Mediaboss Marketing

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Hotels.com and Columbus Internet have today announced the launch of the first in-Facebook affiliate programme through their joint app ‘Hotels WithMe’ in the UK, Italy, France, Sweden and Germany.

The ‘Hotels WithMe’ app enables friends, families and colleagues to get together to collectively browse, choose and book a hotel from Hotels.com’s portfolio of almost 140,000 properties worldwide. The app launched on the UK Hotels.com Facebook page in September 2010 and has since seen strong growth, also rolling out across APAC and Europe. In this new and innovative move, owners of other Facebook information pages can now install the app and earn commission on bookings made through it.

The app can be added to a facebook page in a few seconds, as is explained in the video shown here http://www.choosewithme.com/affiliate-marketing/. Once added, visitors to that page can browse and book properties. Every time a booking is made, the page’s owner will earn commission via the affiliate programme, which is managed by AffiliatePerformance GmbH.

AffiliatePerformance has developed a management tool for affiliate partners which gives a detailed overview of the performance of the app within their Facebook pages. The whole tracking system is accessible to page-admins from within Facebook, as well as via the AffiliatePerformance website directly.

Josie Shah, Director of Partner Marketing at Hotels.com, comments, “The launch of the affiliate programme utilising the app is a unique innovation for Hotels.com, and one we are pleased to be spearheading. The use of this app through Facebook pages will be of particular interest to those championing sports events, bands or concert tours as it can be pre-set with default dates and locations to match multiple tour dates. This offers a useful service to fans of the Facebook page as well as great commission opportunities for the owner.”

“This is not only the first real Affiliate Program to sit within Facebook, it is also a way for Facebook pages to significantly increase interaction with visitors to their pages,” said Andrew Sittermann, CEO at Columbus Internet. “We are very proud to be working with Hotels.com and AffiliatePerformance on this ground-breaking project.”

Matthias Juergensen, CEO at AffiliatePerformance, is convinced that this new Facebook2Facebook marketing programme offers clear added value to users and affiliates alike, adding, “This is the perfect integration of social media and online marketing.”

-Ends-

About Hotels.com:

As part of the Expedia, Inc. group which operates in all major markets, Hotels.com, the global hotel specialist, offers almost 140,000 quality hotels, B&Bs and serviced apartments worldwide. If the customer can find the same deal for less on a prepaid hotel, Hotels.com will match it. Hotels.com benefits from one of the world's largest hotel contracting teams in the industry, negotiating the best rates for its customers, plus there are 3 million reviews from users who have actually stayed in the hotels to ensure customers make an informed choice when booking. The company currently operates 85 Hotels.com sites around the world.

Hotels.com, Hotel Price Index, HPI and the Hotels.com Wake Up Happy logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Hotels.com, LP, in the U.S. and/or other countries. Other logos or product and company names mentioned herein may be the property of their respective owners. © 2002-2011 Hotels.com, LP. All rights reserved. CST # 2083949-50

About Columbus Internet:

Columbus Internet is one of the leading providers of social shopping applications under the brand Choose WithMe both within and outside of Facebook. Columbus Internet is based in Berlin Germany and was founded in 2008.

http://choosewithme.com/

About AffiliatePerformance:

Founded in 2007 by Matthias Juergensen, AffiliatePerformance is a seasoned affiliate management agency with clients in the travel, dating and financial sectors. AffiliatePerformance specialises exclusively in the creation and management of affiliate programmes to deliver maximum results. AffiliatePerformance succeeds by applying their expertise on analysing programme progress and continuous improvement. The team has a proven track record of successful affiliate programme implementations as well as a comprehensive background in e-commerce marketing and technology.

http://www.affiliateperformance.de/

Read more:
Hotels.com and Columbus Internet launch first in-Facebook affiliate programme through ‘Hotels WithMe’

DUBAI — Millions of Iranians have suffered serious disruption recently in accessing email and Internet social networking sites, raising concerns authorities are stepping up censorship of opposition supporters ahead of parliamentary elections next month.

Iranians have grappled with increased obstacles to using the Internet since opposition supporters used social networking sites to organize widespread protests after the disputed 2009 re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The country is preparing to hold parliamentary elections on March 2, the first time Iranians will go to the polls since President Ahmadinejad's disputed re-election. The government denied any fraud in the vote, which ignited street protests that were crushed violently by security services after eight months.

