advertising campaigns and can help a business make more informed decisions about where and how to spend ad budgets.

The AdCloud network was designed and developed from the ground up for a distributed cloud computing environment, using the latest technology in PHP web caching and optimization along with MYSQL database replication technologies. Along the way, AdCloud has integrated many of the industry’s long-sought-after features, such as “screen-on-the-fly” fraud protection, real-time reporting and account management into its platform.

More features are on the way, according to AdCloud Founder and CEO George Nassef.

“We’re announcing today new features which extend our advertiser and publisher benefits into the mobile and social networking space,” he said. “In our ad center, advertisers and agencies will now have the ability to control where an advertising campaign is displayed down to the types of websites, mobile phone devices, and geography using longitude and latitude.”

Given the momentum on the product side, the company is also announcing several new strategic hires and promotions to manage the anticipated growth, including:

- the promotion of Joshua Bergeron to Chief Technology Officer, replacing Gerald Owens;

- the hiring of Ashlee Henderson in Business Development;

- the hiring of Sherri Tucker as Vice President of Sales & Marketing; and

- the hiring of Guy Barretta as Director of Sales & Marketing.

AdCloud’s revenue potential is now limitless as the term of its agreement with Adknowledge, with whom some AdCloud personnel had been affiliated, which restricted certain aspects of its advertising efforts, has expired. “We are free to do business with all advertisers and publishers now,” said Nassef.

Interested Advertisers and Publishers can sign-up online at www.adcloudmedia.com.

Interested media should contact Holt Hackney of Hackney Communications at 512-478-8858

AdCloud Inc. agreed to avoid business with five advertising clients and five publishing suppliers until Oct 31, 2010. The agreement also permits AdCloud to retain all of its current employees and rehire one former employee and provides mutual releases in full for both parties among other items.

AdCloud was represented in the settlement negotiations by Altman & Company P.C. (www.altmanco.net) of New York.

The AdCloud solution was designed and developed from the ground up for a distributed cloud computing environment, using the latest technology in PHP web caching and optimization along with MYSQL database replication technologies.

A highly intuitive solution, AdCloud has integrated many of the industry’s long-sought-after features, such as “screen-on-the-fly” fraud protection, real-time reporting and account management in its platform. AdCloud’s network currently processes in excess of 200 Million ad queries per day with exceptional response times.

The Cloud Computing Advantage

The AdCloud product resides transparently on cloud computing. This gives the company the ability to isolate traffic in a variety of ways to improve traffic quality for all advertisers, identify traffic sources or auto-scale the capacity of AdCloud’s network in seconds during peak periods. By only deploying computing capacity when needed, AdCloud is able to reduce its infrastructure cost during off peak periods and thereby pass along this cost saving to advertisers and partners.

Interested Advertisers and Publishers can sign-up online at www.adcloudmedia.com

ad:tech New York 2009, booth No. 2044

NEW YORK – AdSide™, the premium pay-per-click ad network will be presenting new developments in contextual targeting at ad:tech New York next month.

ad:tech will host the Content Revenue Strategies Conference & Expo dedicated to contextual advertising. AdSide executives will be presenting at these sold-out sessions:

Panel: The State of Content Advertising

Thursday, November 5, 9:00 – 9:50 am, Advertising Track.

Oded Itzhak, chief executive officer of AdSide, will co-host a roundtable discussion on the future of content and contextual marketing. Oded and fellow experts from ContextWeb/ADSDAQ Exchange, AdKnowledge, Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo will share their insights on the state of the industry now, and in the future. The session will closely examine Contextual, Content and Category-based targeting – a new model that is rapidly gaining traction as a media buying standard on premium content sites.

Panel: Targeting Tips for Content Campaigns

Thursday, November 5, 10:00 – 10:50 am, Advertising Track.

