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Humanity Calls invites nonprofits to participate in the eBay Earth Day Fundraising Tournament at www.humanitycalls.org. The tournament’s cash pool has been seeded with $50,000 generously donated by eBay and will grow significantly during the tournament as individual donations magnify the amount available to all winning nonprofits. At the end of the tournament, the top voted nonprofits will share proportionally in the tournament cash pool.

The eBay Earth Day Tournament is open to all nonprofits focused on the environment, including issues such as climate change, conservation, recycling, renewable energy, pollution and more. The tournament will start on April 22 and end on June 22, 2010. Future Humanity Calls fundraising tournaments will be focused on global challenges such as health, education, poverty and human rights. There is no cost for nonprofits to join Humanity Calls.

“Humanity Calls unlocks the power of social media to bring together an online global community and businesses that share a commitment to making a difference,” said Ron Bouganim, Director, Humanity Calls. “We encourage all nonprofits to tap into a vast new pool of donors and advocates by participating in our tournaments.”

How the Tournament Works

Nonprofits sign up at Humanity Calls to participate in the tournament.

Once the tournament begins, nonprofits reach out to their supporters asking for their vote. Humanity Calls provides nonprofits with tools to help, including email copy, embeddable widgets, Twitter copy, etc.

Individuals, responding to nonprofits’ request for their vote, arrive at Humanity Calls and simply login to cast their first free vote. They can then earn additional votes by donating and referring friends via Twitter and Facebook.

Donating to the tournament cash pool earns individuals the most number of votes, which they can in turn “spend” on the most deserving nonprofits. As such, the total cash pool available to all nonprofit winners exponentially grows!

Even nonprofits that don’t end up in the top winners’ list will benefit directly by Humanity Calls providing incentives for direct donations to nonprofits as another important way for individuals to earn votes.

At the end of the tournament, the top voted nonprofits share in the tournament cash pool.

Supporting Humanity Calls as part of a corporate philanthropic program enables companies to engage and empower a global community that includes customers, employees and shareholders. For more information about Humanity Calls or information on becoming a corporate sponsor, visit www.humanitycalls.org.

About Humanity Calls:

Humanity Calls is the world’s first fundraising tournament website designed to bring together nonprofits, companies, and individuals focused on addressing global challenges such as the environment, health, education, poverty and human rights. Crowd sourcing, social networking tools and game mechanics all drive fundraising momentum to increase the ultimate amount awarded to multiple nonprofits over the course of each Humanity Calls tournament. 100% of all donations collected by Humanity Calls during a tournament (less third party payment processing fees) are passed along to the intended nonprofits. Humanity Calls is a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that supports itself through a combination of direct individual donations and corporate sponsorship fees. Humanity Calls is the collective effort of a volunteer team that spans the globe. It was brought to life by their desire to make a positive impact on the world by creating a new way to engage many in making a difference.

nDreams announced the launch of ‘Spirit of Adventure’, the first ever soap opera on Facebook. Spirit of Adventure features a rich, twisting story that will be revealed week-by-week, written by Christian Wheeler (writer of Bramwell, a period drama for ITV, and PlayStation Home’s cult cross-media game, Xi). It combines a compelling tale and strong characters with a variety of puzzles to create a unique narrative-driven Facebook experience.

“This is the first time social storytelling in this form has been delivered on Facebook,” said Patrick O’Luanaigh, CEO of nDreams. “It allows people to actively follow and interact with a fascinating story as a community, as opposed to passively watching on television. I’m extremely excited about the launch of Spirit of Adventure, which is one of the first Facebook games/apps that’s narrative-lead.”

Spirit of Adventure follows the extraordinary tale of Helen Hobbes, a housewife who lives a happy life until she makes a discovery that leads her to abandon everything; her family, her home and her loving husband to go on a quest for a mysterious man who she doesn’t even know yet.

“One of the things I love about Spirit of Adventure is that we’ve taken the traditional concept of story-telling and said, ‘Let’s see what we can do if…’ So it’s not just text – there are drawings, photos, letters that you can open and read; you can follow and help Helen via Twitter…” said Christian Wheeler, writer. “What we are talking about is interactive and participatory storytelling, even the puzzles are a part of the story, Helen might meet a waitress in a café and we’ll suddenly have a puzzle based on the waitress’s life, a tiny vignette into somebody else’s life. This is storytelling for the Facebook generation.”

