Berlin, January 11, 2012 – 9flats, the leading European provider of private short-term rentals, has announced today that it has completed a major investment round led by T-Venture, the Venture Capital arm of Deutsche Telekom AG.

9flats.com aims to change the way people travel by providing private apartments as an alternative to hotels. Guests can book individual private places to stay and get a better experience at a lower price than with hotels. On the other side, hosts can earn additional income by renting out their room, apartment or house when they don’t need it.

The multi-million Euro funding round is lead by T-Venture, and includes additional participation by existing shareholders Redpoint Ventures (Menlo Park, California) and eVenture Capital Partners (Hamburg).

Additionally 9flats.com will enter into a strategic partnership with ImmobilienScout24, Germany’s largest real estate marketplace. ImmobilienScout24 will contribute its online marketing competence and its know-how in building digital businesses.

Stephan Uhrenbacher, CEO of 9flats explains the relevance of these steps: “This new round of financing will enable 9flats.com to scale our service across Europe and marks an important step for the company as it grows to become a global player in the online travel sector. T-Venture not only provides 9flats with additional funds, but through the separate partnership with ImmobilienScout24, we will be able to expand our audience in a significant way.”

“The private accommodation market is an exciting segment of the real estate lettings market for ImmobilienScout24. This investment enables us to participate in innovative peer-to-peer business models at an early stage and will further strengthen our competitive position. We are delighted to cooperate with 9flats.com and T-Venture on this project” said Dr. Martin Enderle, CEO of Scout24 Holding and Senior Vice President Digital Services at Deutsche Telekom AG.

Christian Leybold, General Partner at eVenture Capital Partners commented: “When we provided the seed capital for 9flats to Stephan Uhrenbacher just a little over one year ago, we were betting on a serial entrepreneur to help bring the emerging Internet business models of the “Sharing Economy” to Europe. We are excited to see the company’s tremendous success in such a short time and the enthusiastic response from consumers as this new way of “staying at home away from home” is being adopted across Europe.”

About 9flats
9flats is an online marketplace for private accommodation that facilitates smarter and more local travel. Through the site, members can rent private places worldwide or let out their own place for extra income. 9flats launched in February 2011 and currently lists more than 25,000 private accommodations more than 100 countries, ranging from private rooms to appartments and houses. 9flats.com was founded by Stephan Uhrenbacher, one of Germany’s leading Internet entrepreneurs, who was involved in both the success of travel booking site lastminute.com and founded Europe’s most popular local review site Qype.com.. The company’s headquarter is in Berlin and it currently employs 70 people.

The survey was conducted between November 14, 2011 and November 26, 2011 to better understand the security and compliance issues that have the greatest impact on smaller businesses. Respondents were asked, “Does your business routinely scan your entire network for security risks, including devices that are behind the firewall?” The majority of respondents – 66% – said they only run security scans of internet facing devices. An additional 17% of respondents indicated they would like scan behind their firewalls but that it was too difficult to change firewall rules.

Elizabeth Ireland, nCircle’s vice president of marketing, commented: “Incomplete security scanning is likely to leave business owners with a false sense of security. Scanning only part of a network is like locking only the front doors of your house and assuming thieves won’t try the windows or the back door.”

“Smaller businesses without dedicated IT support have found it difficult to find a practical vulnerability scanning solution that can help protect their entire network without additional hardware or software”, continued Ms. Ireland. “Unfortunately, small businesses face the same security and compliance issues as larger organizations, but they don’t have the same resources to defend themselves.”

nCircle’s PureCloud is the only security service that can scan every device on the network, including those in front of and behind the firewall. No hardware or software deployment or firewall changes are required. Using only a web browser, PureCloud scans every device, prioritizes all discovered security risks and provides detailed guidance on the steps necessary to reduce or eliminate those risks.

nCircle PureCloud is available now and is completely free through December 16, 2011. Additionally, anyone that scans their network with PureCloud through December 16 will be entered to win one of ten Kindle Fire tablets. Try PureCloud for free at purecloud.ncircle.com

About nCircle
nCircle is the leading provider of automated security and compliance auditing solutions. More than 5,500 enterprises, government agencies and service providers around the world rely on nCircle’s proactive solutions to manage and reduce security risk and achieve compliance on their networks. nCircle has won numerous awards for growth, innovation, customer satisfaction and technology leadership and has been ranked among the top 100 best places to work in the San Francisco Bay Area. nCircle is headquartered in San Francisco, CA, with regional offices throughout the United States and in London and Toronto. Additional information about nCircle is available at www.ncircle.com.

