Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Janice K. Fedarcyk, the Assistant Director-in-Charge of the New York Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), announced today the largest coordinated international law enforcement action in history directed at “carding” crimes – offenses in which the Internet is used to traffic in and exploit the stolen credit card, bank account, and other personal identification information of hundreds of thousands of victims globally.  Today’s coordinated action – involving 13 countries including the United States – resulted in 24 arrests, including the domestic arrests of 11 individuals by federal and local authorities in the United States, and the arrests of 13 individuals abroad by foreign law enforcement in seven countries.  In addition, the federal and local authorities, and authorities overseas, today conducted more than 30 subject interviews, and executed more than 30 search warrants.  Today’s coordinated actions result from a two-year undercover operation led by the FBI that was designed to locate cybercriminals, investigate and expose them, and disrupt their activities.

Eleven individuals were arrested today, and one last night, in the United States: CHRISTIAN CANGEOPOL, a/k/a “404myth,” was arrested today in Lawrenceville, Georgia, MARK CAPARELLI, a/k/a “Cubby,” was arrested in San Diego, California;  SETH HARPER, a/k/a “Kabraxis314,” was arrested in Albuquerque, New Mexico; ALEX HATALA a/k/a “kool+kake,” was arrested in Jacksonville, Florida; JOSHUA HICKS, a/k/a “OxideDox,” was arrested in Bronx, New York; MICHAEL HOGUE a/k/a “xVisceral,” was arrested in Tucson, Arizona; MIR ISLAM, a/k/a “JoshTheGod,” was arrested in Manhattan, New York; PETER KETCHUM, a/k/a “IwearaMAGNUM,” was arrested in Pittsfield, Massachusetts; STEVEN HANSEN a/k/a “theboner1,” was arrested in Wisconsin, where he is currently serving a prison sentence on state charges.  In addition, two minors, whose names will not be made public, were arrested by local authorities in Long Beach and Sacramento, California.  HICKS and ISLAM will be presented later today before a magistrate judge in the Southern District of New York.  The other federally arrested defendants will be presented before magistrate judges in the corresponding federal districts of arrest.

Another 13 individuals were arrested today in seven foreign countries.  Eleven of those individuals were arrested as a result of investigations commenced in foreign jurisdictions based in part on information arising out of the undercover operation and provided by the FBI to foreign law enforcement.  Those 11 arrests occurred in: the United Kingdom (6 arrests), Bosnia (2), Bulgaria (1), Norway (1), and Germany (1).  Two additional defendants were arrested today in foreign countries based on provisional arrest warrants obtained by the United States in connection with Complaints unsealed today in the Southern District of New York.  Those two individuals are: ALI HASSAN, a/k/a/ “Badoo,” who was arrested in Italy; and LEE JASON JUESHENG, a/k/a “iAlert,” a/k/a “Jason Kato,” who was arrested in Japan.  Australia, Canada, Denmark, and Macedonia conducted interviews, executed search warrants, or took other coordinated action in connection with today’s takedown, including.

This case is being handled by the Office’s Complex Frauds Unit.  AUSAs James Pastore, Serrin Turner, Timothy Howard, Rosemary Nidiry, Alexander Wilson, and Sarah McCallum, are in charge of the prosecution.

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AOL was once the biggest name on the web, but since the explosion of mobile devices and Google and Facebook seemingly taking over the internet, their name has been forgotten by many. However, advertisers should keep them in mind, for they have recently announced their offering of cross-platform ads for mobile and desktop. They will be an extension of their Pictela format across multiple screens.

In mobile ads, advertisers will be able to use five apps within the Pictela technology such as Twitter, Facebook, feeds, and photo and video galleries. The app icons within the ad will open in a separate display, but without leaving the ad. For desktop, there is the choice to use your choice of 25 applications. The desktop format will operate almost exactly like the mobile, in the sense of effectiveness.

Pictela became part of AOL in 2010, so that AOL could solidify it’s name in the advertising world. They incorporated their system of content management with branded content in their advertising campaigns. Pictela’s main attributes are their strong media solutions and high-definition video options in their expandable advertisement displays.

This new release of AOL’s dual platform Pictela formats is a sure success, because many of the major advertisers and brands need an integrated style in media, and often cannot find the right one. Even though it may seem that AOL is simply reformatting an existing ad platform to fit different size screens, it doesn’t matter. Mobile optimization is always the best choice these days, but it often causes advertisements to lose some of the best attention grabbing assets. With a platform that can capture almost the same things on mobile devices and tablets as it can on desktop, advertisers will only have to build ads once, and there isn’t much need to redesign them for mobile.

