NEW YORK, NY–(Marketwire - July 1, 2009) - The NewsMarket (www.thenewsmarket.com) today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement and plan of merger with Medialink Worldwide Incorporated (NASDAQ: MDLK).

The NewsMarket will acquire all of the outstanding shares of Medialink’s common stock at a price of $0.20 per share in cash. Once approved by Medialink’s shareholders, Medialink’s employees and services will be combined under The NewsMarket, Inc. This transaction combines The NewsMarket’s digital video distribution platform with Medialink’s professional services and production capabilities to create a complete video solution for corporate customers.

“Video continues to be the fastest growing category in marketing services, and the combination of The NewsMarket and Medialink will create a very compelling offering for all of our customers’ increasingly sophisticated demands,” said Jim Lonergan, CEO & President of The NewsMarket. “Merging Medialink’s strengths in strategy and execution with our technology creates the industry’s most complete video solution and enables us to be responsive to a larger share of the market.” The NewsMarket was launched in 2003 to capitalize on emerging digital distribution technologies to create the world’s preeminent video platform for the marketing, PR, and news media industries.

Medialink is a global leader in providing unique news and marketing media strategies and solutions that enable corporations and organizations to inform and educate their target audiences with maximum impact on television, radio and the Internet. Medialink offers creative services and multimedia distribution programs including video and audio news and short-form programming. For the 12 month period ending March 31, 2009, Medialink recorded revenues of $17.95 million.

By acquiring Medialink, The NewsMarket will significantly broaden its services to the marketing, communications, investor relations, and media community. “Video has gone mainstream and we’re seeing budgets increasingly shift toward the inclusion of video in all elements of mainstream communications and marketing. Customers want one trusted partner for their sophisticated video needs, and this acquisition positions us incredibly well to help customers from strategy, through production and distribution,” added Lonergan.

With this acquisition, The NewsMarket substantially increases its customer base, and thereby also exponentially grows its content archive. This large, varied and high quality archive is extremely relevant and valuable to the rapidly growing universe of media organizations, blogs, online outlets and consumer-facing video sites whose demand for content increases every day.

“We continue to see corporations – large and small – increasing their focus and expenditure on video as a core component of their marketing and communications strategies.  With the acquisition of Medialink, The NewsMarket will now bring truly end-to-end solutions to an expanded customer base.  The combined company will instantly be the clear leader in the industry, with the financial and management resources necessary to drive to even greater success,” said Brad Svrluga, Managing Director of High Peaks Venture Partners. Other investors in The NewsMarket include Hearst Interactive Media, Battery Ventures, Apax Partners, and Softbank.
The Board of Directors of Medialink has unanimously approved the transaction. It is anticipated to close this summer, subject to Medialink stockholder approval, regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.

About The NewsMarket

The NewsMarket is the leading platform used by global brands, governments and NGOs to communicate with all their key audiences using video. The NewsMarket combines award-winning, proprietary technology with a unique, strategic approach to support the marketing programs of the world’s leading brands including General Motors, Volvo Cars, the U.S. Department of State, IBM, UNICEF, Facebook and Google. The company’s media site (www.thenewsmarket.com) is used by more than 25,000 media outlets in 190 countries to view and order free news video. Headquartered in New York, the company also has offices in London, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Beijing and San Francisco. To learn more about us, visit: www.thenewsmarket.com/postingcontent.

The full article in The Business Review can be found here.

Flat World Knowledge (www.flatworldknowledge.com), based in Nyack, NY, is a next generation educational content business that aims to disrupt the $8B annual college textbook market.  The company believes this is the perfect timing to enter the market with a fundamentally disruptive model based on 4 key principles:

• Provide first class content from top quality authors
• Deliver content in an open format with flexibility for faculty members to customize and supplement the text
• Make core content available online for free while printed copies and a la carte supplemental materials generate revenue
• Enhance the student experience by facilitating a vibrant, collaborative social learning network around the core content.

Due to increasing frustration with current industry practices and pricing models, FWK has been met with praise and excitement from industry analysts, textbook authors, college faculty and students alike who see this as a fundamentally new model that existing publishers will not be able to match.