Spirit of Adventure also opens up a host of other content such as puzzles, with new challenges linked into the story every week and a fan page with an active discussion forum where players can chat about what is going on and interact with the development team. There are also 70 unique keepsakes that players collect by completing puzzles, interacting with the game, and sharing with each other on Facebook. Users can join at any time and there are lots of surprises that will be revealed.

A new episode will be released every Thursday. Spirit of Adventure is free to experience, and you can play it now by searching for ‘Spirit of Adventure’ on Facebook or going to apps.facebook.com/spiritofadventure.

To see writer Christian Wheeler talk about the project in more depth, visit ‘Unlimited’ now (search for ‘Unlimited’ on Facebook) or go to the nDreamers YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/ndreamers.

More information on the game can be found at http://www.ndreams.com/, and you can follow the development of this and other unique projects on Twitter by following @patrickol

Mobile social network provider Gypsii announced in March 2010 that is would launch a new application that integrates location and social networking technology with Twitter.
Known as Tweetsii, the app provides users with the ability to geo-tag tweets, add pictures and video to tweets and search tweets based on location. Tweetsii will also integrate any updates posted by Gypsii users as well as other mobile social networks such as Gowalla and FourSquare.

Tweetsii will be firstly rolled out to iPhone users, followed by Android and BlackBerry.

Twitter announced Monday that the company plans to introduce a new service called “@anywhere.” The new service will allow Twitter users to connect to their own Twitter accounts through Websites such as The New York Times and eBay, “Users will be about to follow their favorite columnist or writer directly from the publishers’ site. Facebook Connect already allows Facebook users to sign into third party website.

Twitter says “rather than implementing APIs, site owners need only to drop in a few lines of javascript” to implement the new @anywhere service.

Initial participating sites will include Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube

The March 2010 rankings of the best social media marketing strategies services in the United Kingdom were released by the independent authority on search vendors, uk.topseos.com. An experienced team of evaluators reviewed the thousands of applications received in order to find the best social media professional. Online social networks have been an excellent place for people to connect with one another. Since the development of these sites, businesses have been searching how to capitalize on them. The companies on this list specialize at creating quality social marketing campaigns while maintaining a consistent message with the client’s website.

The March 2010 rankings of the best social media marketing strategies services in the United Kingdom were released by the independent authority on search vendors, uk.topseos.com. An experienced team of evaluators reviewed the thousands of applications received in order to find the best social media professional.

Online social networks have been an excellent place for people to connect with one another. Since the development of these sites, businesses have been searching how to capitalize on them. The companies on this list specialize at creating quality social marketing campaigns while maintaining a consistent message with the client’s website.

The UK’s best social media optimization companies for March 2010 are:

1. Click Trick Media Ltd
2. Dynamix Factory
3. Site Visibility Ltd
4. Atlas SEO UK
5. Rankability
6. Atelier Studios
7. Social SEO
8. Best SEO Guru
9. SwamiSEO
10. SEO Junkies

The evaluation team with uk.topseos.com analyzes the work that has been completed by each vendor in order to find the best social media optimization firm. They also contact at least three clients of each firm in order to get their perspective of working with the vendor. They ask questions such as, “What analysis went into your website before the decision to implement social media optimization (SMO) techniques to your website was determined?”, “How were your SMO tactics chosen? “, and ” What has been the impact to your conversion rates from the implementation of SMO techniques? ”

Want your agency to be considered for rankings with uk.topseos.com? Apply at:

http://uk.topseos.com/rankings/search-engine-marketing-agencies/apply-for-ranking

To view the latest rankings of the best social media optimization firms visit:

http://uk.topseos.com/rankings-of-best-social-media-optimization-companies

FinRoad, the international business and social network reserved for Financial Markets professionals, today announced that it is now open for direct registration.

After a successful initial period of registration by invitation only, FinRoad has now opened its platform fully so that Financial Markets professional can register themselves directly and free of charge via: http://www.finroad.com.

Arnould Moyne, CEO of FinRoad, said ‘This is a major step in FinRoad’s business development. The positive feedback that we receive every day from our 15,000 early- adopters is very encouraging. We have now decided to accelerate FinRoad’s growth by opening the platform to the whole Financial Markets community, while still maintaining our VIP registration service. Our team will continue to complete online profiles on behalf of members without any effort on the members’ part.”

FinRoad – The Company

FinRoad was founded in 2009 to meet the requirements of Financial Markets Professionals for

– a private and vertical sector-based networking approach
– intelligent tools to identify real business opportunities as
quickly and accurately as possible
– higher collaborative-added-value services specific to their
sectors
– specific marketing tools for financial services companies.

