No — after numerous client requests, vertical ad network BuySellAds.com is licensing its software to empower other companies and entrepreneurs to build their own vertical networks.

Well, that’s pretty cool. Doesn’t quench my thirst though… You can’t put that on the rocks, can you?

In a blog post, CEO and founder Todd Garland mentions that he’s always felt like BSA was more software company and less ad network. Although there were numerous naysayers suggesting the software is easily reproducible and easy to create, Garland argues that nothing else like BSA’s Private Label exists.

The first company to take advantage of the software is Beacon Ads, a network focused on the Christian space that decided to boost its current offering with Private Label. In effect, the software is advantageous for companies currently running ad networks or looking to build one from scratch.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have quite the hankering for a cocktail.

Version 7.0 of both products feature significant architectural improvements and enhanced features such as beefier inventory management and forecasting tools, as well as robust and intuitive reporting and graphical data mining.

Complying with IAB’s VAST specification and Brightcove’s video media player, AdJuggles now offers more thorough support for rich media formats. Also, the company has improved its backbone for campaigns across both web and mobile devices, including mobile targeting by device.

On the attribution front, APS and ANS have simplified tag management and automated tag routing, as well as improved invoice processing. The upgraded versions also feature expanded cookie targeting, retargeting and post-impression tracking.

Finally, AdJuggler has enhanced its user interface and workflow based on Adobe Flex, facilitating micro-edits to campaigns, direct navigation across the software and role-based security and approval for both marketing teams and agencies.

In addition, Madrona partner and former Yahoo! VP Matt Compton is grabbing the reigns as CEO of the startup. Madrona Managing Partner, Tom Alberg, who also sits on Amazon’s board of directors, will take a seat on ShopIgnite’s board.

The company’s platform allows retailers, wholesalers and brands to merchandise products on Facebook and hunt for customers on Twitter, as well as manage their online store functionality through a straightforward dashboard. ShopIgnite claims that its services boost online sales by as much as 30%.

In other funding news, interactive marketing software developer Arkayne scooped up more than $1 million in an initial round of Angel funding. The company’s Plugin SaaS offering links site visitors from one page to others within a single site or customer-designated network of sites by displaying relevant links. Arkayne will launch another product in the spring as well as an upgrade for Plugin.

Pretend this is a media buyer, says Shawn Riegsecker, president and founder of local media buyer Centro. Assume she has to reach out and send RFPs to 15 different publishers — 15 smaller Playmobil characters appear below her — but even before that she has to find the appropriate contacts. Red trails shoot back and forth between the doll at the center and her many contacts, standing in for the spreadsheets, word documents and emails traversing between the parties. I’m slightly discombobulated, but I urge him to press on.

Insertion orders are sent via fax machines, the creative specifications from publishers are sent to the creative Playmobil figure and a wobbly dialog takes place before the traffic manager enters the picture. Delivery issues appear in dotted green while the accounting figurine jumps into the right-hand corner along with tiny people below the publishers, all linked in a tangled web of colors, arrows and dotted lines. The invoices and reports stack up, as well as discrepancies that run rampant within the towering mound.

Soon I’m begging him to make the madness end — I don’t know if I can watch one more seemingly innocent Playmobil character enter the slide only to be lassoed into a rainbow of emails and spreadsheets. Riegsecker pats my quivering hand and with a solemn glance asks me to imagine dealing with such a fiasco in real life — this is the agony of the media planner.

“The saddest part of this.. is the media planner in the middle, who becomes an uber-switching station, doing transactional activities and making sure nothing breaks when a computer and the web can automate all these processes so that person can focus on more strategic activities,” Riegsecker says.

Alas, ad agencies and advertisers suffer as well, missing out on engaging digital media plans and innovative ideas. “They’re getting a lot of what we consider to be a lot of watered-down, low-CPM tonnage buys on ad exchanges and ad networks… This is the process we’ve been working on fixing,” he adds.

The solution is Transis, streamlined media-planning software that Centro has been perfecting with its own operations over the last four years. As the company’s goal was always to bring the software to the industry, the release of Transis today marks nine years of toil in developing a system for automating a wildly fragmented process.

