Today, Shiny Ads is announcing that the company has closed another financing round. The round was lead by Intertainment Media with existing investors, Maple Leaf Angels and York Angels, also participating and continuing to support the company.  Total capital raised was $400k plus an option for an additional $250k.  Proceeds of this financing round will be used to accelerate the company’s sales strategy and continued product evolution.

You can view Intertainment Media’s press release below;

Intertainment Media Inc. closes Investment in Award Winning Advertising Technology – Shiny Ads

Canada’s technology incubator, Intertainment Media, takes stake in Toronto advertising technology start up

NEW YORK / LOS ANGELES / SAN MATEO / TORONTO – February 1st, 2012 – Intertainment Media Inc. (“Intertainment” or the “Company”) (TSXV:INT / OTCQX: ITMTF / FRA: I4T) announced today that it has finalized its early stage investment in Shiny Ads, an award winning advertising technology company, which specializes in the sell-side automation of premium inventory for online publishers.

Shiny Ads and its suite of products is well positioned to capture a share of the estimated $14 billion dollar self-serve ad market. Winner of the Foreign Affairs Technology Growth Initiative and chosen by the IDC as a top 10 digital company to watch, Shiny Ads currently counts an impressive list of clients including CBS Interactive, DeviantArt.com, Wikia.com, AdWeek.com, Unanimis.co.uk, and SourceInterlink as well a number of other tier one brands.

“Intertainment Media is very excited to close its investment in Shiny Ads. The potential for this advertising technology to successfully deploy on a global scale is, in our opinion, phenomenal.” said David Lucatch, CEO of Intertainment Media. “Intertainment Media is committed to its philosophy of investing, nurturing and developing leading edge technologies digital and social media platforms and the Shiny Ads investment was a natural fit with that mandate.”

“We are extremely happy to have an organization such as Intertainment Media share in our vision for our technology.” said Roy Pereira, CEO and Founder of Shiny Ads. “We look forward to tapping into their experience and resources as we look to take Shiny Ads to the next level.”

“The investment in the Shiny Ads platform provides a fantastic strategic opportunity for Intertainment Media’s current portfolio of investments.” said Brad Parry, CMO of Intertainment Media. “The ability to more efficiently direct premium advertisers to our available inventory across our multiple platforms will ensure that we are securing the best possible returns for our inventory.”

The initial early stage investment of $250,000 will provide Intertainment Media with an ownership stake in Shiny Ads and also provides the opportunity for Intertainment Media to increase its investment by an equal amount within six months at today’s valuation and will also provide Intertainment Media with a seat on the Shiny Ads board.

About Intertainment Media – www.intertainmentmedia.com
Intertainment Media Inc. is one of Canada’s leading technology incubators and is focused on developing, nurturing and investing in technologies and companies that provide technology solutions for brands and consumers alike.
Intertainment Media also owns and operates a number of key properties including Ad Taffy, itiBiti, Ortsbo, Deal Frenzy and Magnum, with investments in leading edge technologies and social media platforms including theaudience.com . For more information on the Company and its properties, please visit www.intertainmentmedia.com

Headquartered in the Toronto, Canada region, with offices in New York, Los Angeles and San Mateo, CA, Intertainment Media Inc. is listed on the Toronto Venture Exchange under the symbol “INT” (TSXV:INT) and in the US on the OTCQX Exchange under the symbol “ITMTF”. Intertainment is also traded in Europe, on the XETRA Exchange under the symbol “I4T”.

About Shiny Ads – www.shinyads.com
Shiny Ads is an advertising technology company specializing in sell-side automation of premium inventory. The award-winning Self-Service Advertising Platform is a core product offering. With Shiny Ads, smaller advertisers are able to quickly and easily purchase advertising without the need of industry knowledge, graphic designers, or a large budget. Shiny Ads is NOT an ad network, nor does it solicit directly from advertisers or ad networks. Shiny Ads is a solutions provider that supports direct sales team and works in conjunction with ad networks – providing online publishers with access to an untapped revenue stream. Visit website at ShinyAds.com or check out the demo at vimeo.com/shinyads/intro.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. This news release may contain certain forward-looking information. All statements included herein, other than statements of historical fact, is forward-looking information and such information involves various risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such information will prove to be accurate, and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such information. A description of assumptions used to develop such forward looking information and a description of risk factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking information can be found in the company’s disclosure documents on the SEDAR website at www.sedar.com. The company does not undertake to update any forward-looking information except in accordance with applicable securities laws.

