OTTAWA, Canada, April 30 - Electronics designer Fidus Systems has posted revenues of $5.86 million dollars for the year, a five-year high for the company. Revenues rose 29 percent over the previous year, and 89 percent over three years.

"We've undergone rapid expansion at multiple sites," says President Michael Wakim. "In the past year, we've opened a design centre in Toronto, added designers in Lebanon and Ottawa, and nearly doubled the size of our Ottawa hardware laboratory."

For the second consecutive year, Fidus ranks as one of Ottawa's Fastest Growing Companies, according to a survey by independent business analysts with the Ottawa Business Journal.

U.S.-based customers represented 30 percent of Fidus' new contract bookings in 2006, up significantly from the previous year. In 2006 the company designed circuit boards and related electronics for 63 customers from Ottawa, Southern Ontario, New York, Boston, San Jose and Europe.

Link to the full release document
Visit Fidus

Advanced Web Content Management Features Able To Sync Web Site And Email Marketing Campaigns

San Francisco, CA - April 25, 2007 - Hot Banana Software, Inc. (www.hotbanana.com), a leader in Web content management for marketing, today showcased its new integration between Hot Banana Version 5.5 and email marketing software application providers, such as EmailLabs. Hot Banana made the announcement at ad:tech San Francisco, here through April 26.

The email marketing integration enables marketers to design and create best practices HTML email content directly in the Hot Banana Web CMS, ensuring consistent cross-channel branding throughout the Web site, landing pages and email campaigns. Marketers can export ready-to-go HTML email files from Hot Banana into their email marketing software of choice, where the campaigns can be launched and managed.

Additionally, by using Hot Banana Version 5.5's innovative cross-mapping technology, marketers creating Web forms for use on landing pages-or elsewhere on the Web site-are able to facilitate the seamless exchange of data with their email marketing software without any additional API programming. The data obtained from registrations, subscriptions, promotions, newsletters and surveys can flow to database applications such as EmailLabs-or any other email marketing vendor-where it can be accessed for future email campaigns.

"Hot Banana is committed to providing marketers in small-to-medium enterprises with best-of-breed Web site and eMarketing capabilities to maximize their return on marketing investment," said Krista LaRiviere, general manager, Hot Banana. "With Hot Banana, brand consistency and campaign data exchange can be turned into significant marketing intelligence for the next email campaign-giving marketers a true closed loop lead-generation ecosystem. The integration of the Web CMS and email marketing technologies is a key first step toward achieving a more streamlined marketing platform and complements other forward-thinking Web CMS capabilities in Hot Banana version 5.5."

"Hot Banana is paving the way with tools that help marketers work smarter," said Luis Rivera, CEO, J.L Halsey. "The integration between Web CMS and email marketing technologies, such as that from EmailLabs, enables unparalleled access to data in an easy-to-use application. This marks an important step in J.L Halsey's commitment to advancing integration among our various brands and bringing powerful tools to marketers generally."

To make the process of managing email marketing campaigns even more effective and productive, Hot Banana has also added many Web site optimization and marketing automation features, such as robust A/B testing on landing pages, data exchange capabilities with SFA and CRM applications such as Salesforce.com, and extensive Web analytics integration with numerous vendors.

For more information about Hot Banana Version 5.5, visit the Hot Banana Web site.

Link to the full release document
Visit Hot Banana Software

Presented at Gilbane Conference, White Paper Lauds Integrated
Web Content Management, SEO, CRM, Web Analytics and Email Marketing Solutions

San Francisco, CA - April 11, 2007 - Hot Banana Software, Inc. (www.hotbanana.com), a leader in Web content management for marketing, announces a new white paper from The Gilbane Group that explains how marketers benefit from utilizing a Web CMS-driven eMarketing platform to deliver tangible ROI on marketing investments.

Hot Banana made the announcement at The Gilbane Conference San Francisco, the industry's premier conference on content management technologies, held at the Palace Hotel through April 12. Hot Banana is exhibiting in Booth #125. David Terry, the company's vice president of marketing, is presenting at the conference and is on a panel called WCM Tools & Strategies for Marketing, Wednesday, April 11 at 2 p.m. The Gilbane white paper, entitled "Strategic eMarketing: Converting Leads into Profit" is available for download at http://www.hotbanana.com/company/resource-center/white-papers/gilbane-white-paper/

It explains how a Web CMS-driven eMarketing platform is ideal for bridging disparate marketing, sales and customer service business processes. It also discusses how this approach is key to "bolting together" lead generation and lead conversion efforts so marketers can deliver - and prove - the return on marketing investment (ROMI) that executives increasingly demand.