Greg Rogers writes on the AOL blog, “Similar to the desktop browser experience, every high-definition experience within the ad unit can be navigated without leaving the page. The functionality takes into account the tactile nature of mobile devices, and allows users to swipe and tap to see more content which can be updated instantly during a campaign.” Since Pictela’s formats were originally intended for desktop platforms, they are now simply perfecting the integration of the same platforms in mobile devices.

On their blog, Greg states that, “Advertising inventory will be available across AOL’s Owned & Operated mobile web properties and apps, as well as across third-party mobile inventory through Advertising.com.” He also states that the new Pictela innovations can be seen in iOS 4.0+ and Android 2.2+. Their new expanding ad format will attract many advertisers because of the potential that can be seen in it. AOL’s Pictela was significantly successful when they first acquired it in 2010, so it’s hard to see any way that it can fail after improvements and mobile integration. AOL’s blog ensures that there will be more app choices thrown into the new mobile offering in weeks to come. This new and improved Pictela advertising promises to bring big things for advertisers and AOL alike.

Israeli powerhouse, Matomy Media group is now offering a unique plan to help affiliates hit by bad networks debts. Following in the footsteps of Adknowledge, they are offering a special plan which will pay bonuses for up to a year from joining their programs, hoping to assist those affiliates that have been hit by COPEAC, Epic Media and fears about Neverblue’s (parent) bankruptcy. While tiered payment plans aren’t anything new, the length of the bonuses plus the unique promise to start extended credit lines to valued affiliates should bring attention from the industry.

Accentuating the benefits of steady, long-term growth as opposed to a more popular but less stable quick win, Matomy is contributing a 10% bonus on top of approved affiliate commissions for a period of 12 months from the date the affiliate joins the program. In addition, affiliates can earn a monthly bounty of up to $5,000, based on set earnings criteria.  The company has also promised to extend a credit line to eligible affiliates on a case-by-case basis to boost confidence and activity.  The promotion begins on June 27, 2012 and is open to existing Matomy affiliates as well as new accounts that register by August 31, 2012.

Assaf Suprasky, Affiliate Network General Manager, says, “Affiliate marketing is a legitimate sales channel that, when done right, provides enormous value for advertisers’ money and provides a steady income for millions of affiliates.  To this end, our responsibility as a performance marketing company is to create profitable relationships between advertisers and affiliates, manage commission approvals, and provide reliable and sustainable terms to our affiliates who heavily rely on their payments.  With this promotion, we are putting our money where our mouth is, and have temporarily reduced our network commission to help our affiliates pass this hurdle”

Learn more about the promotion with Matomy here.

Businesses all over the world know that keeping a network is of the utmost importance. Not only do businesses need to be in contact with other businesses, but they need a way to keep their own business’s employee staff in conjunction with one another. Social media has helped businesses, everyday people, and even schools. In the business world, networking is often what people can thank for their success. Keeping up with competitors and keeping organization within a business is what enterprise social media is all about.

The enterprise social media site that has had everyone talking is Yammer. With over 5 million users in the corporate world, Yammer has proven to be a very successful website and a crucial tool. Microsoft, once again seeing an opportunity to build up the empire they’ve already created, has announced in their Microsoft News Center that they have acquired Yammer. Steve Ballmer, CEO at Microsoft says, “The acquisition of Yammer underscores our commitment to deliver technology that businesses need and people love.”

Microsoft has been working recently on building up certain components of their enterprise. They’ve created a portfolio of cloud services that is growing quite fast. Since social networking is the biggest thing on the web today, Microsoft knows that acquiring a site like Yammer will secure them some solid ground to keep them well in the game, though they would probably never have and issue with that.

Yammer began in 2008, helping local businesses with their social networking for free, but with a bigger goal in mind. With this new acquisition by Microsoft, their goals have been reached, with a cash payment somewhere around $1.2 billion. Along with that, functions at the Yammer offices won’t really change much, and Microsoft even assures us in their News Center post that the current CEO of Yammer, David Sacks, will still be the one that runs the ship and that employees will continue to answer to. Yammer will continue to be a complimentary service as well.

On the Microsoft blog, Kurt DelBane writes on how he has big expectations for this new addition to Microsoft’s cloud service portfolio. “Over time, I see opportunity for exciting new scenarios by adding Yammer’s stand-alone service alongside and integrated into our collaboration offerings with SharePoint, Office 365, Dynamics and Skype. I picture people being able to use Yammer to manage and expand their professional relationships, share and collaborate on Office documents, stay informed about content updates, and to seamlessly move from status updates and feeds into voice and video conversations.”