Native support for Tenable Nessus is enabled through nCircle Benchmark’s data adapter technology. nCircle Benchmark data adapters transform raw data from a wide variety of security products into useful metrics and powerful key performance indicators. These security metrics enable users to quickly assess their compliance and risk posture and compare the results to their industry peers.

“The value of the vulnerability management benchmark increases with additional contributors and a broader range of data sources,” said Jim Acquaviva, vice president of product strategy at nCircle. “nCircle Benchmark’s support for Tenable Nessus enables more organizations to convert vulnerability management system into useful metrics, key performance indicators and visual scorecards.”

nCircle Benchmark Metrics Pack for Vulnerability Management is now available to all nCircle IP360, McAfee Vulnerability Manager, Qualys QualysGuard, Rapid7 NeXpose and Tenable Nessus customers. nCircle Benchmark normalizes data across different vulnerability management products, providing a common baseline that enables the entire nCircle Benchmark community to compare vulnerability management results regardless of the scanning technology used.

The nCircle Benchmark Vulnerability Management Scorecard Pack contains pre-built metrics that transform raw data from your vulnerability management solution into actionable metrics including:
Average host risk score
Average number of days since last vulnerability scan
Vulnerability distribution by platform
Vulnerability distribution by severity
Percentage of Systems with Severe Vulnerabilities
Common high severity vulnerabilities

All of these metrics can be presented by industry, company size, geography and assets under management. Internal metrics can be analyzed by an even wider range of criteria including risk profile, organizational structure and compliance requirements. Standard, Premium and Enterprise editions include many more metrics, scorecards and other benefits.

The Tenable Nessus data adapter is now available as part of the nCircle Benchmark Vulnerability Management Scorecard Pack.

nCircle Benchmark Scorecard Packs
nCircle Benchmark Scorecard Packs deliver pre-packaged, field-tested metrics and scorecards that provide complete visibility across multiple-vendor security and compliance environments. nCircle Benchmark metrics and scorecards offer a comprehensive, at-a-glance indicator of IT investment performance. nCircle Benchmark offers a broad range of Scorecard Packs. Vulnerability Management, Configuration Auditing, Antivirus & Endpoint Protection, Identity & Access Management and Patch Management are available now. Additional Scorecard Packs for Endpoint Encryption, Event Management, Incident Response and Network Protection will be available soon.

nCircle Benchmark Editions
Each Scorecard Pack is delivered in three editions: Basic, Standard and Premium. The Basic Edition of every Scorecard Pack is always free and provides an initial set of metrics and scorecards. Organizations can easily expand beyond the free Basic Edition and subscribe to a broad range of additional scorecards delivered in the Standard Edition or the Premium Edition to start building internal benchmark assessments from the extensive nCircle Benchmark catalog.

Get Started Free
To get started, simply visit benchmark.ncircle.com to create an account and select a Metrics Pack. Within minutes, customers can view metrics and scorecards of their security performance and compare results to a benchmark of their peers.
For more information, please visit benchmark.ncircle.com.

About nCircle
nCircle is the leading provider of automated security and compliance auditing solutions. More than 5,500 enterprises, government agencies and service providers around the world rely on nCircle’s proactive solutions to manage and reduce security risk and achieve compliance on their networks. nCircle has won numerous awards for growth, innovation, customer satisfaction and technology leadership and has been ranked among the top 100 best places to work in the San Francisco Bay Area. nCircle is headquartered in San Francisco, CA, with regional offices throughout the United States and in London and Toronto. Additional information about nCircle is available at www.ncircle.com.

“APB Reloaded takes another giant step today with the release of the retail version of the game packed with extras and unique items,” said Rahul Sandil, SVP of marketing and business development for GamersFirst. “We appreciate the hard work of our distribution and retail partners bringing the game to all major outlets just in time for the Christmas holiday season.”

Additionally, the Company also announced that APB Reloaded has launched the first version of a brand-new gameplay experience called the Fight Club. Now players can experience faster-paced APB action at the push of a button, and drop in to short-form battles emphasizing player communication and small unit tactics. In this first incarnation the fight club game mode puts players in fights to the finish in a mid-city construction site and at a secure shipping yard.