"'Quick-shot' email campaigns, generic landing pages, and disorganized Web sites are not delivering the ROI that marketers hoped for. Solution providers that understand the need to increase WCM's impact on revenue generation rather than simply administrative control are providing eMarketing as an integral platform component," wrote Leonor Ciarlone, Senior Analyst, The Gilbane Group.

Ciarlone notes that this is "an extremely important industry breakthrough," and outlines how a Web CMS with built-in eMarketing components helps integrate disparate tools used for search engine optimization, Web analytics and email marketing.

The white paper notes that due to Software as a Service (SaaS) pricing models, small and mid-size organizations can now implement a Web CMS with eMarketing capabilities "with lower upfront costs and reduced risk."

The Gilbane Group white paper reminds companies of all sizes to consider the need for certain key features in a Web CMS-driven solution, including:

• Centralized management of Web site assets, including HTML pages, forms, and rich media sources such as video and audio.
• Performance management for micro sites as well as landing, registration and survey pages
• Email marketing management, including rules-driven interactivity and dynamic personalization
• SEO tools, including metadata and keyword management
• Analytics capabilities, including tagging, tracking, conversion measurement, automated optimization, and generic Web site behavior reporting
• Integration paths to SFA and CRM resources
• Design tools that promote usability and account for Web accessibility guidelines.

Hot Banana's latest release, Version 5.5, meets all of the above requirements, empowering marketers to maximize inbound Web site traffic, launch email campaigns, leverage landing pages with A/B testing and Web forms, and transfer leads to customer relationship management and sales force automation systems like Salesforce.com.

"Now more than ever, marketers at small-to-midsize companies need to transform their Web sites into lead-generation engines," said David Terry, Hot Banana vice president of marketing. "That's why we built eMarketing capabilities into the very core of Hot Banana's Web CMS."

Hot Banana integrates best-of-breed, third-party Web analytics, email marketing and CRM solutions with its intuitive, easy-to-use Web CMS solution, so marketers can build Web sites and easily update content without relying on IT support. Hot Banana solutions are available as either hosted, SaaS offerings or as licensed software.

Link to the full release document
Visit Hot Banana Software

Marketers Can Now Improve Organic Search Rankings by Optimizing Web Sites for Peak Marketing Performance

New York, NY – April 11, 2007 – Hot Banana Software, Inc. (www.hotbanana.com), a leader in Web content management for marketing, today announced a host of new Web site optimization features, including a unique “SEO Center” and a vendor-agnostic “Analytics Center” that helps marketers at small-to-midsize companies improve their organic rankings in search results – without IT support or deep SEO expertise.

The company made the announcement at the Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo 2007, in New York through April 12.

“Web sites that rank well organically with the search engines are more valuable than those that do not, they deliver more traffic and a higher ROI for the marketer,” said Krista LaRiviere, general manager, Hot Banana. “Hot Banana is the most SEO-friendly Web CMS out there, not only building great Web sites, but also ensuring that they are optimized for search engines. Our SEO Center has all the key SEO tools, based upon Web standards and best practices. Combine this with the Hot Banana Analytics Center, and our clients can choose any Web analytics vendor to track, measure and quantify organic and paid keywords, and optimize the Web site to perform even better.”

Hot Banana, built from the ground up as a search engine friendly Web CMS, now makes it even easier for non-technical users to increase site traffic, determine which keywords work best and fine-tune their sites for peak marketing performance.

The new SEO Center helps marketers manage SEO-friendly Web sites that are built using well written and clean code; plain English URLs, page titles and headings; h and alt tags; meta tags; robots.txt files and a keyword analyzer that shows the keyword density, frequency and weight.

The first-of-its-kind Analytics Center makes it easy to work with several pre-configured, leading Web analytics vendors, such as ClickTracks, WebTrends, Google Analytics and IndexTools. Other Web analytics vendors can be easily manually configured. Once configured Hot Banana automatically adds the analytic vendor of choice’s preferred tagging code to each Web page, so marketers can easily track keyword conversions and Web site visitors. Hot Banana has also added its own lead source and conversion tracking mechanisms for Google Adwords, Yahoo! and MSN conversion tags and EmailLabs Action Tracking conversion tags.

“Web analytics and Web content management are naturally synergistic, which is why ClickTracks and Hot Banana are such a strong fit," said John Marshall, founder and CEO of ClickTracks. "Once you see how visitors interact with a page, you can make intelligent choices about improving that interaction. Hot Banana makes it easy for marketers to adopt and use Web analytics, so they can improve SEO site performance."