“The college textbook publishing market is ripe for the sort of radical disruption in the coming years that the internet has brought to other traditional content industries.  We believe that the fundamental business model of the traditional textbook industry is no better suited for the 21st century than those of the record and newspaper industries,” commented Brad Svrluga, Managing Director of High Peaks Venture Partners, who has been following the company for well over a year. “The existing model is broken, and dissatisfaction is growing amongst students and faculty alike.  Pricing is egregious and getting worse, and the content delivery model is inflexible. Flat World Knowledge offers a delivery model that is flexible, open, suited to the media consumption habits of today’s students and, ultimately, better for students and faculty alike.  As students at state and community colleges are increasingly hit with textbook bills that approach the size of their tuition bills we have watched a wave of opposition swell from students, faculty, authors, and even the US Congress.  Until Flat World there was no viable commercial alternative.  We are very excited to be helping bring this important solution to market.  And most importantly, we are thrilled to be doing it with a team of this caliber.  Jeff and Eric are exactly the right guys to make this happen – their experience and respect in the industry is unparalleled and represents the perfect formula for driving this critical industry change.”

“The timing of this latest investment could not be better,” said Jeff Shelstad, co-founder and chief executive officer of Flat World Knowledge. “In these uncertain economic times, we all are looking for the best value for our preferred products and services.  Administrators, parents, faculty, and students are very intrigued by and attracted to the value provided by the Flat World Knowledge model.  With this further investment, we can continue to scale our sales and marketing activities, staff up our acquisition talent to attract more talented authors to Flat World Knowledge, and improve the overall experience for our customers.  We are very grateful for the financial support of our investors.”

At Peak Pitch entrepreneurs are paired with investors for a 6 minute chairlift ride during which they pitch their business and receive feedback from experienced capital providers.  The top “pitchers” as determined by the investors then pitch the entire group at the end of the program.  This year’s top pitchers, as determined by investors, were:

1. Diego Rey, GeneWeave Biosciences
2. Greg Moran, Chequed, Inc.
3. Peter Dean, UpSideOver.com

Congratulations to the top 3 for their outstanding pitches and thanks to all those who attended for making the event an enjoyable and productive experience.

High Peaks extends a special thanks to the law firms of Phillips Lytle, Duane Morris and Nixon Peabody for sponsoring the event.

Event coverage by the Albany Times Union newspaper can be found here.

In an industry flooded with buzzwords and numerous companies jumping on the platform bandwagon, Apprenda cuts through the SaaS platform clutter and draws a bold line with SaaSGrid. SaaSGrid is a powerful cloud operating system that abstract SaaS intricacies into the SaaSGrid software layer and provides ISVs with the necessary online tools to manage their SaaS business and application offerings. SaaSGrid drastically slashes time to market for ISVs by automatically weaving a SaaS architecture into their non-SaaS web applications while providing significant long term value via web-based application management capabilities.

“Essentially, we’ve done for on-demand software development what the operating system did for desktop software development. We’ve created a cloud operating system for SaaS, which provides a new layer of abstraction that takes the burden of creating SaaS specific technology, architecture and business components off of ISVs shoulders,” said Apprenda’s CEO Sinclair Schuller. “The desktop operating system short circuited the massive amounts of wasted effort that the industry sank into complicated parts of application development by capturing redundancy into the OS value layer. Similarly, SaaSGrid squashes the need to engineer a SaaS delivery architecture and auxiliary business tools by automatically injecting SaaS DNA into the architecture of the applications it hosts. This allows our customers to focus on their core business domain and competencies, deferring SaaS difficulties to SaaSGrid rather than making disproportionate investments in solving these non-strategic problems in their applications.”

ISVs who choose SaaSGrid as a foundation dedicate nearly 100% of their development investment to their application, shaving off massive amounts of development time and capital requirements that would have previously been allocated to SaaS delivery intricacies. This allows ISVs to bring their solutions to market faster than ever before, utilizing SaaSGrid’s out of the box functionality for delivery method specifics including:

• Multi-tenancy
• User and role systems
• Provisioning
• Monetization, billing and payments
• Application lifecycle and release management

Apprenda believes that the adoption of the SaaS model does not have to be disruptive to an ISV’s core business and SaaSGrid was built to wholly support that belief. While many of the Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings on the market today unnecessarily constrain ISVs with proprietary languages, WYSIWYG online editors, or closed-technology stacks, SaaSGrid empowers ISVs to leverage the SaaS delivery method while continuing to extract value from their existing, industry hardened Microsoft .NET skills, knowledge and assets. Additionally, Apprenda partners with hosting companies who act as independent SaaSGrid Cloud Providers, creating a powerful PaaS utility that gives ISVs the benefit of standardized development on SaaSGrid with the luxury of choosing which Cloud Provider will host their published application. ISVs simply use existing tools and IDEs along with the SaaSGrid Software Development Kit, write web application and database code as if for a single customer, upload the application to a cloud instance of SaaSGrid, and complete a simple publishing process to make their SaaS offering commercially available to a multi-customer market. ISVs can then manage a variety of operational aspects of their business through SaaSGrid, ranging from pricing structure definition, security models, and new version releases to customer acquisition processes such as integrating a SaaSGrid backend e-commerce engine with their corporate website, thereby allowing for the seamless provisioning and onboarding of new customers against defined revenue models.

