Blogging platform Tumblr now has more blogs than WordPress.com, growing from 7 million to about 21 million blogs since the beginning of the year. Of course, there’s no way to monetize those blogs…

Vivek Kundra, the first federal chief information officer, is leaving the government and heading to Harvard in August, according to Politico. Kundra was behind initiatives Data.gov and IT Dashboard, and led the push of federal data to the cloud.

G’day, mate: Lyris has bought a majority stake in Cogent Online, a large Australian marketing outfit.

Digimarc’s Discover mobile reader app can now scan QR codes along with its abilities to detect digital watermarks and identify music.

Here’s a cool chart from our friends at digital advertising research firm AdGooroo showing the growth in first page advertisers over the last 12 months for both Google and Bing.

The company has introduced instant conversion and revenue tracking to Lyris HQ – which combines e-mail marketing with search, social and mobile channels. The new features offers a comprehensive real-time view of campaign visitors, click-throughs, conversions and revenue generated by specific e-mail. In additions, marketers can analyze time and area spent on sites, e-mails or associated web pages while the consumers are browsing.

“Successful campaigns demand measurement tied to the bottom line, not just arbitrary clicks or opens,” said Lyris Chief Marketing Officer Blaine Mathieu. “As online marketing becomes connected, the same holds true for analytics. Marketers need holistic marketing analytics that measure success ranging from web traffic, clicks and opens, to bottom-line data like conversions and revenues.”

MySpace welcomed Shari Friedman as senior vice president of advertising sales — West. In June 2006, Friedman was hired by Fox Interactive Media to build the entertainment vertical for MySpace and IGN. Before that, Friedman had a six-year tenure at AOL, where she started on the entertainment sales team and became regional sales director, overseeing the movie and television business.

Todd Bowman has joined the appssavvy executive team as senior vice president of sales. Bowman was previously West Coast sales director for Conde Nast Digital Media, and also has experience as Los Angeles director at Forbes.com. In addition, Jared Zlotnick came aboard appssavvy’s direct sales team for the social media space as senior account executive serving the East Coast.

Lyris has appointed Michael Weston vice president of U.K. and EMEA sales. Weston arrives from wunderloop, where he was responsible for increasing international sales. Prior to that, he was managing director for Silverpop EMEA after Silverpop acquired Digital Oxygen, which Weston founded in 2003.

Feed Company welcomed Miry Whitehill as an account executive. Previously Whitehill was media and seeding manager at Keta Keta. Also joining the Feed team is Jacke Meyer as social marketing manager after a stint as social media manager at Karma Media Labs.

R/GA is so excited about William Charnock, it created the role of chief strategy office just for him. The industry veteran was most recently at JWT New York as director of strategic innovation and co-head of strategic planning. Also, after being transplanted across the Atlantic, Nick Corongoes is heading up the London technology department as executive technical and strategy director. Lucio Rufo has been promoted to design director for the London office.

Andrew Rutledge joins PubMatic as Vice President of Publisher Sales and head of its expanding New York office. Andrew was previously Director of DoubleClick’s agency and advertisers sales. Also, Josh Wetzel has been appointed to Vice President of Publisher Services. He previously worked at eBay. [Media Memo]

Brand.net, the online advertising network for Brand advertisers, announced several hires. Dylan Parks, a seven year veteran of Yahoo!, who most recently served as Vice President of Digital Media for Major League Gaming, has joined Brand.net in New York. Andres Lahoz joins Brand.net in New York from the Nielsen Company, where he served as Vice President of Online Sales. Prior to Nielsen, he was Advertising Director for Time Warner’s InStyle Digital. Ali Weitzman joins Brand.net to lead Sales Development and Strategy. Weitzman spent the past 12-years at AOL, most recently as Vice President of Marketing. Derek Zabbia, a six-year veteran of AOL, who most recently led the Southeast region for Fox Interactive Media, has joined Brand.net to open the Dallas office and lead the South region.

Premium Network and veteran online advertising entrepreneur, Ken Margolis, have launched Homepagetakeovers.com. Homepagetakeovers.com is dedicated to the deployment and management of Roadblocks, Homepage Takeover Ads, Skins and Peels for advertising agencies, brand advertisers and websites.

HiveMind Marketing, a new marketing “mashup” company that integrates web design and development, as well as email, search, and social marketing, has announced it will use Lyris HQ Agency Edition to enhance clients’ digital marketing campaigns, from creation to delivery and measurement. HiveMind is also deploying Lyris HQ for its own email marketing, Web analytics and pay-per-click campaigns. Lyris HQ Agency Edition will enable HiveMind to combine its creative Web design and development skills with Lyris’ integrated online marketing tools to simplify marketing efforts and optimize campaign ROI for both the company and its clients.