Hot Banana’s numerous built-in SEO tools and controls enable search-engine robots to crawl deep inside Web sites, indexing practically everything. Hot Banana Web sites are all built to the W3C, XHTML and CSS Web standards that search engines prefer, with logical navigation. Marketers can update the myriad page elements that influence search rankings on the fly – even if they know little about SEO best practices.

New SEO features in Hot Banana’s latest release, Version 5.5, include:

• XML Sitemap - automatically creates XML standards-compliant sitemaps and registers them with Google, Yahoo! and MSN.
• Automated Title Attributes In Hyperlinks - sets the hyperlink titles in the Rich Text Editor as the default page-title attributes for searchengines. This way, if marketers use the right keywords and naming conventions when they create the content, they automatically carry these benefits over to the search engines.
• Duplicate Content Redirect 301 - automated tags tell search engines not to spider cloned and printer-friendly Web pages.

Link to the full release document
Visit Hot Banana Software

After reaching a peak of $6.6 billion in 2001, ICT R&D spending in Canada dropped to $5.3 billion in 2002. It has since grown steadily each year, and total ICT R&D spending in 2006 is expected to top $5.7 billion. Since 1997, ICT R&D spending has grown at an average rate of 5.5% per year, compared to some 6.1% for total Canadian private sector R&D. ICT sector R&D as a share of total Canadian private sector R&D spending has consequently decreased, from 49% of the total in 2000 to an anticipated 39% in 2006. Nonetheless, the sector remains the largest private R&D performer in Canada.

The substantial decline observed at the sector level in 2002 was mainly due to major reductions in R&D spending by the communications equipment manufacturing industries, which cut their R&D expenditures by 39% or $1.3 billion. After further reductions in 2003 and 2004, R&D spending in these industries increased slightly in 2005, and R&D intentions for 2006 suggest a second year of moderate growth. These industries' 2006 R&D intentions account for 27% of ICT sector and 10.5% of total Canadian private sector R&D intentions.

The largest nominal increases in R&D spending for 2006 are expected to occur in the software and electronic component manufacturing industries, with increases of $56 and $32 million respectively, while the communications equipment industries R&D intentions for 2006 are up by $26 million. The year over year growth in software industry R&D spending is the highest for any ICT industry in Canada, at 9.2% over the 2005 level. Research and development spending in this industry has grown very rapidly since 1997 (at an average annual rate of some 17%) and has increased every year since 1998.

Research and development spending in the communications services industries has grown at over 29% per year, on average, since 1997, and intentions for 2006 are over nine times 1997 levels.

Total Canadian private sector R&D expenditures are expected to be $14.9 billion in 2006, up 1.3% from 2005.

Link to the full release document
Visit Innovation Synergy Centre in Markham

Version 5.5 Empowers Small-to-Midsized Businesses To Build and Fine-Tune Web Sites for Lead Generation

Barrie, ON, and Menlo Park, CA - March 7, 2007 - Hot Banana Software, Inc. (www.hotbanana.com), a leader in Web content management for marketing, today announced that it has launched Version 5.5, which takes Web CMS to the next level by integrating Web site optimization and marketing automation features. The company also made significant changes to its SaaS and licensed pricing, squarely focusing on small-to-midsize marketers.

"Hot Banana is throwing down the gauntlet and claiming the mid-market Web content management space," said Krista LaRiviere, general manager, Hot Banana. "We're now giving midsize marketers advanced tools and controls for creating Web sites that are designed from the ground up to generate and convert leads and to handle complex online marketing campaigns. And we're giving it to them at a price they can afford, in an off-the-shelf SaaS or licensed package that they can implement with or without IT assistance."

As part of its re-positioning strategy, Hot Banana has re-launched its own corporate Web site using Version 5.5, at www.hotbanana.com.

The company's innovative new release, Hot Banana Version 5.5, is first to focus on three areas: (1) Web content management, empowering marketers to build Web sites and take control of their content, (2) Web site optimization, giving marketers the tools they need to fine-tune the marketing performance of their sites, and (3) marketing automation tools for capturing Web site visitors, turning them into qualified leads and transferring the leads to CRM systems.

The one-of-a-kind Web CMS integrates best-of-breed, third-party Web analytics, email marketing and CRM solutions. It also consolidates all the capabilities from Hot Banana's formerly optional Active Marketing Suite into one core product.