With Microsoft acquiring all of these services like Yammer and Skype, Kurt is correct in thinking that even bigger things are headed their way. Microsoft will continue to do great things in the future to bring the best in technology and services to the business world and consumers alike. With the brand new Windows 8 to look forward to along with all the new services Microsoft offers, it isn’t hard to see that Microsoft will continue to prosper for a long while.

People rely so heavily on social media now that it has almost become crucial to daily life. It’s understandable in that social media brings people from all walks of life, from all around the world together as one. For many, social media networks have replaced telephone conversations, meeting up for lunch, and most often talk to people in person. It is the new form of communication, and there are some people who spend entire days at a time browsing through their Twitter stream and waiting for the next post. Granted, it shouldn’t be a common practice to sit in front of a computer all day, but it has gotten to the point that some people would be perfectly happy doing it. So, one can only imagine what happened to the world when, on Thursday, Twitter went out like an old light bulb.

Obviously, people began to panic. Even though it was only for a total of 40 minutes between the two separate outages, users still complained about what could have been tweeted in that span of time. It isn’t only because people are obsessed with seeing what’s going on in the world, but it’s also because some businesses rely on Twitter for advertising or developmental reasons.

Twitter says in their blog, “We immediately began to investigate the issue and found that there was a cascading bug in one of our infrastructure components.” They explain how the outage had nothing to do with their new office, a hacking, or GIF avatars, but was simply because of a ‘cascading bug.’ Although people were enraged for a good half hour, it was Twitter itself that was hurt most.

A lot can happen in 40 minutes of outage. Twitter is trying hard to make itself known to advertisers and put itself in the center of the advertising world. They want to seem like a reliable and successful site that can be a great option for marketing uses. However, when things like this happen out of the blue due to reasons that are barely explained, advertisers get nervous. Some understand that these things can happen to any website because there’s always somebody out there that wants them gone, but with a chance of losing advertising time in the future if this were to happen again, many became resistant.

In their blog, Twitter does an excellent job at redeeming themselves after what seemed to many like a disaster. They explain, “For the past six months, we’ve enjoyed our highest marks for site reliability and stability ever: at least 99.96% and often 99.99%. In simpler terms, this means that in an average 24-hour period, twitter.com has been stable and available to everyone for roughly 23 hours, 59 minutes and 40-ish seconds.” The people at Twitter know how much their network means to the world, and they were just as scared as we were. Though, it’s obvious that people will continue to use Twitter, it would be unfair for advertisers to judge their reliability based on one small, 40 minute slip up. After all, it can’t change the monumental amount of traffic the site receives on a daily basis.

The way of the world has become mobile in the past few years, making the game of advertising a completely different one all together. People had to start from scratch, basically, as the internet ads that worked so well for a while became much less useful in what seemed like an instant. Google has done a great job at helping advertisers optimize their efforts for the mobile generation.

According to Google’s Ad Blog, 44% of all Americans own a smartphone now, and there are countless other people who, if they don’t have smartphones, have other mobile devices. It’s for this reason that Google is continuously improving upon their mobile search ads. Their newest addition to their mobile ad campaign is a redesign in search ads that has brought them to Google Maps. Google states a few of the new features that they’ve brought in their Inside AdWords Blog; “The updated formats feature several key improvements: Important calls to action like ‘get directions’ and ‘click to call are now prominent in the ad and clickable in more places.” Being that clickability is a major factor in internet and mobile advertising, Google has made a great choice to work on this feature in their ads. Calls to action have always been something that Google has had a great grip on, however. Also, Google has utilized a tool called a “hyperlocal marker” within their advertisements, to show users how close they are to businesses being advertised. Therefore, wherever a user is in Google Maps, local businesses near that point will have advertisements shown, along with a proximity to their location.

“To enable advertisers to better connect with potential customers through mobile search, we have redesigned our local ad formats for Google Maps for Mobile. These have produced measurable results – in initial tests, these redesigned formats increased click-through-rates by 100%,” Google writes on Inside AdWords. This claim of a 100% increase in click-throughs is a significantly huge one, but it is simply from the initial tests. However, it does show a huge potential if things were to run similarly to the testing. Google Maps Mobile is a widely used application, helping people find new places to eat, to sleep, to get medical attention, or even just have fun. With places like that being marketed directly in front of them in the process, it will be hard for them to not take advantage of the advertisements, especially when they show users how to get to the local business.

Google has been very efficient about optimizing their advertising network to the mobile market. Their new Google Maps Mobile advertising improvements are sure to be a success, because they are innovative and create a user-friendly, clickable display. Many small businesses will benefit greatly by utilizing these innovations, for they will bring consumers and potential customers straight to the doorstep. By enabling the new location extensions option within AdWords, small businesses and advertisers can take advantage of the intriguing new features the Google has created.