This release may contain forward looking statements within the meaning of the “safe harbour” provisions of US laws. These statements are based on management’s current expectations and beliefs and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward looking statements. Intertainment Media Inc. does not assume any obligation to update any forward looking information contained in this news release.

Contacts:

For Intertainment Media Inc.:

Brad Parry, bparry@intertainmentmedia.com
Tel: 800-395-9943 / 905-763-3510
Email: info@intertainmentmedia.com
To learn more, visit: www.intertainmentmedia.com

For Shiny Ads Inc.
Roy Pereira

http://ShinyAds.com

(416) 844-7697

Public Relations / Media Inquiries:
SS | PR
Email: mcampe@sspr.com
Web site: www.sspr.com

Shiny Ads announces the launch of our audience targeting & optimization solution called Shiny Ads Audience Targeting. The offering is an add-on to the core Shiny Ads Self-Serve Advertising Platform and enables online publishers to take smaller ad buys for highly user-targeted ads by leveraging their user’s data and thus increasing revenue and performance.

With the launch of the Shiny Ads Audience Targeting, online publishers have the same ability to offer a highly targeted social ads platform that the large social networks do. Shiny Ads Audience Targeting acquires user data, targets on that rich user data and also has an innovative prediction engine that in real-time calculates which ad would obtain the highest performance for the current viewer based on rich user data and historical data from similar users.

“Shiny Ads Audience Targeting is the first offering of it’s kind to be delivered directly to online publishers” said Roy Pereira, Founder & CEO, Shiny Ads, “It is further extension of our mandate to provide publishers with automation tools for the monetization of their premium inventory.”

Shiny Ads Audience Targeting is built to be scalable and able to handle complex targeting and optimization calculations in real-time. It is the first advertising technology entirely built on the brand new event-based persistent architecture called node.JS which gives the product tremendous speed and makes real-time machine learning with big data a possibility. Shiny Ads Audience Targeting is available to online publishers with registered users with optional gender, age, location and other information.

ABOUT SHINY ADS

Shiny Ads is an advertising technology company specializing in sell-side automation of premium inventory. Our award-winning Self-Service Advertising Platform is our core product offering. With Shiny Ads, smaller advertisers are able to quickly and easily purchase advertising without the need of industry knowledge, graphic designers, or a large budget. Shiny Ads is NOT an ad network, nor do we solicit directly from advertisers or ad networks. We are solution provider that supports your direct sales team and works in conjunction with your ad network – providing online publishers with access to an untapped revenue stream. Visit our website at ShinyAds.com or check out our demo at vimeo.com/shinyads/intro.

Advertising technology company, Shiny Ads, announced that it had closed a seed funding round led by the two largest Angel networks in the greater Toronto area – Maple Leaf Angels and York Angels. Also contributing to the seed round were individual investors from the digital media industry.

Shiny Ads’ self-serve advertising platform has helped mid to large online publishers, like deviantART.com, maximize their advertising revenue by providing a simple, user-friendly interface so that long-tail advertisers can purchase ads on high traffic websites. This was nearly impossible before Shiny Ads due to resource constraints – budget, industry knowledge, graphic design, etc. “The platform that Shiny Ads provides allows us an efficient and customizable way to offer a great product to the large number of small businesses looking to advertise on deviantART,” says Ernie Riemer, VP of Advertising for deviantART.

Shiny Ads was established in May 2009 and until now, Roy Pereira, its founder and CEO, privately funded the advertising technology company. “Passion is everything in a startup environment. If you truly believe in your product and execute like your life depends on it, then success will follow,” says Roy Pereira. The fact that Shiny Ads was already integrated into a large number of online publisher’s websites prior to the seed funding round is testament to that passion and the revolutionary technology behind the company. Pereira has been involved in several startups, some successful and other not so successful, from the creation of remove access VPN at TimeStep to the award winning Refresh Partners, the first boutique marketing firm to focus on social networks. Roy’s experience goes beyond startups, working with a number of highly successful public companies such as Cisco Systems, in California, and Certicom, in Toronto.