At the same time that the company has increased product functionality, it has also made its pricing structure more affordable. The company created a three-tier model based on usage: one to five users, six to 25 users and unlimited users. Hot Banana SaaS, the company's hosted offering, starts at only $329 per month, while Hot Banana Licensed Software starts at $4,999.

The most expensive package is a licensed-software offering that handles an unlimited number of users and URLs for only $27,999.

Pioneering Web Content Management for Marketing

Version 5.5 builds Web site optimization tools and marketing automation processes directly into the core product. This approach empowers marketers to maximize inbound Web site traffic, launch email campaigns, leverage landing pages with A/B testing and Web forms, and transfer leads to CRM systems like salesforce.com.

"We're the only Web CMS vendor with this laser focus on giving marketers total control," said LaRiviere. "Our approach lets marketers focus all their energy on making sure the Web site content is fully optimized and automated, so their marketing campaigns can perform and outperform."

Among the most innovative features are:

• An industry-first "Analytics Center" that integrates several leading Web analytics tools, including ClickTracks, Google Analytics, IndexTools and WebTrends. Hot Banana automatically adds the proper tags to each Web page, based on the user's preferred analytics vendor. Users can easily add additional Web analytics vendors.
• Email marketing capabilities that transfer Web form data to the email marketing provider of choice, so this data can be leveraged in the next campaign. Best-practice design templates are included, so users can create emails, landing pages and corporate sites, all with the same consistent look and feel. For example, email HTML pages can be created in Hot Banana and exported to any email-marketing software, such as EmailLabs, for delivery.
• The ability to transfer Web form data to CRM systems, such as Salesforce.com. Hot Banana's landing pages enable users to build sophisticated Web forms that track lead sources and conversions. All the data captured in the Web form can be transferred to CRM, database or email-marketing software of choice.
• A new "SEO Center" that consolidates Hot Banana's numerous built-in SEO tools and controls. Enhancements include 301 redirect and automated title attributes in hyperlinks. Users can also automatically create XML standards-compliant sitemaps, such as Google Site Maps, and register them with Google, Yahoo! and MSN.
• An improved Rich Text Editor that enables users to quickly and cleanly cut, paste and filter documents and tables from Microsoft Office and other programs.
• A "Dynamic Content Engine" that borrows tagging tricks from social networking sites - so content authors can categorize and tag their own content. This feature is ideal for managing large volumes of content for online publications and publishers. Web site visitors can search content by tag, categories, title, author and abstract.

Link to the full release document
Visit Hot Banana Software

Software Company's 'Modern' Site Features Built-In SEO, Lead Generation and Marketing Automation

Barrie, ON, and Menlo Park, CA - February 27, 2007 - Hot Banana Software, Inc. (www.hotbanana.com), a leader in Web content management for marketing, today announced that its Software as a Service (SaaS), hosted offering enabled Versa Management Systems, Inc. (www.versasys.com) to relaunch its Web site in less than six weeks. 

Versa Systems, a leading provider of regulatory software solutions for North American government agencies, had a 10-year-old, custom-coded Web site that could only be updated by computer programmers.

The new Hot Banana-powered site can now be updated by non-technical employees, without IT assistance. It has a cleaner design, improved navigation and built-in search capability. In addition, the site is now optimized for search engines, designed for lead generation and equipped with eMarketing capabilities.

"With Hot Banana, we are able to concentrate on the content without worrying about the technology or artistic design," said Tom Gottlieb, Versa Systems vice president of licensing solutions. "Our new site combines easy navigation and search with a modern, eye-popping presentation that attracts new prospects far better than before."

Hot Banana's SaaS, hosted Web CMS offering is specifically designed to help marketers at small-to-medium enterprises take control of their Web sites.

"SaaS is growing in popularity, because companies want to empower marketing teams to generate leads and to keep IT focused on projects that truly require technical expertise," said Krista LaRiviere, general manager, Hot Banana. "For this reason, Web content management is tailor-made for SaaS, and Hot Banana is emerging as a leading SaaS provider."

The Web CMS empowers non-technical personnel to easily update Web sites by displaying content in a WYSIWYG editor - without code. It also features built-in SEO tools that make it more likely for search engines to rank sites in organic search results. Hot Banana's marketing automation features ease the process of launching and managing email campaigns.

Link to the full release document
Visit Hot Banana Software

Executive Appointment

February 16, 2007 - The Partners of WILSON VUKELICH LLP are pleased to announce that ROBERT MARTINI has joined the firm as Counsel Rob practices tax law.