“Our developers and designers at Reloaded Productions have been working hard for months to create a series of new game play experiences that will let APB players take their custom characters and gear and use them in completely new ways,” said Bjorn Book-Larsson, COO/CTO of GamersFirst and the head of Reloaded Productions. “The first incarnation of the fight club game mode is a stepping stone to an expanded system that eventually includes bi-weekly fight club challenges and a whole series of new clan-focused activities and events, where clans can challenge each other in specific areas of the city, and set the parameters of their fights for clan supremacy.”

“We expect to expand the system to eventually include a lot of different types of Deathmatches, Territory Control and King of the Hill modes that will be fast, invigorating and engaging from the moment each fight starts, as an alternative to the ‘open-world mission’ modes that were the key feature of the Open Beta version of APB”

Exclusive Virtual Items and Services for Retail Edition
APB Reloaded’s retail edition is a value-added DVD-ROM for Windows® XP/Windows Vista®/Windows®7 and can be purchased for a suggested retail price of $29.99 USD. Available at Best Buy, GameStop, Target and Wal-Mart locations nationwide, the APB Reloaded retails edition bundles premium service, an exclusive weapon and vehicle in order to better equip Criminals or Enforcers as they start down their path of infamy. Each retail copy of APB Reloaded will include:

• 30 days of account wide Premium service, providing players with faster reputation and experience gains, more in-game currency rewards and a 20 percent discount in the Armas Marketplace, APB Reloaded’s in-game cash shop.
• 500 G1 Credits, redeemable in the Armas Marketplace.
• A faction-specific Cisco Z180 sports car. This all-wheel drive vehicle provides players with a fast, maneuverable and durable ride especially designed for mission in the mean streets of San Paro.
• And the exclusive Magnum ACT-44 Last Stand secondary weapon, a powerful, permanent handgun with great stopping power available to all characters on the account.

Additionally, players can also minimize their download and installation process, allowing them to jump into the battle for San Paro that much faster.

Fight Club: The APB Reloaded Experience Refined
As San Paro falls further into chaotic disarray, Criminals and Enforcers are searching for that one advantage to tip the scales into their favor for control of the city. In APB Reloaded’s new gameplay experience, players can chose to fight over two of these key advantage points within the current districts. Be it controlling the Waterfront District’s Baylan Shipping to control the influx of contraband, or to hold the high round of The Beacon, a partially-constructed high-rise hotel stronghold, players fight in classic Deathmatch and King of the Hill missions to determine the victorious faction. Closed off from the rest of their respective action districts, Fight Club provides fast-paced visceral combat for up to 32 players at a time, delivering a distilled, potent smaller-scale version of APB Reloaded’s brand of open gameplay.

In the world of San Paro, Criminals and Enforcers battle in an open-world environment to control territories, commit or stop petty crimes, and gain notoriety within their own organizations. Be it on foot or from the driver seat, APB Reloaded melds player-on-player combat within the immersive world of a city on the edge of total chaos. Powered by Epic’s Unreal 3 engine, APB Reloaded features a robust set of customization tools second to none, providing gamers the ability to create the exact look of their in-game avatar, character symbols, clothing and even customize cars they drive. To get up-to-date information on GamersFirst and APB Reloaded’s Community and Fan Pages, check out the following links:

Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/APBReloaded
Development Blogs – http://apbreloaded.gamersfirst.com;
Website – http://www.APB.com
Twitter – @APB_Reloaded @GamersFirst

About Reloaded Productions
Reloaded Productions is the creative game development studio subsidiary of GamersFirst.com and K2 Network Inc with studio operations in Irvine, CA, Cary, NC and Edinburgh, UK. Reloaded Productions’ roster of massively multiplayer online games includes APB Reloaded, Hailan Rising and Fallen Earth. For more information about Reloaded Productions, please visit http://www.reloadedproductions.net or follow us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/reloadedproductions.

About GamersFirst
GamersFirst is the leading Free2Play® MMO game publisher in the Western hemisphere. GamersFirst.com serves more than 30 million players in over 160 countries with offices throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. GamersFirst.com features the hit MMOG’s Knight Online, Fallen Earth, Sword2, and War Rock and future hits APB Reloaded, Hailan Rising, Victory: Age of Racing and Taikodom: Living Universe. Read more about the company and its games at http://www.gamersfirst.com.

Available for download today, Steam members can now join the fight for control over the fictional world of San Paro while the game continues to refine itself through the open beta process.

“GamersFirst is and always will be focused on our community, and being able to deliver the truly unique gaming experience that APB Reloaded offers to Steam subscribers only strengthens that commitment,” said Rahul Sandil, SVP of marketing and business development for GamersFirst. “Steam and GamersFirst share a common passion for authentic gaming experiences and dedication to delivering the very best entertainment possible to the PC platform.”

