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New Media News Every Morning

Amazon.com diamond sales up more than 75% in third quarter

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amazon.pngAmazon.com announced that third-quarter 2007 diamond sales increased more than 75 percent year-over-year. Each quarter, an increasing number of Amazon.com’s millions of customers are shopping the Amazon.com Jewelry & Watches store.

Selection for Amazon.com’s diamond jewelry collection expanded with 2,269 new styles launching in the third quarter, including an extensive number of styles of the black diamond collection. Every piece of jewelry sold by Amazon.com is inspected by jewelry professionals to verify quality attributes and ensure an excellent product. Customers can read detailed product specifications about each of the piece’s components, including gemstones, settings and metal stamps. The store provides all of the tools and helpful information that Amazon.com customers know and love, such as Customer Reviews, Top Sellers lists, So You’d Like To guides and Listmania lists.

YouMail raises $4.5 million in funding from VantagePoint Venture Partners

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youmail1.pngYouMail, Inc. has raised $4.5 million in series A funding from VantagePoint Venture Partners. Additionally, Craig Cooper, venture partner at VantagePoint, will join the YouMail Board of Directors. YouMail will use the proceeds to invest in further product development and marketing initiatives, and expand its management and development teams.

YouMail provides consumers with a free cell phone voicemail service. YouMail users can also access their cell phone voicemail over the web or in their e-mail, easily share special voicemails, and save them for life.

TurnHere announces online video distribution deal with Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau

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turnhere.pngTurnHere, Inc. announced a deal with the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau (HVCB) to distribute GoHawaii videos across the Internet. The videos showcase stories about people who live in Hawaii, and through broad distribution will introduce Hawaii visitors to the unique diversity of activities and culture that awaits them on the islands.

TurnHere has built a YouTube channel for seven GoHawaii videos, a GoHawaii travel blog and is loading the videos into all the major search engines. TurnHere will also be announcing other distribution agreements with travel destination sites in the near future. HVCB looked to TurnHere’s solution to help extend its brand across the Web and expand its audience by tapping into popular video and travel sites. TurnHere’s distribution model also allows HVCB to showcase videos without using traditional ad models, enabling them to engage customers with compelling content early in the decision making process.

Beatport favors Authentify to secure online registrations

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authentify.pngAuthentify Inc. announced that Beatport has selected Authentify to secure online registrations at its web store and prevent fraud. The Authentify service will verify the identity of certain users attempting to create new accounts using a real-time authentication method that combines an automated phone call with a web service.

With a global presence in the online music community, Beatport provides over 5,500 new tracks each week for DJs and music lovers, keeping it the most relevant online source of electronic music in the world.

Authentify is providing Beatport with a real-time authentication service that can only be completed by legitimate users attempting to create a new account. The Authentify service uses a hybrid out-of-band system that combines an automated phone call with a web service to protect Beatport.com from criminals attempting to perpetrate identity theft and commit fraud. By requiring that selected users answer an automated phone call in real-time and read-back on-screen information, Authentify virtually eliminates counterfeit registrations.

AOL launches Indian language portals, international Truveo sites

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aol.pngAOL announced the next steps in its ambitious global expansion effort with the launch of new local language versions of the AOL India portal and the launch of Truveo’s popular video search engine serving eight countries, including India.

AOL.in is launching content channels in the Hindi and Tamil languages, improving the breadth of AOL’s offerings at a time when the online audience in India is skyrocketing. The number of Internet users in urban India has grown by 28% in the past year, and about 60% of all active online Indians (30 million) prefer to read in local Indian languages. The Hindi and Tamil language portals will have language sections in News, Cinema and Astrology.

Building on the success of its industry-leading video search engine, Truveo has announced plans to expand its rapidly growing service into several major markets for online video worldwide including France, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, Spain, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom. The Truveo video search engine lets users search and browse through tens of millions of videos from thousands of sources across the web, and reaches more than 40 million users a month in the U.S.

Over the next two months, Truveo will build on this expansion with the launch of video search sites in additional countries including Australia, Brazil, Italy, Mexico, The Netherlands, Russia and Turkey.