“Great software takes a lot time and a lot of hard work,” Riegsecker says. “You don’t get it perfect right out of the gate.”

The software automates the planning process across all mediums including mobile and video while trashing all the “20th century” technology — no emails, faxes or phone calls, everything is handled through the browser-based application. Currently all of Centro’s media operations run through the Transis platform, from site selection, planning, buying, digital insertion orders to accounting through integration into the financial department. Depending on campaign type, initial research shows a 31% to 69% increase in efficiencies across the digital media planning process.

Centro and Transis have their roots in Riegsecker’s experience in working with RealMedia (which later merged with 24/7 to form 24/7 Real Media), that first company helping ad agencies place ad across local websites, primarily premium publishers ranging from local news stations to alternative weeklies. While others were wrapping their heads around ad networks, he was looking at all the little guys scattered across the Internet. In the late 90s he heard it all — local is too difficult, you can’t scale, it’s too fragmented, there’s no money to be made, the digital buys are too small….

But Reigsecker did see the potential in the space — with the epiphany that the only way to scale digital media is through automated software.

“You can’t scale the digital industry through spreadsheets and fax machines and emails and phone calls,” he says. “We figured if we could create automated software that simplified the entire process from front to end, we could actually help the industry scale all of display media.”

In 2001 he founded Centro, which is based in Chicago and now boast 120 employees spread across offices nationwide. A third of the staff is involved in software and technology development while the rest handle sales and account services. In 2009 240 ad agencies used Centro to buy local online media on behalf of nearly 600 individual marketers.

At the same work began on developing Transis. Through the “weeping and gnashing of teeth internally” to arrange campaigns across thousands of small websites throughout the U.S., the team determined the regimen for automation. Built on web 2.0 technology, Transis features an extended database of local sites interfaced with comScore Media Metrics. Users can filter sites via channels, including geography and demographics.

In addition, the software features immense functionality and workflow tools for media planners that bypass the need for separate files and programs like Excel. (“We had to recreate Excel inside of the browser with more features and robustness,” Riegsecker says.) Through an updated network of publisher contacts estimated at around 5,000, the publisher collobration system, which Riegsecker compares to Google Wave, connects all parties through the browser and gives a history of communication.

The final pieces to fall into place were the digital insertion orders and integration with accounting software, which Riegseeker admits took a few more quarters than he expected.

Last week Riegsecker and I had an insightful conversation about Transis at Centro’s New York City office. Here’s the man himself on video and my disembodied, quite congested voice.

Viruses have had the ability to disable phones and inflate phone bills since 2004, according to Reuters. This has led to a new security technology market.

Mikko Hypponen, head of research at security software firm F-Secure said to Reuters that “If Android becomes a fully open platform … and when such a platform becomes more common, risks are greater than with the current platform kings such as Symbian.”

There is also concern over Apple’s planned open platform and security issues arising from this development.

Even though the risk of an infiltrated cell phone is low, thousands of phone users have reported issues. Hypponen continued to say “Although the first problems were already quite extensive and appeared all over the world, current smartphones from the largest device makers, particularly Nokia, have got rid of these problems.”

McAfee conducted a survey of 2,000 cell phone users that showed three out of four mobile users were concerned about mobile service safety.

It is reported that since the first mobile virus surfaced in 2004, viruses, worms and other malware is at a total of 395 according to F-Secure.

MySpace business development executive Amit Kapur has been promoted to COO as part of the launch that will occur on Feb. 5th reports Reuters.

There have not been many other details released about the platform before the official launch; however Kapur told Reuters that the program would be accessible in 28 territories around the world stating “I will be focused on making a platform for developer to monetize and promote their applications.”

The program was initially announced in October of last year.

Gerry Miller, COO at ePrize said “With the power of our world-class ToyBox 2.0 software, ePrize clients will benefit from several enhancements, including a smoother launch process, even higher quality rates and better results tailored to their specific marketing needs. The launch of ToyBox 2.0 represents the single-largest technology advancement in our company’s history. In addition to further distancing ourselves from the competitive pack, it will allow ePrize to provide clients a rock-solid platform for increasingly complex and sophisticated promotion applications.”