In the world of San Paro, Criminals and Enforcers battle in an open-world environment to control territories, commit or stop petty crimes, and gain notoriety within their own organizations. Be it on foot or from the driver seat, APB Reloaded melds player-on-player combat within the immersive world of a city on the edge of total chaos. Powered by Epic’s Unreal 3 engine, APB Reloaded features a robust set of customization tools second to none, providing gamers the ability to create the exact look of their in-game avatar, character symbols, clothing and even customize cars they drive. To get up-to-date information on GamersFirst and APB Reloaded’s Community and Fan Pages, check out the following links:
Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/APBReloaded
Development Blogs – http://apbreloaded.gamersfirst.com;
Website – http://www.APB.com
Twitter – @APB_Reloaded @GamersFirst

About Steam
Steam, created by Valve Corporation, is the leading platform for PC and Mac games and digital entertainment, serving over 1500 games to over 35 million active users worldwide. For more information, please visit www.steamgames.com.

About GamersFirst
GamersFirst is the leading Free2Play® MMO game publisher in the Western hemisphere. GamersFirst.com serves more than 30 million players in over 160 countries with offices throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. GamersFirst.com features the hit MMOG’s Knight Online, Fallen Earth, Sword2, and War Rock and future hits APB Reloaded, Hailan Rising, Victory: Age of Racing and Taikodom: Living Universe. Read more about the company and its games at http://www.gamersfirst.com.

The direct access to Sirena-Travel and TAIS (Transportation Automated Informational Systems) will allow Jizo.ru’s customers access to the ultimate range of fares offered by the Russian airlines – all represented in these two Russia’s GDS’s in the most thorough way compared to foreign ones. At present Sirena-Travel and TAIS are not accessible in full by any other search engines in the world nor can they be accessed in full by foreign OTAs. Jizo.ru will now include the details of almost half of all domestic flights in Russia.

Out of approximately 30 Russian scheduled airlines, only five are hosted in foreign inventory systems: Aeroflot in Sabre, Transaero, S7 and Vladivostok (soon to be supposedly absorbed by Aeroflot) in SITA, Rossiya in Amadeus. The rest of the Russian domestic airlines such as Utair, Orenair, Ural, Yakutia, Kuban are shared between Sirena-Travel and TAIS (at about 6:4 ratio respectively).

Here’s a little bit of history of the Russian inventory and distribution systems. SIRENA (SYstem of REservations Na (on) Airlines), the predecessor and the prototype of today’s Russian GDS’s, was founded in the Soviet Union in 1972 as the Soviet GDS. It was evident that during the Cold War the Soviet Union’s then the only airline Aeroflot would not be using SABRE (like nowadays) or any other foreign GDS’s with a small exception—international flights were still hosted in UNIVAC which was however based in Moscow. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in early 90s, due to differences of views on future developments SIRENA split into two competing distribution companies having proceeded the further development of common SIRENA solution on their own: Sirena-Travel (with its Sirena-2000 inventory) and TAIS (with its Sirena-2.3).

“No other search engine in the world has established direct access to the broadest CIS fare databases before. With this project Jizo.ru becomes a unique meta search engine currently including the most extensive proportion of domestic flights in Russia. And at the same time Sirena-Travel with TAIS not only starts contributing to expanding the Russian market flights’ possibilities – it also initiates the new and prospective business opportunity for future partnerships – with regard to rising role of the Internet in distributing fares in Russia”, Marina Volodina, Sirena-Travel Commercial Director, says.

Apache is still the undisputed king of web server software but according to the latest Netcraft Web Server Survey from November 2011, NGINX usage has grown almost 300% over the last year.

In real numbers NGINX increased from about 15 million sites a year ago to 43 million in November 2011. That’s a faster growth than any other web server software tracked by Netcraft.

Since we’re big fans of NGINX at Pingdom, we wanted to try to understand this tremendous growth, so we put some questions to Andrew Alexeev (Q&A further down). Andrew looks after Business Development and Marketing for NGINX Inc., the company formed in October this year, backed by $3 million in venture funding, with the intent to expand the open source NGINX project and explore commercial opportunities.

NGINX usage has skyrocketed
NGINX is the little web server that could. At least that’s how it started in 2002, a development project with the goal of creating a fast and light-weight web server that could take on specialized roles as load balancer, caching, etc.