A number of ISVs that were part of Apprenda’s Technology Preview are already building production SaaS applications on SaaSGrid.

About Apprenda

Apprenda is the creator of SaaSGrid™, a powerful Software as a Service platform that gives independent software vendors a business and technological foundation to build, deploy, and monetize their service-oriented applications for on-demand use without technological lock-in. SaaSGrid empowers software companies with the ability to build powerful SaaS applications at break neck speeds, smashing time to market barriers, removing implementation roadblocks, and significantly reducing risk. This leaves developers with one job: to build on-demand software that meets customers’ needs without worrying about the difficulties of on-demand delivery.

For more information visit Apprenda’s website at: http://www.apprenda.com

“This financing will fuel the growth of SmartPill as we conduct further clinical trials to expand our indications for use and increase our sales and reimbursement efforts,” said David Barthel, President & CEO of SmartPill Corporation. “We are extremely pleased to have attracted investors of this caliber and we look forward to working with them as we expand our presence in the rapidly growing diagnostic GI healthcare arena.”

The potential for significant impact for gastroenterologists utilizing SmartPill was noted by Jeff Barnes, General Partner of Oxford Bioscience Partners. “In addition to providing significant clinical benefits, the SmartPill technology allows diagnostic procedures to remain under the control of gastroenterologists, who are ultimately responsible for their patients’ therapy,” said Barnes.

Jeffrey Krauss, Managing Partner of Psilos Group, explained why SmartPill was identified as a solid candidate for investment. “By improving quality of diagnosis and therefore quality and efficacy of treatment, SmartPill adds a valuable tool to the physician’s arsenal, while eliminating needless testing and expense from the healthcare system,” Krauss said. “This opportunity fits squarely in line with our investment philosophy of backing healthcare technologies that simultaneously advance the best interests of patients, payers and providers.”

Bela Musits, Managing Director of High Peaks Venture Partners, expressed his firm’s ongoing support. “We have been working with the SmartPill team for several years and we are consistently impressed by their ability to develop technology-based products to improve patient health,” he stated. “High Peaks is excited to be part of SmartPill and we are confident that the company will continue to grow in the months and years ahead.”

About SmartPill Corp.

SmartPill Corporation is a leading developer of capsule-based medical devices that aid in the diagnosis, definition and therapeutic intervention of gastrointestinal (GI) motility disorders and diseases. The company’s flagship product – the SmartPill GI Monitoring System – features the SmartPill Capsule, an ingestible medical device that provides data, heretofore unavailable, that can assist physicians and researchers in the evaluation of GI motility disorders. SmartPill Corporation’s SmartPill GI Monitoring System was granted 510(k) release from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in July 2006. Visit www.SmartPillCorp.com for more information.

About SmartPill’s Investors

Oxford Bioscience Partners (OBP), established in 1992, is a venture capital firm that provides equity financing and management assistance to emerging, entrepreneurial-driven companies within the life sciences and healthcare sectors. Experienced partners, who bring together deep domain knowledge in life sciences, have established a proven track record of identifying, validating, and backing emerging trends and technologies. While willing to consider an investment in a company at almost any stage, OBP brings unique value and expertise to early-stage situations. With approximately $1B of committed capital under management, OBP has invested in over 140 life science companies worldwide, and has successfully leveraged the extensive research, operating, and financial expertise and experience of its team of investment professionals.

Psilos Group has been a successful healthcare venture capital and private equity firm since its founding in 1998. With more than $550 million under management, Psilos focuses its investments across the healthcare services, healthcare information technology, and medical technology sectors. Psilos invests nationwide in businesses that are poised to create enduring market value by fundamentally improving the U.S. healthcare system. Its portfolio companies have a demonstrated ability to reduce the costs of healthcare delivery, improve clinical quality, and advance the alignment of payer, patient, and provider incentives. Psilos has offices in New York, the San Francisco Bay Area and Santa Fe, New Mexico.