The success of any contextual advertising campaign is directly dependant on the ability to properly target ads to the right audience. AdSide’s vice president of sales and marketing, Yael Yekutiel, will be one of the experts on a panel discussing advancements in ad targeting technologies and the best practices they support, exploring content and category-based targeting, behavioral-targeting models and more. DraftFCB will host the panel, and will be joined by RJ Palmer Media Services, Google, ScienceOps, Peer39, and AdSide.

About Category Targeting:

Category-based targeting advances contextual and placement-targeting models into a highly efficient process. It allows advertisers to easily extend their reach within chosen demographic groups, beyond what is accessible through traditional contextual or placement targeting.

Live Content Targeting demos:

A live presentation of AdSide’s advanced content and category-based targeting capabilities will be provided at the AdSide booth No. 2044 on the ad:tech New York exhibition floor, November 4-5.

About AdSide

AdSide (www.adside.com) is a premium pay-per-click ad network, serving tier-1 content publishers, advertisers and media agencies. We offer a better, simpler platform that delivers highly-targeted text ads within a controlled environment of quality content sites. AdSide is owned and operated by DOCLIX, a provider of advanced performance advertising solutions. DOCLIX is a member of the IAB and the Click Quality Council. We are headquartered in New York City. For more information contact us at info@adside.com.

More:

AdSide’s patent-pending Two-Step Click™ model ensures advertisers pay only for twice-qualified clicks. The network partners solely with advertisers and publishers that have been pre-screened for quality. Advertisers benefit from a unique combination of twice qualified leads, premium sources of traffic, flexible targeting, and ad placement control – at optimal price points. Publishers are able to uphold advertiser quality and leverage a powerful yield optimizing technology.

COLUMBIA, Md., & KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Message Systems, a premier provider of holistic, fast and flexible message management solutions, and Adknowledge, a leading online advertising network, announced a partnership enabling Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Email Service Providers (ESPs) to monetize their messaging platforms through highly targeted advertising insertion.


Message Systems provides an intelligent, scalable, customizable framework for message management that helps improve deliverability of legitimate email while putting a stop to messaging abuse. Adknowledge combines pay-per-click performance with targeting technologies and privacy safeguards to insert ads at the bottom of user-generated emails and within a webmail interface. The new partnership between the two companies will enable Message Systems’ clients to monetize POP and Web-based email services and increase Average Revenue per User (ARPU) by implementing Adknowledge’s service seamlessly into their existing message management platform.

“For the most part, legitimate email senders and receivers both share the common goal of delivering wanted email and eliminating spam,” said David Harvey, Vice President of Business Development & Partnerships for Message Systems. “Our mission is to help deliver only the right messages to the right people at the right time, while helping ISPs and telecommunications carriers find new ways to monetize their existing email services. Our partnership with Adknowledge opens up significant new revenue streams for our clients via targeted ad insertion – it’s an innovative approach to better leveraging of existing infrastructure and services, and provides additional incentives to email operators (senders & receivers) with established reputations.”

For ISPs and carriers, the Message Systems platform is widely recognized for how it simplifies the complexity of managing email, reduces operating expense and helps stop spam and other forms of messaging abuse. Less well known, is how the same platform can be leveraged to lower call center costs, reduce customer churn, and take advantage of new ways to monetize email services, such as Adknowledge. For email service providers who originate legitimate email, the Message Systems platform plays a similar role. It significantly enhances operational efficiency and lowers cost while enabling ESPs to improve email deliverability, sustain good reputations, and optimize the ROI on marketing campaigns through adherence to industry best practices and innovative applications.

Adknowledge is a performance-based advertising network that utilizes powerful predictive technology to connect advertisers with consumers across multiple channels, including email, search, messaging, domain, and social networks. The service is based on a predictive modeling technology that determines the specific ad to deliver to selected consumers at the optimal time. The Adknowledge Targeting Technology predicts future consumer responses based on past, recorded responses. This continuous modeling of millions of pieces of anonymous consumer data optimizes and refines the targeting.