Given this investment, Shiny Ads has grown the team to include industry veterans like Zunaid Khan, VP of Business Development and Sales. Khan’s previous roles include Canoe/Sun Media as Director of Product Management and Strategic Alliances and Director of Technology Sales at 24/7 Real Media. Joining the Board of Directors is James Prudhomme, one of Canada’s leading Digital Media executives, Scott MacCannell, founding President of York Angels, and Robert Koturbash who is the founding Managing Director of the Maple Leaf Angels. “Shiny Ads is a disruptive technology that allows content publishers to directly interact with their small and local advertisers in an extremely cost effective manner – it allows them to once again own those critical relationships at the same time as generating revenue that was once lost to them,” says Koturbash. “York Angels is very pleased to be involved as a partner with Roy Pereira and the great team of professionals that he has assembled at Shiny Ads to address this promising market opportunity. We very much look forward to working with Roy and his team, the Maple Leaf Angels and the other independent Investors that are involved in this exciting venture,” said Scott MacCannell.

ABOUT SHINY ADS
Shiny Ads is an advertising technology company focused on enabling online publishers to maximize revenue from small and local advertisers. Our self-serve advertising platform allows publishers to automate the sales, finance and ad-operations for small ad campaigns in a cost-effective manner. Small and local advertisers are able to quickly and easily purchase advertising without the need of industry knowledge, graphic designers, or a large budget enabling the online publisher to access this untapped revenue stream. Visit our website at ShinyAds.com or check out our demo at vimeo.com/shinyads/intro.

“Our innovative technology has revolutionized direct online ad sales by significantly lowering the cost of those transactions”, Roy Pereira, Founder and CEO of Shiny Ads.

ABOUT MAPLE LEAF ANGELS
The Maple Leaf Angels is a group of private investors who come from a wide variety of backgrounds and careers. With chapters based in Toronto and Mississauga, the group has invested over $7 million into 19 high growth companies. Maple Leaf Angels possesses deep expertise in information, communication and clean technologies. Visit their website at mapleleafangels.com.

ABOUT YORK ANGELS
York Angels actively provides a supportive linkage between local entrepreneurs, seeking early-stage capital, and investors with a commitment to the economic development of the Region and Ontario generally, and to the entrepreneurial spirit of their communities. We are committed to providing quality investment support and coaching to qualifying companies, thereby ensuring they have the best opportunity for growth and expansion in their industry. Visit their website at yorkangels.com.

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For more information and/or to schedule an interview please contact Jessica Rowen, Marketing Communications Manager for Shiny Ads p: 416 800 7340 x7, m: 647 838 6733, e: jessica@shinyads.com.

Shiny Ads, the innovator in self-service advertising platforms, today announced that Zunaid Khan has been named Vice President of Business Development and Sales. Zunaid Khan is a seasoned professional with 15 years of experience in Technology, Digital Marketing & the Media sectors. Most recently Mr. Khan was with Canoe/Sun Media as Director of Product Management & Strategic Alliances and he has also held the Director of Technology Sales role at 24/7 Real Media.

“I am very excited to be part of the Shiny Ads team and am looking forward to growing the business. Shiny Ads has developed a solution which cost effectively helps all web publishers address the under-served market of small and local advertising.”, said Zunaid Khan, Shiny Ads’ new VP of Business Development and Sales.

In this role, Mr. Khan will set and execute strategies related to online publisher acquisition and inbound marketing’s lead generation activities and be a key member of Shiny Ads’ executive team.

“Our innovated technology has been able to lower the cost of an online advertising order down to nearly zero and that has allowed Shiny Ads to win most of the competitive deals that we have seen”, said Roy Pereira, President of Shiny Ads. “With the addition of Zunaid, we will be poised for strong growth in the coming year as we supercharge our sales strategy with his experience and industry insights. It’s an honour to have someone of Zunaid’s caliber helping to shape and deliver the Shiny Ads solution to our partners and customers.”