Jeffrey Morgan has joined Moire Marketing Partners as a principal and head of the firm’s new West Coast operations. Prior to joining Moire, he was senior vice president and chief marketing officer for Best Lawyers in America. He served as the West Coast principal of Greenfield/Belser and was alsoa executive vice president of American Lawyer Media (ALM).

No terms were disclosed. With the acquisition, Lyris has expanded its global footprint and ability to extend full-service offerings to multinational customers. Lyris will be opening a new office in central London. Donna McNicholas, who was recently named the Lyris UK sales director, will lead the London sales team. Andrew Robinson, former managing director and owner of Facultas, will assume the position of Lyris’ director of international professional services.

“We have seen tremendous momentum for our Lyris HQ integrated marketing suite in the US and recognize a large opportunity in the European market for a SaaS-based, online marketing solution,” Luis Rivera, CEO, Lyris, said in a statement. “The services expertise of the Facultas team combined with new executive talent in the UK provides Lyris with a strong presence in Europe and will afford extended resources and market knowledge to new and existing Lyris customers worldwide.”

ListManager 10 uses “mailstreams” and introduces MailStream Optimization. Mailstreams is the ability to send campaign emails in parallel over multiple IP addresses. This improves inbox delivery rates. MailStream Optimization enables marketers to group qualified subscribers on one IP address, allowing them to maintain a high reputation score. Two more major new features to ListManager 10 include Smart Bounce Processing, which saves legitimate email address and weeds out invalid ones; and Dynamic Block Reaction, which allows systems to dynamically adjust connection limitation properties in real-time based on response codes from the ISP. It also tracks the historical connection behavior for the optimal number of connections for each ISP.

Since its soft launch about seven months ago, more than 200 customers have adopted the system, J.D. Peterson, director of product management, told ADOTAS. “So far, about 62% of the early adopters use at least two of the products in the toolset – and 72% plan to use three or more in the next six months. We modeled the system after Microsoft Office. Initially, people were only buying it for Word – but soon everyone was using Excel and PowerPoint.”

Lyris HQ was built on Adobe Flex Builder 3 technology; when ADOTAS took it for a test drive, the desktop-like interface was easy to navigate and tightly integrated – with lots of shiny bells and whistles that would make scheduling and launching campaigns — and analyzing their performance — a snap. Delivered in a hosted model, the interface starts at $299 a month.

“Today’s online marketers wear many hats and they have little time to complete their tasks, let alone navigate a sea of disparate online marketing tools — none of which can give them a single, clear view of their campaign results,” said Blaine Mathieu, CMO, Lyris, in a written statement. “As a result, small-to mid-sized marketing teams need help to regain control of their campaigns. That help comes in the form of Lyris HQ, which is the only solution available today that provides easy-to-use, affordable, integrated Web-based marketing capabilities that combine email marketing, Web analysis and optimization, and PPC marketing.”

The company also announced the launch of Lyris HQ for Agencies, an online marketing platform geared to address the direct needs of advertising and marketing firms that serve multiple clients. (It’s priced at $500 a month for up to nine clients).

Lyris has been in business since 1994 has about 10,000 customers, has raked in about $43 million in revenue and is growing exponentially (the staff grew from about 180 six months ago to about 270 today). Clients include Nokia, Adobe and Jupitermedia.

Mackintosh hails from Benefitstreet, Inc., where she was vice president and corporate controller at the online financial and benefits management services company.

“We are delighted to have someone with Heidi’s background joining the company. She brings a great depth of financial experience with a number of leading technology companies. In addition, she has worked with both public and pre-IPO companies and also has extensive acquisition integration experience. She will play a critical role as we implement Lyris’ integration and growth strategies,” said Luis Rivera, president and chief executive officer of Lyris, in a statement.

Lyris recently announced the launch of LyrisHQ, an interactive marketing portal created to share online marketing best practices and knowledge.

Lyris is a marketing technology company that provides an integrated platform for online marketers.

American Apparel, a vertically integrated manufacturer, distributor and retailer of fashion basics is implementing Lyris’ ListManager – a marketing software program that creates, sends and tracks e-mail marketing campaigns – to execute its worldwide newsletter campaign.

“We’re thrilled that American Apparel has chosen ListManager as its e-mail marketing solution,” Blaine Mathieu, senior vice president of marketing at Lyris, said in a statement. “Being an accomplished digital marketer, American Apparel will make full use of the application’s powerful tool set that includes full database integration, audience segmentation, content personalization, automated bounce handling, open detection and click-through tracking.”

ListManager is now integrated with ClickTracks, the award-winning Web analytics program, to give clients a more comprehensive view of their customers’ behavior, including how subscribers interact on company Web sites. Clients can also create new user segments based on the results of this Web analytics data and automatically populate the segments into ListManager for subsequent e-mail targeting.