LibreDigital today announced that it has closed a $15 million Series B funding round led by new investor Triangle Peak Partners and existing investor Adams Capital Management. The company’s other key investors include HarperCollins Publishers, The New York Times Company and Noro-Moseley Partners. The new capital infusion will be used by LibreDigital to expand marketing and development of the company’s industry-leading digital platform, designed to help publishers go direct to consumers as they access, buy, read and share content across online and mobile platforms.

“As eReaders and mobile devices continue to be adopted by consumers, demand for books & newspapers in digital formats is out-pacing supply – making it one of the fastest-growing and most exciting areas in the media and entertainment industry,” said David L. Pesikoff, Co-Founding Partner of Triangle Peak Partners. “The LibreDigital platform is helping the world’s top publishers meet this demand by enabling them to deliver content across emerging digital platforms and devices.”

In addition to securing its recent funding round, LibreDigital announced that it has named Triangle Peak Partners President, David L. Pesikoff, to the LibreDigital board of directors. He joins current board members, Martin Neath, Chairman and General Partner of Adams Capital Management, Brian Murray, CEO of HarperCollins Publishers, Scott Heekin-Canedy, President of The New York Times Company, and Jeremy Halbreich, CEO, Sun Times Media Group.

“As the universe of digital distribution expands, the technology from LibreDigital will help publishers successfully deliver their content to millions of consumers across thousands of digital marketplaces and mobile devices worldwide,” said Scott Heekin-Canedy, President and General Manager of The New York Times.

“Already powering billions of page views and online content sales across digital channels, LibreDigital is uniquely positioned to be the top content delivery platform for publishers,” said Martin Neath, Chairman of LibreDigital and General Partner of Adams Capital Management. “We look forward to working with the talented team at LibreDigital as they expand development of their technology to empower publishers to take advantage of a market where demand for eBooks and eEditions is projected to exceed $2 Billion by 2012.”

“Knitting together traditional and new content sources with the various mobile devices consumers use to access it can be a daunting task for any publisher,” said Russell P. Reeder, CEO and President of LibreDigital, Inc. “We’re making the entire process seamless no matter what device or content source publishers need to feed. The support of our investors will allow us to service more customers more quickly, while delivering new innovations and applications as content delivery continues its evolution into the digital age.”

LibreDigital works with six of the world’s top book 10 publishers, including HarperCollins Publishers, Hachette, Simon & Schuster and Wiley, and many of the leading newspapers, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, to deliver their content across an expanding array of digital channels, including eReaders, search engines, online stores and mobile devices. LibreDigital also helps publishers market and control their valuable works across digital formats, including ePub and other eBooks formats, eInk, online, mobile and new print-on-demand delivery options.

At the Burton Group Catalyst Conference, UnboundID Corp., a developer of identity management software for Internet-driven, consumer-facing architectures, today announced the availability of the UnboundID™ Directory Proxy Server. The new proxy server is a fast and scalable LDAPv3 gateway that can be used with a number of popular directories, including the recently launched UnboundID Directory Server. Together the solutions are designed to improve identity management performance and support the needs of high-volume distributed applications, such as smart phone applications, text-messaging and cloud computing services.

“As people rely more on complex distributed applications for business and personal use, traditional directory services architectures are having problems supporting them,” said Don Bowen, co-founder and VP of Marketing at UnboundID. “With the release of our new proxy server, we can help ensure that directory service requests respond as needed for the new mobile computing paradigm.”

The UnboundID Directory Proxy Server allows client applications to securely and seamlessly connect to directory servers to increase the performance of high-volume identity management architectures. Key features include:

• Entry Balancing – allows data to be transparently spread across multiple sets of servers to provide scalability beyond the memory constraints of a single system. It uses a robust memory-based index to efficiently route requests to the appropriate servers without the need to alter the contents or hierarchy of existing data.
• Load Balancing – reduces the overall client load by spreading it across multiple backend servers, which offers greater protection against failures. It can select servers based on their locations and relative health, and can route related requests to the same backend server to improve cache efficiency and avoid problems due to propagation delay.
• High Availability – allows organizations to transparently fail over between servers, while ensuring the workload is balanced across the network topology. If one directory server becomes unavailable, the proxy will route requests to other servers with no data or performance interruptions.
• Data Mapping and Transformation – handles distinguished name (DN) mapping and attribute mapping dynamically to allow clients to continue working when changes have occurred at the directory layer or to work around limitations imposed by clients hard-coded to expect a particular schema or directory structure.
• Security and Access Control – provides additional firewall capabilities as well as constraints and filtering to help protect the directory server from attacks. In addition it allows for more granular security of the directory server layers to limit access to certain parts of the directory to specific users.