FinRoad for Financial Markets professionals

FinRoad is a fast-growing networking platform for Financial Markets professionals, with free and exclusive smart matching tools to detect and develop business, career and networking opportunities based on a sophisticated classification of financial markets by sub-sectors, functions and asset class expertise.

In order to deliver the most relevant content and suggest the most useful connections, FinRoad uses a sophisticated matching engine based on a unique matrix created by its experienced management and their deep understanding of the industry and the goals and challenges of each line of work.

Opened on an invitation-only basis in 2009, FinRoad quickly became a leading Online Community for professionals in Financial Markets, with members in more than 100 countries across the sector including trading, investment banking, asset management, hedge funds, brokerage, etc.

FinRoad for Financial Markets companies

FinRoad (http://www.finroad.com) also offers companies from the industry (brokers, asset management firms, exchanges, data/software vendors, etc) highly targeted marketing tools based on its new B2B marketing and social media platform that helps these organisations to:

– know their customer better and manage customer loyalty in the
long term through dedicated services for client communities
– develop their business and find new clients in the Financial
Markets sector through the power of very targeted marketing activities
using social media.

EggZack.com announced today a new service that allows users to post their information once and automatically update their choice of social media, like Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, LinkedIn, WordPress and Tumblr. The new service is the free part of the EggZack.com information broadcasting platform, a comprehensive means for managing digital communications in one place, with one entry.

Co-Founder and CEO Jon Zack stated ”People use a lot of different social media to keep in touch with their friends. Businesses are in the same game with their customers. Yet we know firsthand how time consuming it is to update each one separately. So, we made it faster and easier for them to update everything. And, we made it totally free to use.”

Co-Founder and CTO Rick Morrison said “With our new free service, we are trying to make local information more accessible on social media. We think that what happens in people’s local day-to-day lives is important yet it is still largely missing on social media.”

Zack added “Information portability is a critical problem with fragmented media. Doing it better is key to increasing awareness and getting your information read on the web. It is no longer about just getting people to your website, it is about getting your information to where people are; to where they want to read it. This will help.“

About EggZack.com
EggZack.com helps businesses make the most of their online presence by getting their information to the places where people will read it. EggZack.com’s information broadcasting platform allows businesses to reach customers quickly and effectively through a variety of channels, with just one entry. Channels include social media, search engines, websites, blogs and local media.

The company was has offices in San Francisco, California and Flemington, New Jersey.

LifePics announced today the BETA launch of its Facebook integration, which allows consumers to share images from their LifePics online account to their Facebook page, as well as add their Facebook images to their LifePics account. The integration is the latest application launched through LifePics’ OPEN program, which gives app developers and affiliate sites the ability to drive users, images, and orders into the LifePics Retail Network.

“We are thrilled with what LifePics has been doing this year to drive us orders,” said Mandy Earnshaw, Lab Manager at Precision Camera. “LifePics’ OPEN program gives our customers more places to access their digital images and send the images to our store to print, and the new Facebook integration is the latest milestone to emerge. We love that our customers can add Facebook photos to their online photo account, and share photos from their online account to their Facebook page. It gives our customers a better overall web experience, and gives us more exposure and value as a photo service provider, which will ultimately lead to more orders to our store.”

A recent article by Seeking Alpha (http://seekingalpha.com/article/175351) indicates that larger photo sites have seen a 37% decrease in photo sharing since 2007, while social networking sites like Facebook are gaining momentum as the industry’s most popular photo sharing sites. With the launch of its OPEN program, LifePics sees its new Facebook integration as only the beginning of its social networking partnerships, and expects that by giving consumers the convenience of accessing their Facebook photos in their online photo accounts, consumers will print their Facebook photos through the LifePics Retail Network.

“Clearly, Facebook has established itself as a force to be reckoned with in the photo sharing world,” said Ken McDonald, Vice President of Marketing at LifePics. “Our Facebook integration is a primary example of what potential third party partners can do through our OPEN program; the ability to share and add images between Facebook and LifePics accounts has opened the door for other developers and partners to take our integration to the next level.”

Zabaware is the maker of the award winning Ultra Hal software, artificial intelligence technology that won the “most human” computer of the year in the 17th annual Loebner Prize Competition for Artificial Intelligence (AI). Zabaware’s Ultra Hal has recently become an app on Facebook that socially interacts with and learns from Facebook users that talk with it.

Zabaware is an Erie, Pennsylvania based company that specializes in artificial intelligence technology. The company’s mission “giving your computer the power of thought” once considered a futuristic pipe dream is becoming a reality. It is one thing to talk to your computer it is quite another to have a conversation where you are exchanging information and the computer learns and utilizes the information in the future. Zabaware’s Ultra Hal technology and its associated brain are currently doing just that. The software can give computers a personality using AI technology, speech recognition technology, and real-time animation.

