WideOrbit Named One of the Bay Area’s Top 100 Fastest-Growing Private Companies for a Third Consecutive Year

WideOrbit Inc., the leading provider of advertising management software for media companies, is pleased to announce it has been named one of the Bay Area’s Top 100 Fastest Growing Private Companies by the San Francisco Business Times for the third consecutive year. Ranked sixty-three this year, WideOrbit was ranked eighty-nine last year and ninety-nine the previous year.

“It’s an honor to be recognized once again as one of the Bay Area’s fastest growing private companies,” said Eric R. Mathewson, Founder and CEO of WideOrbit. “Our twelve years of consistent revenue growth is a reflection on our commitment to delivering innovative software solutions that help our clients run their organizations more efficiently and profitably. It is a testament to the dedication and hard work of our growing WideOrbit team to be able to achieve this recognition consistently year after year.”

SuccessFactors, Inc. has been named one of the Top Workplaces in the San Francisco Bay Area

The San Francisco Business Times partners with PricewaterhouseCoopers on an annual basis to conduct research and produce the Top 100 Fastest Growing Private Companies List. The Fast 100 ranks privately held companies in the Bay Area on percentage of revenue growth during their three most recent fiscal years.

WideOrbit provides innovative solutions for managing the business of broadcast and cable operations, helping companies run their stations and networks more efficiently, effectively and profitably. More than 2,000 television stations, radio stations and cable networks around the globe use WideOrbit Trafficsoftware and more than 3,000 radio stations run on WideOrbit’sRadio Automation platforms. WideOrbit manages more than $14 billion in advertising revenue annually and reinvests more than $20 million annually in core product development and support.

About WideOrbit

WideOrbit (www.wideorbit.com) is the leading provider of business management software for Media companies. WideOrbitprovides innovative, proven solutions for managing the business of broadcast and cable operations – from proposal to order, scheduling to automation, billing and aging. WideOrbit has been helping clients since 1999, delivering high ROI, greater efficiencies and revenue optimization. More than 2,000 Television stations, Radio stations and Cable Networks around the globe use WideOrbitTraffic software with another 3,000+ onWideOrbitRadio Automation platforms. WideOrbit manages more than $14 billion in advertising revenue annually. Clients include: Astral Media, Corus Entertainment, DirecTV, E!,Entercom Communications, Fox Sports, Galavision, Gannett Co.,Hearst Television, Madison Square Garden, Meredith Corporation, Midwest Communications, NBCUniversal, NHL Networks, Rogers Communications, Scripps Television Group,Tribune, Yankee Entertainment Sports, Univision and more than 300 other major media organizations. WideOrbit is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in Dallas; Denver; Seattle; Agawam, MA; and Melbourne, Australia.

New Online Strategy Worked Well for Family Fun Entertainment - a Bay Area Party Entertainment Company

While many may think it foolish to attempt to build a business these days with our troubled economy, business man Franco Fonseca has been doing just that. He's grown his Bay Area Party Entertainment business since 2004, and now against the odds, he's achieving incredible success in 2011.

After adding new services and products to his line up, like mobile photo booth rentals, green screen photography, and the newest craze "Boogie Heads", Fonseca knew he needed to find a better way to get the word out to make these investments a success. He found that success through the implementation of an internet marketing strategy, including a brand new web site, with the help of Bay Area SEO Company Alameda Internet Marketing.

Web designer Ross Taylor says, "While Franco's former site was nice, we took it to the next level with a clean and effective design and started a search engine optimization campaign that will make it easier for potential customers to find him online. Making Franco's site more visible was the key to finding more customers for his services."

It's clear that internet web search influences buying decisions when it comes to local goods and services, and SEO consulting has become a service more and companies are considering getting into. Some business owners worry it may not be effective. Franco isn't worried at all and is enjoying the new flood of business. "In the first two weeks I have booked 6 parties, producing revenue far more than what I paid for the site and SEO support."

Visitors to FamilyFunBayArea.com will now find an attractive and easy to use website highlighting the main services provided. There's now rich galleries of airbrush tattoos, photo booth images, and other samples as well as detailed information about the company and an easy reservation form to book or get more info. The new website also makes it easier for event planners to visualize what they're getting as it's easier to make a decision about which entertainment options they want to use.

About Family Fun Entertainment 

 
Family Fun Entertainment was launched by Franco Fonseca in 2004 as Family Fun Airbrush Tattoos, and has since expanded into a full service family party entertainment service. Their services are a great choice for weddings, corporate events, birthday parties, fund raisers, Bar Mitzvahs, Bat Mitzvahs, college parties, and more.