Spiceworks, which provides the first free social IT management application for small and medium businesses, today announced that over 65,000 managed service providers (MSPs) worldwide are now using the Spiceworks IT Desktop to service and manage client computer networks. Spiceworks also unveiled enhancements to its IT management software and MSP partner program that together will help MSPs improve service delivery and better market their offerings to the Spiceworks community of over 700,000 small business IT professionals.

“One of the best things about the Spiceworks IT Desktop is it doesn’t require a lot of convincing to get an MSP or their clients to adopt it,” said Mike Mullen, President, Premier Technology Services. “It’s a powerful IT management tool and it’s free – no matter how many companies or devices you want to manage. With the added benefit of the Spiceworks community, we can collaborate and partner with other service providers and market our offerings to a greater number of small businesses worldwide.”

Since its launch three years ago, the Spiceworks IT management software has helped MSPs around the world to service their clients more effectively and affordably than ever before. The Spiceworks IT Desktop is a free IT management application designed for small and medium organizations with up to 500 devices. More than 700,000 IT professionals and 65,000 managed service providers (MSPs) worldwide use the application to automatically inventory, monitor, troubleshoot, report on and run a help desk for IT networks. It is the first business application to embed crowdsourcing, social networking and community collaboration features directly into an IT professional’s daily workflow. Currently Spiceworks is used in 196 countries to support 24 million employees and 35 million devices.

“MSPs provide tremendous value and services to the small and medium business market,” said Scott Abel, co-founder and CEO of Spiceworks. “But ever-changing software pricing models and the market landscape have made their jobs more difficult. We’re helping MSPs by providing a powerful management tool they can use for free, while connecting them to one of the largest communities of potential small business customers in the world.”

Retail paid search marketing leader Adlucent announced today a new partnership with Buy.com that has helped the online retail giant enhance profit goals within months, despite fierce competition and one of the worst economic climates in decades.

While paid search has been a mainstay in the Buy.com marketing mix since the site’s 1997 launch, Adlucent’s unique approach helped the leading e-tailer double visitor conversion rates and substantially boost profitable revenue from paid search.

The partnership marks yet another success for Adlucent, whose client roster includes some of the world’s largest online retailers. Additionally, it also demonstrates the unique potential of paid search marketing during challenging economic times.

“In just a few months, Adlucent has expanded our campaigns and brought an amazing number of high-quality buyers to our site,” said Jeff Wisot, Buy.com Vice President of Marketing. “And its performance-based model means we only pay for sales not clicks, which helps us to get even more out of the dollars we spend on search advertising.”

Buy.com, The Internet Superstore™, is among the Web’s top 50 retail sites, with a catalog of over 4 million products and tens of millions of visitors each month.

Discouraged by lackluster results from other leading agencies, Wisot said Buy.com was impressed with Adlucent’s success record and unique performance-based model, which ties compensation to actual sales instead of sites visits.

Adlucent significantly expanded Buy.com’s keyword coverage, applying its proprietary Deep Search™ technology to quickly and accurately gauge keyword effectiveness while minimizing costs and time.

“Online retailers need to approach search marketing in a different way if they’re to succeed in today’s competitive marketplace,” said Michael Griffin, co-founder and CTO of Adlucent. “By focusing on using search to drive sales rather than eyeballs, Buy.com is doing just that and reaping the rewards in the form of higher profits in a very short period of time.”

Despite a challenging economy and fierce competition, Adlucent not only helped Buy.com find more buyers, but managed to boost revenue without sacrificing profits.