The new Internet blockade affected the most common form of secure connections from Friday, according to outside experts and Iranian bloggers. Traffic was said to have returned to normal on Monday. "I haven't been able to open pages for days but now it's working again, although slowly," said Hamid Reza, a 20-year-old student in Tehran, who was reluctant to give his surname.

The cut-off appeared to target all encrypted international websites outside Iran that depend on the Secure Sockets Layer protocol, which display addresses beginning with https, according to Earl Zmijewski of Renesys, a U.S. company that tracks Internet traffic worldwide.

Google, which uses SSL for its Gmail service, reported that traffic from Iran to its email system fell precipitously.

Iran's Ministry of Communications and Technology denied knowing of the disruption, saying the origin was elsewhere.

"The government is testing different tools," said Hamed Behravan, who reports on Iranian technology issues for the U.S. government-funded Voice of America. "They might have wanted to see the public reaction."

NATIONAL INTERNET SYSTEM?

Many Iranians are concerned the government may be preparing to unveil its much documented national internet system, effectively giving the authorities total control over what content Iranian users will be able to access.

The authorities say it is designed to speed up the system and filter out sites that are regarded as "unclean."

"The Internet is an uninvited guest which has entered our country," said Mohammad Reza Aghamiri, a member of the Iranian government's Internet filtering committee, "and because of its numerous problems, severe supervision is required."

He told the daily Arman that Internet search engines like Google were a threat to the country.

"We have never considered Google as appropriate to serve Iranian users, because Google is at the service of the CIA," he said. "It has adopted a vivid hostile stance against us."

Opposition supporters believe Iranian authorities were targeting their attempts to hold a rally calling on the government to release leaders of the opposition Green movement, Mirhossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi.

The two leaders were placed under house arrest on February 14 last year after they urged their supporters to join a rally in support of uprisings across the Arab world.

Iranian authorities have vowed to quell any public protest against the protracted house arrest of Mousavi and Karoubi.

"It could just be a coincidence but my guess is that the system was looking to block communication between opposition supporters," said an Iranian analyst who did not want to be named.

The disruption has riled some Iranian members of parliament and they have vowed to look for those responsible.

An MP, Ahmad Tavakoli, told the semi-official Mehr News Agency that the issue was creating widespread discontent that could "cost the establishment dearly."

"This filtering leads people to break the law, and using proxies makes the blocking of sites and signals ineffective, because using proxies becomes widespread," he said.

Authoritarian Arab governments under popular pressure have sought to shut down Internet service to make it harder for opponents to mobilize protests, but with little success.

Copyright 2012 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.

See the article here:
Iran's Internet severely disrupted as elections loom

TEWKSBURY, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Mirror Image® Internet, a leading provider of edge computing, streaming and content delivery solutions powered by a patented global network, today announced a new service that combines streaming and edge computing capabilities to dynamically create and stream highly-targeted content and playlists, and enforce custom rules-based policy for live and on-demand video.

The Targeting and Authorization Suite for Live and On-Demand Video is the industry’s only solution that can stream live and on-demand video to any device, including laptops, desktops, mobile phones, tablets, game consoles and set-top boxes via any protocol including: RTSP, RTMP, RTP/UDP, Apple HLS, IIS Smooth Streaming and Adobe HS.

Streaming Features:

Multi-protocol support Adaptive bit rate support Live and on-demand video Supports streaming to desktop, laptop, iPhone, iPad, iPod, Android, BlackBerry, IPTV set-top boxes, and game consoles including Wii and PlayStation 3

Targeting Features:

Targeting based on cookie values, geo-location, language, referrer headers and more Ideal for creating dynamic playlists, pre-roll and post-roll advertising Built-in device detection for thousands of mobile devices

Security Features:

Prevent URL hijacking via referrer domain verification Enforce time-limited access via time-sensitive URLs Ideal for assets with licensing restrictions Enforce licensing restrictions via geography-based blocking and authorization

“Video advertisers, news media, sports media, mobile solutions providers, and others, can now deliver their videos, advertisements or live events and set permissions as to who, when and where they can be viewed,” said James G. Hart, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Mirror Image Internet. “Mirror Image is the only vendor that can deliver live and on-demand video to any screen and combine it with a targeting and authorization service.”