With a first public relese in 2004, NGINX has gone from strength to strength. Besides being fast, NGINX also requires relatively few resources on the machine it runs on. All things combined, NGINX can handle a very large number of simultaneous connections without suffering in performance.

The high performance is certainly one main reason why NGINX is popular among webmasters around the world. That NGINX is also open source certainly hasn’t hurt its popularity.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you may remember that we wrote about the dramatic increase in popularity of NGINX a year ago.

Here’s the development of NGINX over the last few years according to Netcraft:

Just to put the NGINX numbers in perspective, we should point out that in Netcraft’s surveys, the total number of sites tracked as well as NGINX’s main competitors have also seen an increase:

The total number of sites tracked by Netcraft has doubled over the last year from 249,461,227 in November 2010 to 525,998,433 in November 2011.
In the same period, Apache increased from 148 million sites to almost 342 million.
Microsoft’s IIS grew from 57 million to over 81 million.
Q&A with Andrew Alexeev from NGINX
This mind boggling growth for NGINX obviously creates lots of questions.

So following up on last year’s interview we wanted to throw some questions at NGINX again to see what’s been happening and what the plans are for the future.

Andrew Alexeev who’s in charge of Business Development and Marketing for NGINX took time to answer our questions.

Pingdom: What was the genesis of NGINX? How and why did it get started?

Andrew: NGINX started in 2002. Igor Sysoev ‒ the original author of NGINX ‒ had been working at Rambler, a big Russian media company. While there, he pondered the feasibility of writing his own web software to make highly loaded websites scale much better.

It all started with a question raised by the prominent software engineer Dan Kegel: Would it be possible for a web server to easily handle 10,000 or more concurrent connections? Igor was quite intrigued by the possibility, so he started to study in more detail the challenges associated with making a fast, compact and scalable web server.

In those days, the main problem faced by legacy web servers was their inability to handle lots of concurrency, which was caused primarily by large numbers of slow clients. Nowadays, concurrency is also caused by a combination of mobile clients (who are still predominantly slow) and the newer application architectures, which are often based on maintaining a persistent connection, allowing the client to be quickly updated with the content. An additional important factor contributing to increased concurrency is the changed behavior of modern browsers, which typically open four to six simultaneous connections to a website to increase the speed of page downloads.

Older web software spawns a separate process or thread for each new connection, making it inefficient as the number of simultaneously connected clients grows to thousands and tens of thousands, with huge numbers of requests per second.

To deal with these concurrency-related problems, Igor decided on event-based, asynchronous, non-blocking architecture for NGINX, which would allow web servers to process many thousands of connections inside a single process and a highly efficient run-loop. This solution turned out to be a very successful approach for many companies on the Web.

Igor opened NGINX to the public in 2004, and NGINX’s popularity has been growing rapidly ever since. NGINX has always been open source software distributed under the 2-clause BSD license, a model many users appreciate because of its simplicity and flexibility. Since launching the solution, Igor has received many useful suggestions for enhancing NGINX, and over the past 10 years he has introduced a number of new features that have established NGINX as a really interesting toolset.

NGINX has become a very important enabling mechanism for big and small companies worldwide, currently powering 4 out of the top 10 companies from Business Insider’s 2011 “World’s Most Valuable Startups” list, including Facebook, Groupon, LivingSocial and Dropbox. NGINX is also being run by 25% of the top 1,000 busiest websites, and overall by 45 million websites on the Internet.

Pingdom: We asked you last year why you thought NGINX was growing so fast. In a year, according to Netcraft, the number of servers running NGINX has almost tripled to just over 43 million in the November report. To what do you attribute this?
Andrew: We think there are several reasons why NGINX is becoming even more popular. First of all, while its development has been quite fast, the growth of new features has developed steadily over time and with a predictable release cycle. The result is that people now understand this software is being thoughtfully and carefully maintained and they have confidence it will continue to be developed further.

Secondly, NGINX is no longer just a fast and compact web server but also a web infrastructure platform. In a variety of contexts, NGINX provides the right tools for the right job ‒ or rather it provides a set of the right tools. It can be used as a high performance web server for static and dynamic content, a Layer 7 load balancer, caching engine, HTTP streaming server, SSL accelerator, mail proxy and a security gateway for backend applications.

NGINX also brings an important set of values to web developers, including efficiency, performance, scalability and reliability, as well as optimized costs of development, deployment and operations for either large-scale or smaller web installations.