“AdKnowledge is dedicated to delivering a high degree of relevance in all of the ads we serve, without any disruptive change or negative impact to the user experience,” said Travis W. Tisa, General Manager of the Adknowledge Messaging product. “Our partnership with Message Systems will create an exciting, new opportunity to connect advertisers with consumers using email as the vehicle.”

About Message Systems

Founded in 1997, Message Systems is a worldwide provider of message management solutions and services for email service providers (ESPs), Internet service providers (ISPs), social networks and large enterprises that need to manage large volumes of business-critical email. Through a combination of technology, partnerships and intellectual capital, Message Systems offers a family of software solutions and services that address the email infrastructure and deliverability needs for organizations ranging from e-commerce companies to the Global 2000. With the most powerful message management platform on the market, Message Systems gets billions of unique messages to the right place at the right time every day. Headquartered in Columbia, Maryland, Message Systems has a network of channel partners in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. For more information, go to http://www.messagesystems.com or call 877.887.3031

About Adknowledge

Adknowledge is a performance-based advertising network that utilizes powerful predictive technology to connect advertisers with consumers across multiple channels, including email, search, messaging, domain, and social networks. Over 50,000 advertisers use the Adknowledge ad network to promote their offers. Headquartered in Kansas City, Adknowledge has domestic offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Ft. Myers, FL, and international offices in the United Kingdom and Australia. For more information, please visit http://www.adknowledge.com or call 816.931.1777.

NEW YORK – MIVA, Inc., (NASDAQ:MIVA), announced that CFO and COO Lowell Robinson will be leaving the company. Mr. Robinson’s departure follows the asset sale of MIVA, Inc’s MIVA Media business to Adknowledge, Inc. on March 12, 2009. MIVA, Inc.’s existing SVP Finance / Chief Accounting Officer Mike Cutler will assume Mr. Robinson’s duties and take the new title of CFO. The changes are effective immediately.

“Lowell made important contributions to MIVA, Inc. in its turnaround efforts since joining in December 2006 and we wish him the best of luck for the future,” commented Peter Corrao, President and CEO of MIVA, Inc.

“I am delighted to announce the promotion of Mike Cutler to the role of CFO. Mike is a seasoned finance professional with an impressive track record and a deep understanding of MIVA, Inc.’s financial operations. I look forward to working with him as we embark on this exciting new phase in the company’s development following the sale of MIVA Media.”

Mr. Cutler joined MIVA, Inc. in December 2006, prior to which he worked for two years as CFO at NASDAQ listed voice, video and broadband provider, WVT Communications. Previously Mr. Cutler worked as Finance Director at Gibraltar Steel and before that he was SBC/Ameritech’s Executive Director of Finance responsible for managing their international telecom portfolio.

Following the sale of its MIVA Media business, MIVA, Inc. has reduced its corporate team by over 50 percent, which includes the transfer of 10 corporate personnel to Adknowledge, Inc.

www.mivainc.com

About MIVA, Inc.

MIVA, Inc. (NASDAQ:MIVA) is an Internet company that owns and operates the ALOT product portfolio. ALOT’s products are designed to ‘Make the Internet Easy’ by enhancing the way consumers engage with content online. The company’s millions of active users utilize ALOT to discover ‘best-of-the-web’ third party content, display that content through customizable toolbar, homepage and desktop products and deliver high value search traffic to MIVA, Inc for in-house and third-party monetization.

NEW YORK – MIVA, Inc. (NASDAQ:MIVA) announced the completion of the sale of assets relating to its MIVA Media operations to advertising network, Adknowledge, for cash consideration of approximately $11.6 million, plus assumption of certain balance sheet liabilities, and subject to certain retained assets and liabilities and post-closing adjustments.