In the next year, ePrize will be offering ToyBox 2.0 to certified agencies, resellers and third-party developers on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) basis. The firm estimates 50% of its revenue will come from technology licensing within the next five years.”

Miller continued “In the same way Google, Salesforce.com and Facebook created technology platforms on which millions of commercial transactions now reside; ToyBox 2.0 is the equivalent category-killer platform for the interactive promotion industry. Our goal is to become the ‘Intel Inside’ of the promotion industry. We have built a robust software application on which all interactive promotions can run.”
 
Matt Kates, VP of strategy for ePrize said “This innovative process streamlines promotion development, creating stable, effective, and reliable interactive promotions. While this advancement helps today with the roughly 200 concurrent promotions we are developing at any one time, it will be a key element in our success when ultimately running tens of thousands of simultaneous campaigns.”

Yankee Group estimates technology investments that promote online ad performance will more than double the online ad industry’s income from $21.7 billion to $50.3 billion in 2011.

Pieter Knook, SVP of the Mobile Communications Business at Microsoft stated “Bringing Musiwave on board would provide an opportunity for Microsoft to explore new areas in the mobile space previously untapped, and to showcase the power of software plus services. This contemplated acquisition reflects Microsoft’s recognition of the software and technology expertise in Europe.”

As of today, Microsoft mobile technology runs on a variety of mobile platforms, featured on over 140 mobile phones made by 50 handset makers, sold by over 160 mobile operators around the world. According to research firm Ovum, 1,160 million mobile music phones will be shipped worldwide in 2010.

The pressure is on now for Facebook, the original open-to-developers social network to join the alliance as well according to the New York Times. CEO of MySpace Chris DeWolfe stated in a press conference that “OpenSocial is going to become the de facto standard for developers right out of the gate. It will have access to 200 million users, making it way bigger than any other platform out there.”

Eric E. Schmidt, CEO of Google was quoted in the NY Times to say “The most important principle about openness is that everyone is invited to join.” This was in reference to the invitation given to Facebook to join the newly organized team. An alliance of this size, the report continues, will be a powerful tool for exposure for software developers and will inevitably promote online application innovation.

This new partnership between these companies will help bring new life to several social networks that have been hitting a ceiling in their popularity and application abilities.

There is still speculation about the standards that OpenSocial may implement and the actual compatibility on each of the partner sites, but for now it seems as though the innovations will leave a positive imprint on the social networking market.

The group includes Orkut, LinkedIn, hi5, Friendster, Plaxo and Ning. Since it opened its site to outside developers last spring, Facebook has had over 5,000 small programs built to run on its site.

The plan was supposed to be unveiled at a Google party tomorrow night, but people briefed on this, let the New York Times know about it and Google confirmed to the publication.

An anonymous source said to the NY Times “It is going to forestall Facebook’s ability to get everyone writing just for Facebook.” OpenSocial as the platform will be known is “compatible across all the companies,” according to that same source.

The group will also include software makers Oracle and Salesforce.com. The aim is to expand the spectrum of social networks for developers so as Facebook does not hold a monopoly over this market, however for the time being it remains the platform of choice for developers and U.S. users.

Site in the alliance have a combined 100 million users, the report continues, which is over twice as many users as Facebook. Expected at the event at the Google headquarters are the developers of popular Facebook apps like Slide, iLike, Frixter and RockYou.

Eric E. Schmidt, CEO of Google was quoted in the NY Times to say “One of the things to say, very clearly, is that social networks as a phenomenon are very real. If you are of a certain age, you sort of dismiss this as college kids or teenagers. But it is very real.”

Google has ad deals with many social networks, as well as a $900 million deal to sell ads on MySpace. There is also money coming Google’s way through ads running on Facebook apps. This step towards dethroning Facebook, so to speak, is just more proof in the power behind the social network and social networking features. It is undeniable that we are in the age of the social network.