Finally, whether you’re using one or two of NGINX’s features or have made it a complete solution, the software remains compact and is capable of serving an increasing workload without consuming much additional hardware resources.

Pingdom: You have indicated before that NGINX is used more often as a proxy than as a main web server. Has the typical use of NGINX changed any over time?
Andrew: It seems it actually has changed. In the past few months we’ve heard several very interesting stories about people using NGINX in combination with FastCGI/PHP-FPM, Ruby on Railsand Python. There are companies out there that happen to have hundreds of application-enabled NGINX instances handling some really big workloads. An interesting example is WordPress.com, which has recently migrated its web servers completely to NGINX to serve 25+ million blogs.

There are also some notable examples of heavy NGINX usage with reverse proxy. CloudFlare’s service is probably one of the best examples here. CloudFlare, which built its front-end infrastructure with NGINX, is now serving over 15 billion page views per month, delivering great services to their customers ‒ and this has happened in just one year after the service was launched to the public.

Pingdom: In October 2011 you announced that you had received $3 million in venture funding. Why did you decide to go this way and what does it mean for the future of NGINX?
Andrew: With NGINX’s popularity, it didn’t make sense for Igor to continue NGINX as a single-handed development project. Igor realized that a) NGINX is the project he would like to develop further and make even better, and b) he’s not able to do that efficiently by himself. With that in mind, Igor decided to quit his job and start a company with a few other people, and that is exactly what happened.

The company is focusing on two main directions. The first is to intensify the focus on open source product development. Our plan is to make the free open source NGINX better, enhance it with the new features and functionality, resolve problems, implement bug fixes, and so on. We’ve been also actively improving documentation to make it more consistent and clear. Many of our users have already noticed progress on that front. In fact, support processes have already been streamlined since the company received venture backing. We will continue to distribute the free open source version of NGINX under the BSD license, and there will be no shortage of new and interesting enhancements.

Our second focus is on creating a commercial entity which will offer paid products based on NGINX. From our conversations with existing customers and partners, we’ve learned they would like to see more features specific to their areas of business on top of NGINX ‒ and they have been very clear that these features are worth paying for. For example, we’re currently producing a set of valuable extensions for the CDN, hosting, cloud, media and entertainment markets. The commercial products will capitalize on the core strength of NGINX as a high-performance and efficient platform for connection processing and optimization. At the same time, we’ll plan to expend considerable effort on keeping the right balance between what we’re going to sell and what will be open source, as both the company and the investors clearly understand the subtle line you need to follow to avoid distracting such a great open source user community.

Pingdom: Before, Igor Sysoev was the only developer of NGINX, has that now changed and how big is the team?
Andrew: The development team currently consists of Igor and three other developers. We also have system engineers onboard responsible for internal services and for supporting the customer cases.

Pingdom: Finally, is usage statistics like what’s available at Netcraft.com something you pay attention to? If so, does it in any way influence the future direction of NGINX in terms of features and functionality?
Andrew: We do track web server usage surveys and statistics (mainly from Netcraft and W3Techs). This information doesn’t really influence the direction of NGINX, however. Primarily, we listen and talk to the community users who provide real-life feedback and suggestions to include in the roadmap as we plan our future. On the other hand, it does show us that NGINX is headed in the right direction, because for quite a while we’ve been the only web server with its market share steadily growing. So, the web server surveys are actually good indicators for us in gauging whether we’ve been delivering a valuable product.

A bright future ahead for NGINX
We think it’s good news for NGINX and all users of the web server software that the company has received an investment and hired more developers. This is the path that many similar projects have taken in the past, such as MySQL. In some cases the community of passionate users have to some degree voiced concerns about the future of the project. To alleviate the risk of that happening with NGINX, it is in the company’s interest to keep the passion alive in the community at the same time as they work on the commercial side of the business.

We also get the impression that the guys at NGINX have a good understanding of what it is that makes the web server software so popular, which should mean they stand a good chance of achieving commercial success as well.

One thing is for sure and that is that increased success comes with increased attention. It’s beensuggested that by the end of 2012, NGINX may have become the number two web server in the world. When and if that happens we hope to be be able to check in with the NGINX team again to see how the company and the software is developing.

NGINX may have been the little web server that could, but now it’s playing in the big league.

A big thanks to Andrew Alexeev for taking the time to talk to us about NGINX.

Image credit: Nginx logo by Cliff Wells.