A Bay Area Company Challanges Google Ranking

With federal regulators pursuing an antitrust probe over whether Google (GOOG) is abusing its dominance in search to favor its own online products, a company that owns several Bay Area websites promoting local small businesses is taking the rare step of publicly challenging the fairness of the search giant.

ShopCity, the parent company of local sites such as ShopPaloAlto.com, ShopMountainView.com and ShopPleasanton.com, says Google provides it an unfairly low ranking, especially since those sites have the backing of groups such as the city of Menlo Park, the Palo Alto Chamber of Commerce and the Palo Alto Weekly newspaper. A search for "Palo Alto restaurants" on Google this week didn't reveal a ShopPaloAlto.com result until the seventh page of results, while the site ranks at the top for identical searches on Yahoo (YHOO) or Microsoft's Bing.

"The most dangerous man is a man with nothing to lose, and that's the position they've put us in," said Colin Pape, the president of ShopCity, who is considering complaining to federal regulators.

Google defends its rankings as serving users. But ShopCity also says Google is taking its content and displaying it in Google Places, which like ShopCity displays business information such as location, operating hours and customer reviews. The practice is called "scraping," and companies like Yelp and TripAdvisor.com also have complained about the practice.

As Google moves heavily into local services in an effort to attract small advertisers, and faces antitrust scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission and other regulators, long-standing complaints about how it ranks millions of websites may take on a more problematic ring for the Mountain View Internet giant, as unhappy websites allege anticompetitive behavior. Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee said Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, would testify Sept. 21 about antitrust issues. The Texas attorney general also has an active antitrust investigation against Google and other state attorneys general may follow.

A quality issue?

Google says its low ranking of ShopCity sites is fair because the vast majority of its more than 8,100 local sites across the U.S. and Canada do not feature original content. ShopCity acknowledges that all but 44 of its sites do not yet have original content, and the company says it has asked the search giant not to crawl and rank those sites. But Google says it must consider the collective authority of the company's Internet properties, just as someone wouldn't judge a supermarket tabloid as superior to a national daily newspaper based on the accuracy of one story.

"We're committed to returning high-quality sites to our users," said Gabriel Stricker, a Google spokesman. "In the case of ShopCity, this is a network of thousands of sites that appear lower in Google's rankings because nearly 100 percent of the sites violate our quality guidelines. For years, these sites have contained little original content, substantial duplicate content, along with cookie-cutter templates. Our users frequently complain to us about these kinds of sites."

But ShopCity does have 44 sites, including seven Bay Area sites from Gilroy to Menlo Park to Pleasanton, that feature extensive original content, including features like restaurant menus, discount offers from local merchants and community event listings.

The low search ranking has also angered local business leaders who say they are trying to create a quality online presence for independent businesses that can compete against local listings by big companies like Google or Yelp. One business linking extensively to ShopPaloAlto.com is the Palo Alto Weekly, but publisher Bill Johnson says the local listing site is hard to find on Google. He finds the site's low ranking suspicious, because Google search results are based in part on links to other websites.

"Clearly Google is monkeying with the settings manually to prevent that from happening. We're out trying to build a community business website that is providing local businesses with some really great tools they can use to enhance their online presence," Johnson said. "With all this antitrust stuff going on, is Google really trying to make it difficult for those entities who are attempting to compete in the local consumer Web area?"

Search industry expert Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of Search Engine Land, said such suspicions about a site as small as ShopPaloAlto.com are "ludicrous. If that was what (Google) was worried about, you would never find Yelp," a formidable competitor for Google that offers restaurant reviews and business listings, Sullivan said.

But Sullivan said Google should be able to differentiate between higher-quality ShopCity sites such as the Bay Area sites, and placeholder sites waiting until ShopCity makes partnerships with local groups for listings.

Abrupt changes

"Do I think there is something wrong here? Probably," Sullivan said. "Do I think it's because Google has an antitrust agenda? No."

ShopCity is represented by Palo Alto antitrust attorney Gary Reback, who represented a group of companies, including Microsoft, in opposing Google's plan to scan millions of out of print books.

ShopCity's suspicions were triggered when, two days after the June 24 announcement of the FTC inquiry, ShopPaloAlto.com and other Bay Area sites suddenly began ranking better on Google, providing a temporary 400 percent increase in search-engine driven traffic, only to fall back to near zero in mid-July when Google downgraded its sites again. Pape said ShopCity was unable to get a reply from Google about what happened.

Stricker, the Google spokesman, said an earlier automated penalty imposed against ShopCity sites by coincidence had expired at that time, but Google imposed another penalty when it received outside complaints about ShopCity sites. Local partners say they still have high hopes for their network.

"I absolutely think it's a valuable service," said Paula Sandas, president and CEO of the Palo Alto Chamber of Commerce. "This is a very simple and economical way to have the Web presence that the rest of the world seems to have."