Also joining Shiny Ads in an advisory role, will be James Prudhomme. Mr. Prudhomme is one of Canada’s leading Digital Marketing Executives with more than 15 years experience in the Digital Economy. He has had senior roles at AOL, Advertising.com, and Sympatico/MSN.

About Shiny Ads

Shiny Ads, the innovator in self-service advertising platforms, helps the medium-large web publisher generate more revenue without additional costs by enabling the selling of display and text ads to smaller advertisers directly on a publisher’s web sites. Launched in January 2010, Shiny Ads’ customers include top-1000 sites with local news and special interest/niche topics. Find your lost revenue by visiting http://www.shinyads.com.

Analog Photography Users Group (APUG.ORG), the Internet’s largest traditional photography community, has chosen Shiny Ads to power its self-service online advertising offering to its small advertisers who want to target its niche visitors.Â

“So far it seems to be going extremely well. It is no contest really. Our last self-serve advertising system was a lot more hands on, a headache and also seemed glitchy. We also had to chase people down for payments or they would request weird payment methods. Sometimes their payments would fail and we would be stuck fixing it manually.” said Sean Ross from APUG.ORG, “Now I just point them to our Shiny Ads ordering widget on our site and it does it all”.

APUG noticed an immediate improvement in advertiser responsiveness as seen in this quote from one of their small advertisers:

“I just assumed it (self-service advertising) would be a big pain and wanted to wait until I had more time, but I was pleasantly surprised that it appears pretty easy.”

About Shiny Ads

ShinyAds, the innovator in self-service advertising platforms, helps the medium-large web publisher generate more revenue without additional costs by enabling the selling of display and text ads to smaller advertisers directly on a publisher’s web sites. Launched in January 2010, Shiny Ads’ customers include top-1000 sites with local news and special interest/niche topics. Find your lost revenue by visiting http://www.shinyads.com.

About APUG.ORG
APUG.ORG is an international on-line community, completely devoted to traditional (non-digital) photographic processes. We are an active photographic community; our forums contain a highly detailed archive of traditional and historic photographic processes. More information can be gathered at http://apug.org

The Canadian New Media Awards (CNMAs) organizers announced the final 2010 nominees this week and Shiny Ads was pleased to be nominated in the “DIGITAL MEDIA TECHNOLOGY OF THE YEAR” category.

“We’re hugely proud to receive a nomination for Technology of the Year, given that we just launched our self-service advertising platform for top web publishers earlier this year.” said Shiny Ads president and founder, Roy Pereira. “We believe that our disruptive technology opens the door for publishers to generate revenue from small advertisers that they once lost to ad networks.

“We received more entries than any other year from almost every province in Canada, and we’re thrilled to be recognizing such a diverse range of companies and individuals,” says Jory Groberman, Executive Director of nextMEDIA. “Every year the bar is raised with innovative creativity, entrepreneurship, and pioneering technology.”

The CNMAs are Canada’s only nationwide competition that clebrates the accomplishments of Canada’s most successful digital media companies. The Canadian New Media Awards Gala will be held on Wednesday December 1, 2010 at the Design Exchange in Toronto.

To view a complete list of the 2010 CNMA finalists visit:Â www.nextmediaevents.com/cnma/?news=46

Shiny Ads also just recently won the “Best Sell Side Technology/Service” at AdWeb3.0 in New York this month.

About The Canadian New Media Awards

The CNMAs are the country’s only nationwide competition that celebrates the accomplishments of Canada’s most successful digital media companies. Now in its 10th year, the Canadian New Media Awards are a part of nextMEDIA Toronto, Canada’s leading forum for the convergence of all forms of digital media, taking place November 29 to 30, 2010 at the Design Exchange in Toronto. The CNMA gala ceremony will be held December 1, 2010 on the Trading Floor of the Design Exchange.

About Shiny Ads

The innovator in self-service advertising platforms, Shiny Ads, helps medium-large web publishers generate more revenue without additional costs by quickly and easily selling ads to smaller advertisers directly on their web sites. Shiny Ads automates sales, finance and ad operations to lower the cost per transaction down to zero allowing web publishers to attract more advertisers. Find your lost revenue by visiting http://www.shinyads.com.