“Today’s feature update reaffirms our commitment to persistently innovate so that Sonos users have the ultimate music experience in every room of the home,” said John MacFarlane, founder and CEO, Sonos, Inc. “Endless music and effortless control are what will keep us as the gold standard for listening out loud in the home.

”The free Sonos Controller for Android now supports Android® tablets as well as smartphones, letting you control Sonos from any Android device. With Sonos, you can stream all the music on earth wirelessly in every room, and now control it wirelessly on a larger screen with any Android tablet running 2.2 or higher, including the Kindle Fire, HTC Flyer™, Samsung Galaxy Tab™, Sony Tablet™ S, and many others. Plus, Sonos Controller for Android includes new enhancements such as alarms, music library management and Twitter support for Android smartphones and tablets alike. Download it from Android Market.

Slacker® Radio is now available as a free music service on Sonos in the United States and Canada. With Slacker on Sonos you can tune in for free to over 150 expert-programmed stations and create unlimited custom stations from a library of millions of songs. You can even read artist biographies as you listen in every room. Upgrade to Slacker Radio Plus for an ad-free experience or Slacker Premium Radio for even more features like on-demand access to millions of songs, albums and artists and the ability to create custom playlists. Subscribers can also fully personalize their ESPN Radio stations with their favorite shows, plus team and sports updates. To register or learn more about Slacker on Sonos, please visit slacker.com/Sonos.

With Sonos 3.6 software, Sonos is also introducing Sonos Labs, a new Beta environment where customers will be able to test out music services before they’re officially launched on Sonos. New music services will be added to Sonos Labs on an ongoing basis. Media and music service developers can learn more about becoming a Sonos Labs music partner at http://musicpartners.sonos.com.

Sonos 3.6 also includes improved Spotify® integration on Sonos, giving Spotify fans on Sonos access to their Spotify Inbox and ability to play music from Spotify’s new releases and top tracks.

Other features of Sonos 3.6 include:
- AAC+ codec support
- More local language support with Danish and Norwegian

Full details of Sonos 3.6 software can be found here: http://www.sonos.com/support/software_updates/.

The Sonos Wireless HiFi System makes it extremely simple to bring a world of music to any room of any home. Forbes recently said “it really is the best way I’ve ever found to play music.” The Boston Herald recently claimed “If you’re ready to completely make the switch to digital music, the new Sonos PLAY:3 may be the answer for a home stereo system in the age of streaming.”

For more information about Sonos or to demo it at an authorized Sonos dealer near you, please visit sonos.com/storelocator or call 877.80.SONOS.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:
For more information about Sonos or to locate an authorized Sonos dealer in your area, please visit www.sonos.com or call 877.80.SONOS.ABOUT SONOSFounded in 2002, Sonos® is the leading manufacturer of wireless music systems. The Sonos Wireless HiFi System lets you stream all the music on earth wirelessly in every room of your home with control from your Android® smartphone, iPhone®, or iPad®. In addition to playing your personal digital music collection, Sonos gives you access to millions of songs and thousands of radio stations by partnering with AUPEO, Deezer, iheartradio, JUKE, Last.fm, MOG, Napster®, Pandora®, Rdio®, Rhapsody®, SiriusXM Internet Radio, Spotify, Stitcher SmartRadio™, TuneIn, Wolfgang’s Vault, and more. The award-winning Sonos Wireless HiFi System is available at more than 6000 retailers in over 65 countries worldwide; or direct from Sonos at www.sonos.com. Sonos, Inc. is a privately-held company, headquartered in Santa Barbara, California with offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Hilversum, Netherlands, Shenzen, China, and Penang, Malaysia.

Using YuMe’s ACE Relevance Engine, which collects detailed information about the in-page environment of the video player, YuMe’s Ad Visibility technology automatically determines the viewing area, detects the player size, pinpoints player coordinates relative to the viewing area, and intelligently delivers a contextually relevant video ad. This integrated viewport detection technology ensures that video ads are served only when the video players are within the viewer’s sight.

According to Radar Research, up to 50 percent of all ad impressions are never seen by the intended audience.[i] Inclusion of unseen impressions in campaign reporting results in inaccurate metrics. YuMe’s Ad Visibility technology eliminates waste and delivers accurate brand engagement metrics to marketers.

“Ad Visibility technology is not only critical for advertisers to run successful video ad campaigns in which their ads are always visible, it is also necessary to provide advertisers and publishers with accurate brand performance metrics,” said Jayant Kadambi, YuMe CEO. “The Connected Audience Network is the only video ad network in the market that delivers all the essentials of video advertising for brands.”