About Mirror Image Internet

Mirror Image® Internet, Inc. is the leading provider of Real-Time Solutions-as-a-Service capabilities for online companies worldwide. Mirror Image combines a real-time, patented globally distributed Edge Computing network with a high performance content delivery platform to provide highly scalable online services with low latency and worldwide coverage. Mirror Image Internet’s real-time service offerings include Edge Computing capabilities, a complete Online Video Platform, streaming solutions for delivering live video and video on-demand, content delivery capabilities for content caching and file downloads, and optimized delivery to an extensive range of desktops, mobile devices, IPTV set-top boxes and other devices.

Mirror Image has been recognized by Internet Retailer magazine as the 2010 Vendor Leader in the Content Delivery Network Category for the fourth consecutive year. The company was also named a 2008 finalist in the Streaming Media magazine Readers' Choice Awards in the Global Content Network Delivery category. Mirror Image is a U.S.-based company incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in Tewksbury, Mass. Mirror Image was founded in 1997. For additional information, please visit http://www.mirror-image.com or call +1 866 374 4113. Follow Mirror Image on Twitter @MirrorImage_CDN.

Mirror Image is a registered trademark of Mirror Image Internet.

All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Read the original:
Mirror Image Internet Combines Key Video Streaming and Edge Computing Capabilities for Targeting and Authorizing Live ...

Forcing your friends to watch 10 hours of "S%$t chimney sweeps say" videos on YouTube could be a sign you need help.

(Credit: Elizabeth Armstrong Moore/CNET)

The so-called "bible" of the mental health profession is getting an update, and version 5.0 of the American Psychiatric Association's "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (DSM) could add "Internet addiction" to its lengthy list of disorders.

The different iterations of the DSM have for decades been the go-to reference many psychiatrists use to diagnose patients. The manual has been no stranger to controversy over the years, including recent charges by some that it seems written to serve the interests of drug companies as much as those of patients.

But now the APA working group in charge of revising the DSM section on substance-related disorders has proposed adding a new non-substance based affliction--"Internet addiction."

In other words, Internet addiction could soon be classified along other listed DSM disorders like "cocaine dependence" or "Opioid abuse."

As someone who is certainly un-diagnosed, but surely shows several symptoms of a potential Internet addiction problem--as I'm guessing many of you also do--I'm suddenly offended that the only way I could learn about this development was on the Internet. I can't imagine many people who suffer from alcoholism are forced to seek information on their affliction from their bartender.

Every now and then, you might come across a reference to something called "Internet Addiction Disorder," but such a disorder is not officially recognized by any major mental health organization in the U.S. However, Chinese research published last year looked at Chinese students who used a computer around 10 hours a day, 6 days a week and found that such heavy use actually did have a measurable impact on the brain. The researchers concluded that:

...long-term Internet addiction would result in brain structural alterations, which probably contributed to chronic dysfunction in subjects...

So are you and I Internet addicts? Well, it's not yet included in the DSM, so there's no "official" way to identify the symptoms and make such a diagnosis, but Dr. Jerald L. Block recently provided a few red flags in an editorial in the American Journal of Psychiatry:

1) excessive use, often associated with a loss of sense of time or a neglect of basic drives 2) withdrawal, including feelings of anger, tension, and/or depression when the computer is inaccessible 3) tolerance, including the need for better computer equipment, more software, or more hours of use, and 4) negative repercussions, including arguments, lying, poor achievement, social isolation, and fatigue

Yikes, as if that weren't broad enough to make any of us worry about our mental health, Dr. Block also includes gaming and texting under the umbrella of things that could be considered Internet addiction.

To its credit, the APA acknowledges that such diagnoses are problematic and will be considered "as research data accumulate."

The move to consider non-substance-abuse-based addiction disorders has also sparked a bit of a mental health smackdown between the psychiatry and psychology camps. David Elkins, president of the Society for Humanistic Psychology--a division of the American Psychological Association--has launched a petition with numerous criticisms of the proposed DSM changes. Elkins' open letter to the DSM V group includes this passage:

The Conditions Proposed by Outside Sources[13] that are under consideration for DSM-5 contain several unsubstantiated and questionable disorder categories. For example, "Apathy Syndrome," "Internet Addiction Disorder," and "Parental Alienation Syndrome" have virtually no basis in the empirical literature.

Clearly, even though the discussion has been opened on the notion of Internet addiction as a real form of mental illness, it seems the jury is still out. But if either the APA or Mr. Elkins need help in their search for data--or the lack thereof--I'm more than happy to help and dedicate endless hours combing through myriad online research journals, social networks, and other resources...it's all I'm doing these days, anyway.

(Via NY Daily News)

See more here:
Internet addiction could be dubbed official affliction in DSM-V