September 17, 2007 – TechCrunch40 Conference, San Francisco - IDELIX Software Inc. announced today the launch of lat49, a new mapvertising network that opens a whole new online territory to advertisers who want precise, intuitive geo-targeting to a large and relatively untapped online audience.  The patents-pending ad serving solution is optimized for online, interactive maps and provides map-site publishers with a viable revenue model suited to their user behavior and site traffic.

On-map advertising, known as mapvertising, provides advertisers with a unique opportunity to execute both brand and local advertising initiatives in an interactive online environment.  Advertisers buy the exclusive advertising rights to map real estate using the lat49 self-serve interface.  An advertiser’s ad placements display each time a site visitor using a lat49 partner map views the advertiser’s territory. Land parcels can be bought at multiple zoom levels to suit the goals of the particular advertising campaign. