Avenue A | Razorfish announced the release of Super-intelligent Link Crawler (SiLC), a proprietary tool that crawls within web sites to detect errors such as broken links and “404 Error Messages” that alert users the web page isn’t loading. The tool analyzes why errors occur and can benchmark a web site’s performance against other competing sites. The agency has combined the tool with its search engine optimization (SEO) and web design expertise to improve search rankings and usability for major brands like U.S. News & World Report.

U.S. News & World Report recently redesigned its web site to grow traffic within its education, health, money and news sections and to improve its search capability within the site. After running SiLC, Avenue A | Razorfish discovered search engines were not ranking many of its web pages because they were viewing pages as duplicate content. For instance, U.S. News & World Report created the main content of a health page article, as well as a ‘printer friendly’ version. The web crawlers were tracking both and consequently not ranking the pages in search engine results. Within two months of the U.S. News & World Report relaunch, organic visits increased by 24 percent compared to the same period in 2006. In addition, organic visits from Google increased by 45 percent compared to 2006.

After years of reporting on emerging trends and changes in the Silicon Valley tech industry, Red Herring magazine is embracing digital media and transforming its publishing model by launching an electronic edition. Powered by Olive ActiveMagazine, a web-based and easy-to-navigate solution that preserves the magazine’s original layout, viewing Red Herring on the web is now as compelling and easy as reading the magazine in print.

The electronic edition is part of Red Herring’s strategy to expand reporting coverage and analysis to a broader circulation base. The company hopes to attract up to 500,000 digital subscribers globally over the next two years, and it already has readers from all over the world.

“As shown by the strong interest in Red Herring Europe 100, Red Herring North America 100 and Red Herring Asia 100– tens of thousands of entrepreneurs and companies are determined to make a difference in many (new) regions around the world. An electronic edition allows us to reach this increasingly global audience without increasing our print production and distribution costs,” said Red Herring publisher Alex Vieux.

In the latest report by comScore, a global leader in measuring the digital world, the total U.S. e-commerce spending climbed 19 percent to $47.5 billion for the second quarter of 2007. Non-travel (retail) e-commerce grew 23 percent versus year ago to $27.2 billion, while online travel spending increased 14 percent to $20.3 billion.

Moreover, total U.S. online consumer spending reached $170.8 billion in 2006, with non-travel spending accounting for $102.1 billion and travel spending accounting for $68.8 billion. Based on the first-half growth rates, total U.S. online consumer spending is on track to reach $200 billion in 2007.

“Retail e-commerce rebounded solidly in the second quarter after a modest start to the year,” said Gian Fulgoni, chairman of comScore. “After posting 17 percent growth versus year ago in Q1, retail e-commerce sales grew 23 percent year-over-year in Q2, matching the growth rates we’ve seen during the past couple of years.”

Domino’s Pizza is now offering online ordering in the majority of its U.S. stores as a third order method. For decades customers have had only two ways to place their order – in-person or over the telephone.

In addition to providing online ordering capability, the revamped Wesite features colorful, new graphics; easy site navigation; and bright menu pages all done with a sense of humor befitting the fun Domino’s Pizza brand. When visitors arrive on the homepage, they are greeted by a series of comical pictures describing the reasons why you should order your pizza online.

“Ordering pizza on the Internet is a relatively new trend,” said Rob Weisberg, Domino’s vice president of precision and print marketing. “While the majority of our customers still prefer to place their order over the phone, we predict that by 2010, 50 percent of all orders will be placed through digital channels.”

According to the 2007 edition of Internet Retailer’s Top 500 Guide, global leading email marketing and customer intelligence solutions company,CheetahMail, remains the number one choice to manage their email marketing programs. This company serves 30 percent of the Top 50 Retail Websites and nearly three times more than the next email service provider.

This year, appearing in the highest tier of this list are CheetahMail clients: Sears Holding Corp. (ranked 7th), CDW Corp. (ranked 8th), Newegg.com (ranked 10th), J.C. Penney Co. Inc. (ranked 12th), Victoria’s Secret Direct (Limitedbrands Inc, ranked 16th), and Redcats USA (ranked 28th).

“We applaud this year’s Top 500 and we’re honored to work with such a large number of them,” said Matthew Seeley, president of CheetahMail. “Our customers are all brand leaders and experts at building customer loyalty through every customer touch point, we look forward to seeing even more of them in the Top 500 next year.”

Foldera, an information organizer and collaboration service for computer users worldwide, announced that Vision Opportunity Master Fund, Ltd., a qualified institutional buyer and prior investor in the company has purchased an additional $1,000,000 of the company’s common stock. On July 27, 2007, via an amendment to the May 4, 2007 agreement, Vision agreed to purchase 6,666,667 shares of common stock at $0.15 per share. On the same day, Foldera’s common stock closed at $0.105 per share, as reported by the OTC Bulletin Board.

Internet content and interactive media M&A activity increased substantially in the second quarter 2007 compared to the previous year as Google acquired interactive advertising agency DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. Excluding the Google-DoubleClick deal, Internet transaction value increased 44% (from $441 million to $634 million) while the number of deals increased 29% (from 17 to 22), reports merger and acquisition advisory firm Whitestone Communications, Inc.

“In DoubleClick, Google acquired a dominant presence in the one market in which it has been a laggard: the business of selling advertising banners, videos, and other display ads often intended more to promote brands than to generate immediate sales,” reports Baran Rosen, president of M&A advisory firm Whitestone Communications. “DoubleClick has relationships with virtually every major online publisher and more than half of the online ad agencies. Google, on the other hand, has made much of its billions by serving tiny text ads related to searches for relatively smaller businesses hoping for some kind of immediate interaction with a customer.”

Whitestone tracks media M&A activity for its annual reference, Who’s Buying Whom, the most comprehensive and detailed report on deals in the publishing, information and training fields.

Other Internet deals of significance in the second quarter included: CBS Corp. acquired Last fm for $280 million; Comcast Corp. purchased Fandango for $40 million; Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. acquired Jumpstart Automotive Media for $84 million; LivePerson, Inc. acquired Kasamba Inc. for $40 million; and Amazon.com acquired dpreview.com (U.K.) for $15 million.

How would you like to own a pizza-sized gold coin? If you are the highest bidder in the upcoming online auction put on by Escala Group, a global collectibles company in stamps, coins and militaria, you will.

The coin, which will be on auction beginning August 16, is a 100 kilogram coin published by the Royal Canadian Mint. It weighs over 220 pounds contains more than $2 million of gold bullion. The auction coincides with the launch of Teletrade Direct, a new service to sell gold, silver and platinum bullion coins.

“It’s the most valuable coin ever offered in an online-only auction,” said Ian Russell, President of Teletrade, an online rare coin auction company. Teletrade is part of Escala’s Spectrum Numismatics division.

Realtor.com, which recently added a Windows Mobile offering for those seeking real estate information, announced today they would be more frequently updating listings in participating metro areas. It currently updates listings from nearly half of the 900 MLS systems across the US multiple times per day.

Realtor.com is shooting to increase listing updates every 15 minutes. The company hopes to increase the number of properties being updated in 15 minute increments from more than 500,000 every 15 minutes today to more than a million later this year. Some of the metro areas getting thie more frequent listings include Washington DC and Baltimore, Atlanta, Orange County, Boston, Memphis, Las Vegas, Ft. Myers, Cincinnati, Northern Michigan, North San Francisco Bay area and the Silicon Valley, and San Jose.

“Nothing’s more frustrating than going online to research properties and finding you’re basing a decision on old or out-of-date information,” said Realtor.com President Errol Samuelson. “With 15-minute MLS updates, consumers now have access to comprehensive information on listings in as close to real time as possible. This means a seller’s home will be visible to potential buyers faster and buyers will be able to find new homes or price reductions faster.”

WatchMojo.com announced a partnership with ClipSyndicate whereby WatchMojo.com’s content will be made available to thousands of vertical web sites and high-traffic blogs in need of pertinent and contextually relevant video content.
ClipSyndicate marks the latest distribution deal WatchMojo.com has signed: throughout 2007, the company has leveraged its free, eclectic and high-quality programming to build one of the largest syndication networks of any online or offline video content company with relationships with YouTube, Joost, Blinkx, Roo Media, GoFish, Canoe, MySpace, Yahoo! Video, AOL Videos, Voxant’s TheNewsRoom, Azureus’ Vuze, Revver, Veoh, LiveVideo and many more, reaching well over 95% of the world wide web’s video watching audience.

Unlike most of the other partnerships however, this arrangement provides a B2B platform for WatchMojo.com to extend its content to the thousands of vertical web sites and high-traffic blogs that turn to ClipSyndicate to add video content to their sites.