If you’ve ever wanted to see behind the curtain of Kontera innovation, now’s your chance.

We’re pleased to announce the launch of the Kontera Engineering Blog, a new platform for Kontera’s R&D Department to share what they’re working on. Whether it’s porting one of our core services to Ruby, explaining how to speed up environmental load time in development mode, or showing how JavaScript functions as a MindMap; with each post a different member of the team invites you into their online classroom.

For programmers, or those just interested in learning more, it’s definitely a must read!

As a testament to the consistency of the Kontera brand and our performance we were recently presented with an award from TopSEOs, a website that ranks the best providers in a variety of online topics (such as: SEO, PPC, Optimization and more).

The award credits Kontera for being “Consistently Ranked As A Top Performer 2010.”   We are happy and grateful to receive this award and to add another piece of hardware to our Trophy Case.

Thanks TopSEOs.

One great technology platform, now two great networks.

Kontera is proud to announce the official launch of INTENTclick, the premier direct response In-Text network. INTENTclick differs from Kontera’s flagship brand network, in that it’s optimized to meet the specific needs of direct response advertisers and quality publishers in the “Save Money” and “Better Income” verticals. INTENTclick will be expended for additional content categories in the future.

Both networks utilize Kontera’s Synapse Platform, which provides advanced semantic analysis, along with real-time web trend and user context analysis, to predict consumers’ interests and intent. However, INTENTclick has an ad inventory that’s especially effective for monetizing SEO driven content covering the topics of saving or making money. Here are the advantages for both Publishers and Performance Advertisers:

For publishers, INTENTclick delivers:

• Exclusive in-text placements
• Thousands of offers
• Incremental monetization
• Easy setup – for a single site or a network of sites

For performance advertisers INTENTclick delivers:

• Superior optimization
• High conversion
• Precise Targeting for a qualified audience
• Exclusive in-text inventory
• Flexible ad formats (text and rich media)
• Dedicated account management

Kontera SEO Yoav Shaham further elaborates on why now is right time to launch a second in-text network:

“As a technology company with multiple offerings and a rapidly expanding footprint, we’ve scaled to a level where we can effectively manage multiple products, multiple market segments, and multiple networks. This segmentation of networks gives us the power and flexibility, to fully serve both brand advertisers and direct response advertisers, in the unique ways that satisfy their differing campaign objectives.”

As Yoav touched upon, INTENTclick is just the latest in a series of new products Kontera Technologies has released in the last six months. Along with INTENTclick, Kontera has also introduced Mobile Solutions and the acclaimed Social Boost family of products, further cementing Kontera’s position as an industry leader, and valued partner for both Advertisers and Publishers.

In the ongoing smartphone OS wars, the battle to be number one has never been more heated. Given the fierce competition between Google and Apple we were curious how consumers’ reading behavior and interests might change as a result of Google’s big I/O developer conference and press event last week.

Here at Kontera, we constantly analyze editorial content, editorial consumption, and the actual consumer engagement and interest with phrases and links appearing across 15,000+ sites.  We do this in real-time, so it wasn’t too hard to have our analysis team do a quick pull of the data.

Across the web, in thousands of articles and millions of pageviews, we saw a 24% rise in Android related content consumption during this past week, while iOS remained fairly stable. But even more impressive was the fact that Consumer interest and engagement with Android related content and phrases increased by 27%, while interest and engagement with iOS content remained exactly the same.

Here is what we saw discovered:

In the seven days ending May 4^th:

• iOS was mentioned and discussed in the content of 2,119,958 pageviews
• Android was mentioned and discussed in the content of 2,575,994 pageviews

These figures show the number of times the articles discussing the smartphone topics have been consumed across all these sites that use our technology.  By way of background, last week’s figures are consistent with recent trends and the steady state for the OS’s respective “share of voice” that we’ve seen.

In the seven days ending May 11^th:

• iOS was mentioned and discussed in the content of 2,233,120 pageviews (a 5% week-on-week change)
• Android was mentioned and discussed in the content of 3,201,614 pageviews (a 24% week on week change)

Yikes – while Apple is staying within standard week-to-week variance threshold, that jump in Google content and consumption is way outside the norms.  So we are seeing definite sway in editorial production and in consumption due to the recent Google I/O Developers conference and the news it generated, such as Google Music, the Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade of Android, and Android@Home.

This raised the next question for us, “So what?”…   Is Google’s information compelling enough for readers to want to learn more?  “Are people any more interested in these OS’s?”

So we jumped back into the data and looked at how the readers of these articles interacted and expressed interest with iOS and Android phrases within all this editorial content.  We looked at the entire smartphone category (phrases which span OS’s, phone models, etc.), and here is what we saw:

In the seven days ending May 4^th:

• Consumers engaged with iOS phrases 20.45% of the time
• Consumers engaged with Android phrases 24.85% of the time

Again, typical interest levels for the past few weeks’ market trends that we see.  But…

In the seven days ending May 11^th:

• Consumers engage with iOS phrases 20.49% of the time – no change in week-to-week interest levels
• Consumers engaged with Android phrases 29.37% of the time – a 27.16% increase in consumer interest.

So Google’s news is actually driving higher interest in Android during this time period.  This is notable because interest and sentiment are typically more stable beasts than content consumption trends. It remains to be seen how much of this event’s halo will last, but there is no doubt that there is an impact here.

Neat stuff.

The bottom line is that it was a very strong week for Google.  And…  Apple will need to come up with some fireworks in June to counteract these trends in web content, consumption, and reader interest.

“Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Seeking to honor Dr. King’s legacy, the NY Kontera office spent the Martin Luther King holiday as most of our clients/agencies did, giving back to the community. Kontera participated in City Year’s MLK Service Day, a nationwide community volunteering program that carries on Dr. King’s vision of service by making MLK Day a “day ON and not a day off”.

The Kontera team was assigned to IS 292 in East New York, Brooklyn.  IS 292 is a middle school in one of the toughest neighborhoods in NYC.  It serves as a safe haven by remaining open 6 days a week, providing local children with a place to go and stay off the streets.

The day started with a very inspirational performance by a local drum line band called the Soul Tigers.  There we also multiple speeches by City Year alumni corps members as well as Congressman Anthony Weiner on the importance of service and community outreach.  We also did a little bit of PT to get our juices flowing.

Sufficiently warmed up, we were ready for day’s main activity, painting inspirational murals on several classroom doors.  We were assigned to the 3^rd floor of the school and in all were responsible for painting 8 doors. The themes of the murals ranged from Literature, Technology, Science, Math, etc.  Please see the photos below that showcase our impressive talent.

The team truly enjoyed working with the City Year Corp. members and participating students.  It felt great to be able to use this day “off” for service and it was a privilege to be among the over 1,500 volunteers at this MLK event.  We only wish we could have been there the following day to see the reactions of the students and teachers to the beautiful murals that were painted all over the school.

Overall, the response from Kontera’s team was overwhelmingly positive and we’d love to get involved again next year!

City Year was founded in 1988 on the belief that young people can change the world.  City Year units young people of all backgrounds for a year of full-time service, giving them the skills and opportunities to change the world.  These diverse young leaders help turn around high-need schools and get students back on track to graduation.

If you know someone who is interested in joining City Year in their various locations across the country and the world please visit www.cityyear.org.