High Peaks Venture Partners is a venture capital firm focused on investments in market leading, early stage technology companies. High Peaks closed its inaugural fund in 2004 and is actively investing in New York City and throughout Upstate New York, focusing primarily on companies in the digital media, internet-enabled business services, telecomm, advanced materials, and medical technology markets. High Peaks is one of 15 affiliates of Village Ventures, a nationwide network of regionally focused, early-stage venture capital funds.

Company Also Releases White Paper on Revolutionary Platform-as-a-Service Approach to Prepaid Card Processing

New York, NY – June 18, 2008 – TxVia, Inc., a pioneer in prepaid card processing technology, today announced that the company has changed its name from TxCore, Inc. and secured $8.5 million in venture capital as part of its Series B financing. The funding was led by an existing investor, Espírito Santo Ventures, with participation from the company’s lead Series A investors, Village Ventures and High Peaks Venture Partners.

“We’re delighted that Espírito Santo Ventures, with a proven track record of investing in innovative payments businesses worldwide, has taken the lead in this financing,” said Anil D. Aggarwal, CEO of TxVia. “And, we’re equally pleased that other existing investors, Village Ventures and High Peaks Venture Partners, strongly endorsed the company by choosing to participate.”

“TxVia has experienced tremendous market traction since launching to the prepaid card industry,” said Joaquim Sérvulo Rodrigues, Espírito Santo Ventures CEO. “We’re excited about TxVia’s innovative technology and confident that the company has the potential to revolutionize the global prepaid card processing marketplace over the coming years.”

TxVia is the first company to have a live client using a prepaid card processing platform delivered on a “platform-as-a-service” (PaaS) basis. Using its PaaS approach, TxVia quickly and efficiently creates highly customized and fully segregated prepaid card processing platforms. “We utilize PaaS to offer options for our clients that range from outsourcing processing completely to TxVia to bringing processing entirely in-house,” said Aggarwal. “We also offer hybrid options that can evolve over time according to our clients’ needs.” Regardless of the configuration, PaaS users no longer need to share a platform with other organizations and products, and realize significant scalability, competitive, time-to-market, cost and other benefits.

The benefits for issuers and program managers of the PaaS approach to prepaid card processing include:
• Development and operational transparency
• Client control of platforms, including platform creation and enhancement, hosting and operations, and domestic and international third-party implementation and integration
• Reduced platform management costs
• Better separation of client and processor intellectual property
• Improved platform reliability and scalability
• Increased platform longevity
• Enhanced manageability of PCI compliance
“The prepaid market today is limited by the legacy technology and systems that dominate the processing environment. PaaS addresses those limitations and provides a pathway for issuers and program managers to achieve greater control, flexibility and efficiencies in their prepaid programs,” continues Aggarwal. “And, to better reflect the comprehensiveness of our offerings, we changed the name of the company to TxVia.”

TxVia also announced today that the following executives have joined the company:

• Anne Kortlander, executive vice president, Product. Prior to joining TxVia, Kortlander was senior vice president at Fidelity National Information Systems and its predecessors eFunds Prepaid Solutions and WildCard Systems. Before WildCard Systems, Kortlander was senior vice president at Visa, USA.

• Jonathan A. Weiner, executive vice president, Program and Managed Services. Prior to joining TxVia, Weiner was president of Prepaid Media and previously served as president and chief operating officer of TSYS Prepaid and its predecessor Clarity Payment Solutions.

• Christopher Petersen, vice president, Managed Services. Prior to joining TxVia, Petersen was vice president at Fidelity National Information Systems and its predecessors eFunds Prepaid Solutions and WildCard Systems.

• Iris Quitta, director, Business Development. Prior to joining TxVia, Quitta was director at CBSI.

• Shashi Kapur, advisory board member. Kapur was chief information officer of WildCard Systems until its acquisition by eFunds.

In addition, Aggarwal was appointed chairman of the board of directors, and Raymond Iglesias III, TxVia chief financial officer, was appointed to the board of directors. Carl M. Ansley, founder and a director of TxCore, was appointed president of the company.

“The TxVia management team brings more than 75 years of combined experience pioneering new technologies, products and services in the prepaid card industry,” said Rodrigues. “The team has consistently proven its ability to create and manage innovative ventures to tremendous success.”