YuMe’s Connected Audience Network, powered by ACE technology, enables YuMe to effectively deliver visible video content across multiple screens—online, mobile, and connected TV—and provides advertisers with real-time targeting, measurement, and optimization tools to accurately track campaign performance.

YuMe’s video advertising essentials for brands include:
Ad visibility assurance:YuMe’s viewport detection solution guarantees that no impressions will go unseen, so every video ad impression truly extends reach and brand awareness.
Brand-safe distribution: YuMe ensures ads are associated with safe content to protect brand equity. Since video ad players are portable, YuMe’s brand security measures follow the video player wherever it goes to guarantee protection.
Cross-screen compatibility: YuMe enables marketers to reach any screen their customers are viewing, be it a computer, mobile device, or connected TV. Moreover, advertisers can build their YuMe Ads just once and run them on all screens.
Premium, 100% in-stream video inventory: User-initiated, well-lit video ad placements on quality publisher properties and applications yield high brand impact and optimal branding opportunities.
Video ad placement on professionally-produced content:YuMe ensures that the brand message is always paired with high-quality video content for brand credibility. Ads are never placed next to user-generated video content.
Highly interactive video ad units: Socially rich ad units drive brand awareness, favorability, recall, and purchase intent for immediate brand engagement.
Advanced, guaranteed audience targeting: YuMe delivers ads to the right audience using a variety of targeting techniques to meet audience guarantees, ensure relevance, and maximize brand favorability.
Powerful analytics for brand performance optimization: YuMe provides instant, actionable insight into video ad campaign performance across all connected devices.

About YuMe
YuMe is the software infrastructure provider powering digital video and the next generation of television with its operating system for TV 2.0. Its video advertising technology and services seamlessly connect advertisers, app developers, content distributors, consumer electronics manufacturers, and publishers across the globe. YuMe’s patent-pending Relevance Engine powers its premium in-stream video ad network, the YuMe Connected Audience Network, and its industry-leading advertising management solutions, ACE for Publishers and ACE for Advertisers. The YuMe Relevance Engine matches the right ad to the right audience on whatever screen they are viewing-PC, mobile, or connected TV. YuMe is a privately held company headquartered in Redwood City, CA with its European headquarters in London. The company is backed by Accel Partners, BV Capital, DAG Ventures, Intel Capital, Khosla Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung Ventures, and Translink Capital. For more information, visit www.YuMe.com, follow @YuMevideo on Twitter (www.twitter.com/YuMevideo), or like YuMe on Facebook at www.facebook.com/YuMevideo.

[j] Identifying and Combating Fraud Optimize Ad Network Buys by Marissa Gluck. Radar Research.

Neben Broadbean Technology kooperiert Experteer nun mit zwei weiteren führenden Multipostern und erweitert seinen internationalen Service erneut. Unternehmen und Personalberater können nun über insgesamt drei verschiedene Multiposting-Plattformen Premium-Stellen und Professional Solutions bei Experteer veröffentlichen und bequem über 2 Millionen Fach- und Führungskräfte in ganz Europa erreichen.

„Mit der Integration von Experter bei eQuest und idibu bieten wir neben Broadbean Technology zwei weitere Plattformen für das smarte Recruiting von qualifizierten Spitzenkräften, national und international“, so Dr. Christian Göttsch, Gründer von Experteer.

Über Experteer
Experteer ist der professionelle Karrieredienst für Spitzenpositionen ab 60.000 Euro Gehaltsbenchmark in Deutschland und Europa. Bei Experteer planen Fach- und Führungskräfte aktiv ihren nächsten Karriereschritt. Neben zehntausenden ausgewählten Stellenangeboten bietet Experteer Zugang zu einem exklusiven Netzwerk von über 10.000 geprüften Personalberatern. Unternehmen und Personalberatungen nutzen die spezialisierten Recruiting-Lösungen für die erfolgreiche Besetzung von Spitzenpositionen. Die Experteer GmbH mit Sitz in München wurde 2005 von der Holtzbrinck Ventures GmbH, einer Tochtergesellschaft der Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck, gegründet. Renommierte Kooperationspartner wie Handelsblatt, ZEIT online, Stern, FTD oder n-tv haben den Karrieredienst in ihren Online-Auftritt integriert. Weitere Informationen unter www.experteer.de oder den jeweiligen Länderdomains .at/.ch/ .com/.fr/.co.uk/.be/.it/.es/.nl und us.experteer.com.