The transaction further streamlines MIVA, Inc.’s operations and accelerates the company’s strategy of developing and expanding its high margin, consumer-oriented toolbar, homepage and desktop search-related products. As a result of the transaction, MIVA, Inc. has reduced total headcount from 129 on December 31 2008 to approximately 50, which includes the transfer of approximately 75 MIVA Media and certain corporate staff to Adknowledge. MIVA, Inc.’s remaining employees will work predominantly out of the company’s New York offices, with a small number remaining in Fort Myers, Florida.

MIVA, Inc. intends to use the proceeds from the sale of the MIVA Media business to focus on the expansion of its ALOT product portfolio. Peter Corrao, MIVA, Inc.’s President and CEO, commented:

“We believe that consolidation is required in the Pay-Per-Click sector and that Adknowledge is extremely well positioned to take advantage of MIVA Media’s assets.”

“MIVA, Inc.’s ongoing strategy is to focus on developing and expanding our ALOT products and monetizing the high value type-in search they deliver. The transaction delivers increased capital and, importantly, will enable us to focus our technology, business development and product marketing teams on the growth and expansion of our ALOT brand.”

MIVA, Inc.’s common stock continues to trade on the NASDAQ under the trading symbol ‘MIVA’. MIVA, Inc. intends to change its name and ticker symbol in the near future.

The investment bank Petsky Prunier LLC acted as financial advisors and Baker & McKenzie LLP and Potter Anderson & Corroon LLP acted as legal advisors to MIVA, Inc. in connection with the sale of the MIVA Media business.

www.alot.com

www.mivainc.com

About MIVA, Inc.

MIVA, Inc. (NASDAQ:MIVA) is an Internet company that owns and operates the ALOT product portfolio. ALOT’s products are designed to ‘Make the Internet Easy’ by enhancing the way consumers engage with content online. The company’s millions of active users utilize ALOT to discover ‘best-of-the-web’ third party content, display that content through customizable toolbar, homepage and desktop products and deliver high value search traffic to MIVA, Inc for in-house and third-party monetization.

“Lookery and Adknowledge are pleased to announce that Lookery’s ad serving business has been acquired by Adknowledge / Cubics.com. Lookery has been seeking a company to acquire its ad serving business that is able to both provide you with the same or higher payouts that you are currently receiving and provide the same level of service that you have come to expect from Lookery. We found both of those qualities in Adknowledge / Cubics.

The good news is that the transition does not involve changing ad codes, everything is still working as usual and there was no downtime. The only change required on your part is that your ad statistics are now being reported in a Cubics.com publisher account that has been created for you. Your login details have been e-mailed to your account.

If you are currently operating under a Lookery Guaranteed CPM program, that guarantee will continue under the Cubics system. If the system is not currently displaying your guaranteed value for all traffic, please drop us a line.

Rex is still available to answer your questions and introduce you to the publisher team at Cubics. You can also contact your Cubics publisher representative, Gates, at Adknowledge / Cubics with any questions and to learn more about the company and transition.

Adknowledge / Cubics is the largest social ad network, displaying over 10 billion impressions per month on social networks. They are a 150 person company including brand sales offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, London & Sydney. Their advertiser depth and industry experience will undoubtedly provide you with the revenue and service you deserve.”

About Adknowledge

Founded in 2003, Adknowledge is headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri with offices in London, Sydney, San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles. Adknowledge benefits advertisers, publishers and consumers alike by delivering ads that are more relevant than typical online advertisements. The company accomplishes this by utilizing its proprietary and leading-edge targeting technologies across a variety of advertising channels.
In addition, Adknowledge provides full-service solutions to a wide spectrum of publishers seeking to monetize their digital assets. Examples include email list owners, Internet Service Providers, Facebook developers, affiliate networks and web site operators.
Adknowledge is a privately held company with more than 140 employees throughout the world. Overall, our culture is highly focused on developing new technologies and product enhancements. In 2006, Technology Crossover Ventures (portfolio includes C|Net, eHarmony, Fandango, Expedia.com, iVillage, Netflix and more) funded Adknowledge for future expansion.