SmartAge , a new company founded by technology entrepreneur and publisher Bill Lohse, said it is now offering a suite of services designed to help small and growing businesses build, advertise and expand their Internet presences.
SmartAge, a new company founded by technology entrepreneur and publisher Bill Lohse, said it is now offering a suite of services designed to help small and growing businesses build, advertise and expand their Internet presences.
One of the services is SmartClicks, which bills itself as the second largest advertising banner exchange network on the Internet. SmartClicks provides small businesses with ad placement and statistics on the number of people clicking on the ads.
SmartClicks, which was acquired by SmartAge (formerly NetWeb Corp.) in February, permits members to target their ads to a specific category of other members with similar interests, or allows the network to determine the best placement based on past successes through automatic targeting.
“There are plenty of good tools for Fortune 500 companies and media conglomerates that have multi-million dollar budgets to create and market their Web sites,” Lohse said. “But the small business sector–which includes 7 million small offices and 14 million home-based businesses–has lacked an easy and affordable way to leverage the power of the Web. The charter of SmartAge is to fill that void ”
SmartAge also provides SmartAge Watch, a 24-hour Web site monitoring and alert service for $6.95 a month. SmartAge Watch is designed to request pages from subscribing sites each hour and measure response time, and notify site owners of server problems via email.
SmartAge Rank submits a company’s URL to a number of search engines including InfoSeek, Lycos and Yahoo. The company said that because it tracks a site’s ranking weekly, SmartAge Rank lets small businesses know how their sites are positioned on the search engines. Cost is $4.95 a month.
SmartAge’s founder, Bill Lohse, was the turnaround publisher of PC Magazine, founding publisher of PC Computing and president of Ziff-Davis Publishing in the 1980s. He helped start several software companies, including Breakthrough Software (now part of Symantec), ACCPAC (now part of Computer Associates), Wordstar, and Knowledge Adventure (now part of Cendant). Most recently, he was the founding president of SOFTBANK Forums, which became the technology industry’s largest conference and trade show organization.