Shiny Ads is pleased to announce that Sonico.com, South America’s 2nd largest social network, has launched a self-service advertising offering for small advertisers and their members using the Shiny Ads self-service advertising platform.

“Sonico.com was looking for a robust self-service advertising solution that could handle our multi-lingual users that were not savvy advertisers.” said Tomás O’Farrell, Chief Marketing Officer of Sonico.com, “Shiny Ads had the built-in support for the pricing model, display banner sizes, direct tie into DART DFP and most importantly, support for Spanish, Portuguese and English speakers”.

Shiny Ads automates the entire ad purchase process for smaller advertisers on mid-to-large web publishers bringing the long-tail advertiser’s lost revenue within reach.

About Shiny Ads

ShinyAds, the innovator in self-service advertising platforms, helps the medium-large web publisher generate more revenue without additional costs by enabling the selling of display and text ads to smaller advertisers directly on a publisher’s web sites.  Launched in January 2010, Shiny Ads’ customers include  top-1000 sites with local news and special interest/niche topics.  Find your lost revenue by visiting http://www.shinyads.com.

Shiny ads is pleased to announce that Newschoolers.com, part of GrindNetworks.com, has starting selling online advertising directly to smaller advertisers using the Shiny Ads self-service advertising platform.

“Newschoolers.com has long been a place that is the breeding ground of whats next in the sport of skiing. Many tiny brands built themselves into legitimate companies through advertising on Newschoolers.com. However, as things grew and clients got bigger and bigger, it was hard to service the smaller companies who really just needed to get their first break.” said Doug Bishop, Newschoolers.com’s General Manager, “Shiny Ads allowed the Newschoolers team to service clients all the way down to the tiniest hat brand, and ensure that they too could have the opportunity to grow into staples of the ski industry”

Shiny Ads automates the entire ad purchase process for smaller advertisers, including directly interfacing with Newschoolers.com’s ad server DoubleClick DART DFP. Smaller advertisers can purchase online display advertising on Newschoolers at http://newschoolers.com/web/content/pagetemplate/name/advertise/

UPDATE: Shiny Ads won 3rd place in the TiE Quest Toronto 2010 business venture competition. We thank all of the judges and our supporters for their great work since the start of the competition in November 2009.  In addition to winning the 3rd place prize, Shiny Ads also received two “Intention of Interest” certificates from a Venture Capitalist firm and an Angel investor group.

Shiny Ads has been selected as a finalist in the TiE Quest 2010 venture competition and is the only web technology venture left in the competition.

Over 200 contestants received an opportunity to present their ventures to professionals who can actually fund these businesses. Sponsoring firms, from where the judging panel was drawn from, will be offering an “Expression of Interest” for investment of up to $1,000,000 to top teams. The top teams will also receive substantial prizes in cash as well as professional services that will exceed $150,000 in total value.

The winners of the 2010 TiEQuest competition will be awarded on April 15th.

TiEQuest is an annual business venture competition held in Toronto to encourage entrepreneurship, engage emerging entrepreneurial talent and to create an ecosystem of entrepreneurship.

deviantART today launched the next phase of its self-serve advertising strategy with a service entitled adPro. adPro allows professionals and comercial organizations to directly advertise on deviantART and reach the web’s largest creative community.

adPro is powered by the latest version of Shiny Ads self-serve advertising platform. It allows the advertiser to create a display ad using easy-to-use tools including banner templates, target the campaign by country, pay via a wide array of options and then track the performance of their campaign.

Since the entire ordering process is automated, including the ad insertion into deviantART’s OpenX ad server, transaction expenses are significantly reduced. This allows deviantART to lower its price point to attract small and local businesses that would traditionally not be able to afford such a campaign and would spend their small ad budget elsewhere such as ad networks.

“We’re excited by the launch of AdPro, powered by Shiny Ads.” said Ernie Riemer, VP of Advertising, “The platform Shiny Ads provides allows us an efficient and customizable way to offer a great product to the large number of small businesses looking to advertise on deviantART”