Ultra Hal is like an inquisitive child and is capable of learning new things from conversations based on complex natural language processing technology capable of statistically analyzing past conversations. The social aspects of Facebook allow the technology to dynamically alter and optimize Hal’s personality to each individual Facebook user and their group of friends. If a Facebook user teaches Hal about their own life and about their group of friends then Hal will be able to utilize that information when speaking to any of that person’s friends, but will not use that information when speaking to a different Facebook user that is not a friend. This way Hal can evolve to be like one of your closest buddies because he knows all the information you and your friends taught him while ignoring information from strangers. Facebook users can find Hal on Facebook at apps.facebook.com/ultrahal.

In addition to being on Facebook, Zabaware’s Ultra Hal software is available for anyone to download and install on their Windows PC. Once installed, it can be used as a companion or entertainment product. Hal can discuss any topic and learns and evolves from conversations. Hal can also be used as a personal or office assistant. Hal can function as a personal information manager (PIM) and keep track of your appointments, contacts, and more. The artificial intelligence software is available for download at www.zabaware.com as a free 30-day trial, and costs $29.95 to use after that.

NetBiz (NetBiz.com), one of the world’s largest Search Engine Marketing companies, has really increased their efforts to be active in the online Social Media sphere, including the NetBiz Blog, Facebook, Twitter, NetBiz-Community, and iVouch pages.

Just in case you hadn’t noticed yet, NetBiz.com, one of the world’s largest Search Engine Marketing companies, has really increased their efforts to be active in the online Social Media sphere. Here are some places you can now spot and communicate with them across the Web.

NetBiz Blog – In addition to answers to your NetBiz questions, the NetBiz blog provides other useful information about Search Engine Marketing. You’ll also find updates on NetBiz programs, promotions, activities and gain some insight into who they are as a company and as individuals. Visit http://blog.netbiz.com

Facebook – NetBiz has a presence on Facebook where they are more than happy to converse with you about your Internet Marketing questions and/or welcome you as a fan.

Twitter – Follow them on Twitter! Their handle is @Ask_NetBiz. NetBiz will answer your Internet Marketing questions there, too, though 140 characters won’t always be enough to give you all the juicy details.

Netbiz-Community.com (powered by GetSatisfaction) – Want to tell NetBiz how great they are, let them know you have a problem, or want to give them a brilliant suggestion? Visit their community page where you can do all of those things, as well as vote on the best answers to your questions and the best questions by fellow community members. NetBiz is really wants to hear what you have to say! Visit http://netbiz-community.com

IVouch – iVouch.com is an independent third-party website that provides people a place online to find, share, and vouch for the top local and web-based businesses. Visit the NetBiz page at www.ivouch.com/netbiz and see what customers are really saying about them.

NetBiz is a fully integrated Search Engine Marketing company with services including Search Engine Placement (SEP), Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 2.0, and Website Design. NetBiz has been in business since 2002 and is based in beautiful Tualatin, Oregon. When they started, they only had 6 employees and a water cooler. Since then, they have upgraded offices, added over 200 employees, and four new offices. NetBiz recognizes that there are a lot of really great search engine marketing companies out there – but how many of them specialize in helping “Make the Internet Easy” for small businesses? Contact them at 888-847-2226

Kohlieber LLC announced the launch of CribYO.com today; A private social network that charges an annual membership fee. While there are other social networking sites, many generate revenue based on advertising and pay per click programs. According to the owner, Larry Kohlieber, “Cribyo allows users to create their own private social circles and the program allows a user to be completely private allowing access to just friends to one level or increase visibility to the entire community”. Cribyo offer members unique features like a music player, photo directory, chat, magazine, forums and message posts that will provide users content within the portal space.

According to the owner Larry Kohlieber, “A percentage of proceeds from the annual membership fee will be used to fund CribYO Scholarships that will be awarded to CribYO members based on application selection”. In addition, he has decided that a percentage of revenue will also go to a pet rescue organization. These programs will begin once the site portal signs up 2,000 paid members. Cribyo plans on covering operational and management cost first, then providing an application process for education scholarships slated to start at a minimum of $2,000 US. Larry stated “The premise of Cribyo was to provide a social networking site people can join and know that a portion of their annual fee will be used to give something back to selected applicants from the membership base and provide donations to a pet rescue organization”.

www.kohlieber.com