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9th December 2010

Business Partnerships and Expansions On The West Coast

dareThe Vancouver-based offices of brand building agency Dare, a and HootSuite have announced a strategic partnership between the two companies. The agreement will include a customized version of HootSuite’s Enterprise Social Media dashboard that will provide Dare and their clients with a 360 degree social media tool encompassing publishing, broadcasting and reporting of all key social media marketing and communications initiatives on social networks and blogs.

Angèle Beausoleil, Dare’s VP of Strategy and Innovation says “Brand managers are currently operating in a complex and real time environment and need a simple to use and effective tool to monitor, measure as well as engage their consumers.”HootSuite

“After working with numerous monitoring tools for the past three years, it’s very exciting to be partnering with HootSuite on a holistic solution for our clients”‘ added Beausoleil. “The true value is that we can finally integrate Dare’s clients’ campaign and on-going marketing performance data and web analytics directly into the HootSuite reporting environment. Soon our clients will be able to both immediately see and respond to brand conversations affecting the social media space and vice versa. This is a much needed and highly-sought after tool for brand managers.”

Ryan Holmes, CEO of HootSuite says “The partnership with Dare is a great example of HootSuite’s extensible platform and easy to use architecture, and ultimately speaks to the comprehensive solution that we are able to provide for leading brands.”

Born out of a digital agency just two years ago, HootSuite has evolved into a mature and suitable tool for agencies and brands to manage and measure business-oriented social media activities.

Dare SVP and Managing Partner Sandy Fleischer adds “Dare’s partnership with HootSuite is a great example of how Dare’s innovation group will work, under the leadership of Angèle, to provide added value to Dare’s client base.”

The detailed terms of the agreement will be officially announced next week, but Dare’s innovation team is working closely with HootSuite’s Channel Partner team to ensure this industry leading platform is integrated seamlessly with Dare’s brand management and measurement tools. Training for brand managers under HootSuite University will also be part of the package offered by Dare.

clioStaying with Vancouver business news, Themis Solutions Inc., provider of cloud-based legal practice management offering Clio, is bringing real-world, practical legal technology skills to law students by providing Clio at no charge for educational use in law schools across North America. Since its inception, the Clio Educational Use Program has provided free Clio subscriptions to several law schools across the country, allowing them to use Clio in their classrooms and computer centres.

While law schools educate their students on the substance of law, they rarely teach students other important skills that they will need once they become lawyers, including technology usage. This disconnect is highly problematic as law school graduates leave schools largely unprepared for the practical side of running a practice.

Jack Newton, President and co-founder of Clio, states, “Law students are keen on getting exposure to practice management software during the course of their education, as they are increasingly aware that practice management is a skill they need the day they graduate. Because Clio is cloud-based, deploying it in the classroom is much easier than it was with traditional desktop-based systems: teachers can get their students up-and-running on Clio in minutes without needing to ask for support from IT. By making it easy to use a real-world practice management system in a classroom environment, we’re hoping more law students will be able to graduate with the knowledge of how to run an efficient and error-free law practice.”

Clio is currently implemented at the law schools such as Columbia, Georgia State University, CUNY, Loyola, Widener, Indiana State, Texas Tech, and Portland Community College. In some instances, students at these schools are afforded the unprecedented opportunity to simulate managing an active caseload like a practicing lawyer would.

hyperwallethyperWALLET, which is also based in Vancouver, has announced the expansion of its payment network into the Russian Federation, extending the company’s proprietary interlinked ACH clearing capability to 45 countries worldwide. Concurrent with this expansion is the company’s support for payment processing in roubles, and the establishment of an operational subsidiary in Moscow.

“Russia is a major global remitter with a unique regulatory environment, so the extension of our payment services to the region represents a significant network milestone for our company”, states Lisa Shields, President & CEO of hyperWALLET Systems Inc. “With further network expansions planned for the upcoming quarters, hyperWALLET aims to have low-cost ACH clearing coverage to every bank account worldwide by 2012, as well as transactional connectivity to 15% of the unbanked population, via mobile money partnerships.”

With the addition of Russian roubles, hyperWALLET now supports transaction processing and payment distribution in 24 currencies. And with a Russian language localization of hyperWALLET’s web and mobile application interfaces now available, branded payment services can be readily launched in any of 13 languages.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 9th, 2010 at 4:44 pm and is filed under Business News, Digital Products, National News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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