Over the years, Youtube has just about partnered up with all the most popular sites and social media networks on the web. Anytime there is a video embedded in a page, one can usually see Youtube’s logo in the corner of the video window. This partnership around the web has helped Youtube expand itself and eventually become the most popular video sharing outlet on the internet. Youtube reached one of their highest points when Facebook started allowing their videos to be shared on users’ news feeds and personal profiles. Since then, Youtube has brought its videos to Twitter, Tumblr, internet news sites, and even television.

One of the newest and most popular social networking sites on the web today is Pinterest. On a network based around the sharing of individual interests, there’s huge potential to broadcast videos directly into the lives of users. Therefore, Youtube has recently announced their new partnership with Pinterest. Referring to them in their blog as “Pintersting videos,” Youtube videos are now being featured on Pinterest as a new form of shared videos. Youtube writes in their blog, “Since Pinterest introduced video pins, we’ve been ever so eager to join the party.”

On Pinterest, users are able to create different categories of interests to their pages. Not only has Youtube allowed users to share their videos on their own profiles, but Youtube has a Pinterest profile of their own. They have created some boards that will bring a lot of hits to their profile, and in effect their videos. Some of the boards they’ve created include Pinspiration, Make It Yourself, and Work It Out, among a few others. Youtube has found another way to take videos that are already on their own site, and put them in the world in a new way.

Similar to the way they appear on other social networking sites, Youtube videos appear in an optimized format based on that of Pinterest. Therefore, their introductory video advertisements will not appear in the optimized video window, since they really only appear on the actual Youtube site. However, the inserted banner advertisements will still appear. No matter where a video ends up on the web, an advertisement banner will be embedded in the new location. This is important, because a large amount of views that Youtube videos get do not happen on the actual Youtube site, but somewhere else that the video has been shared.

When Youtube started allowing the sharing of their videos on social networking sites, it was one of their most successful decisions. Though people aren’t visiting their site directly, the videos are still linked to Youtube and still contributing to their success. Joining Pinterest is just Youtube’s way of keeping up to date. It isn’t surprising that Youtube would join one of the more popular social media sites that is running right now.  The internet is showing partnerships between big names left and right, and it seems like someday soon there may be a bigger connection between all of the big names on the web.

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Advertisers have long awaited Facebook’s release of an ad network that would allow for advertisers to use the Facebook ad platform all around the web. What advertisers have been looking for with Facebook is an advertising network that would allow advertisers to target their ads, stemming from the information they gather from activity on Facebook and what users share with others. When it was reported by Inside Facebook that Facebook was launching ads on Zynga.com, the website developed by the creators of such games as Words with Friends and Farmville, advertisers thought that their dreams were coming true.

Well, this beginning of a new Facebook ad network is not quite what advertisers were expecting. The three bullet points regarding their new Zynga.com advertisements on Facebook’s Help Center were, “You’ll only see sponsored stories about activity that has been shared with you, You can remove ads that don’t interest you by clicking the X, Facebook doesn’t see information that tells advertisers who you are.” They also write, “The Facebook ads you see on Zynga are the same ads you see on Facebook.com.

So, there really isn’t much that is new about these ads that are now being featured on Zynga.com. However, all hope is not lost. Zynga is one of the most well known game and Facebook app developers on the web. Now that they have their own off-Facebook website, the hits have been very high. So, advertising on Zynga.com with Facebook doesn’t necessarily mean an upcoming failure.

Also, there is additional reason for excitement about Facebook’s advertising future. There have been recent announcements about Facebook partnering up with a few DSPs. Facebook has plans to allow a large chunk of information to be presented for targeting of display ads. This will allow advertisers to target people with the help of the data received from Facebook’s DSP partners. However, none of this new DSP advertising will infringe upon privacy statements, so that Facebook can continue to run smoothly and without struggle with privacy proponents.

Regardless of the idea of waiting longer for a breakthrough Facebook advertising network, there is still quite a bit of marketing potential to come in the near future. For now, the Zynga.com advertising feature will remain very similar to the advertising seen on Facebook. They will feature the well known Sponsored Stories and display ad banners that show up on the side of the Facebook page now. However, the new DSP partnership news shows a gleam of light that may be a new advertising opportunity. It isn’t what advertisers have been looking for exactly, but that’s no reason to shun the idea of Facebook’s advertising in the future. Facebook has had a lot of pressure put on them, be it from advertisers, lawyers, or privacy advocates. With a social network as popular and innovative as Facebook, though, it comes with the package. There’s evidence that Facebook will eventually break out of the shell and start up with new marketing options, but until then advertisers will just have to wait.

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