TxVia also announced today the release of a white paper, “Approaches to Processing Technology for Prepaid Cards,” which discusses the available approaches to prepaid card processing, including software as a service (SaaS), in-house software solutions and platform as a service (PaaS). The white paper identifies critical limitations of SaaS and in-house software that prevent issuers and program managers from attaining their full potential in prepaid, and identifies how PaaS overcomes these limitations, providing significant benefits to both users and the prepaid card industry. The white paper is available for download at www.txvia.com.
TxVia has also secured a new 12,000 sq. ft. corporate headquarters in New York City. The company has additional offices in Barcelona and Dublin.

About TxVia, Inc.

TxVia, Inc. (pronounced “T.X.-Veea”) is a pioneer in prepaid (network branded and closed loop) card processing technology. Using a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) approach, TxVia quickly and efficiently enables the creation of highly customized and fully segregated prepaid card processing platforms. The TxVia approach far better manages the complexities of prepaid across the various products, verticals, industries, organizations and channels.

With PaaS, issuers and program managers can completely outsource processing to TxVia or bring all or a part of their processing requirements in-house, allowing them to take greater control over various aspects of their processing, ranging from functionality and release timing to infrastructure and service levels. Regardless of the configuration, PaaS users no longer need to share a platform with other organizations and products, and realize significant scalability, competitive, time-to-market, cost and other benefits.
TxVia also offers a complete set of services to support prepaid card programs including hosting and platform services, managed services, switch services and professional services.

Worktopia also announced a partnership with GetThere(R), the world’s leading online corporate travel procurement solution, to offer business travelers the ability to search, compare and book meeting space online from GetThere’s home page.  Through Worktopia’s advanced technology, GetThere users can book meeting space, audio visual equipment and catering for simple meetings of up to 100 participants in a single online session.

For more information visit:

• Samwer Brothers Series B Announcement
• GetThere Press Release

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“We are excited to invest in Apprenda,” Jonathan Stillman of High Peaks Venture Partners said. “The company has developed important and widely applicable software technology for the rapidly growing market for on-demand software services, and has a talented team in place. We look forward to working with them to help realize the company’s potential.”

Apprenda is an emerging leader in providing infrastructure software that enables the rapidly growing software-as-a-service (SaaS) marketplace. SaaS is a delivery model for software applications that is very attractive to users. It allows users to avoid the costs and headaches of licensing and managing software. Instead they “rent” their software on a subscription basis and access the applications over the web via a web browser.
Software providers need to rapidly respond to the growing popularity of the SaaS approach by delivering both new and pre-existing software applications as on-demand services over the web. The details of how one accomplishes this from both implementation and operational aspects, however, are complicated.

Apprenda has created SaaSGrid, a platform that reduces significantly the complexity and expense that software companies would otherwise incur in moving to SaaS deployment of applications. SaaSGrid provides software companies with a starting point for development that includes all the necessary mission critical components as well as operational management over the application. SaaSGrid removes the need for them to worry about SaaS architecture specifics: it provides a highly flexible, scalable, and reliable online environment for deployment, and enables developers to focus on their core application. As a result, software providers are able to get their SaaS offerings to market faster, with lower capital requirements, and with significantly greater initial quality, which in turn reduces ongoing maintenance needs.

High Peaks Venture Partners’ second annual Peak Pitch event came to a close on a sunny Tuesday afternoon at Windham Mountain ski area in the Catskills of New York. The event was a very productive and enjoyable day of skiing, pitching and networking for the 60 entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and invited guests in attendance. Peak Pitch is an innovative twist on the traditional business plan competition hosted annually by High Peaks Venture Partners.  Entrepreneurs at the event are paired with Venture Capitalists for a 5 minute lift ride during which they pitch their business idea and get feedback from potential investors.  Similar events are hosted annually by Fresh Tracks Capital in Vermont and Borealis Ventures in New Hampshire.  This year’s top three pitchers, as selected by the investors, were:

• Joshua Cross, Veratag
• Jason Curtis, Epostmarks
• Maxime Elbaz, Geospatial Systems

High Peaks extends a special thanks to the law firms of Phillips Lytle, Nixon Peabody, and Duane Morris for sponsoring the event and providing each of the top three pitchers with an hour of free legal consultation.

You can find additional coverage of the event from the Albany Times Union and the Capital District Business Review below:

• Times Union - Lift up the Slopes Lifts Prospects
• Business Review - Businesses Make Mountaintop Pitches

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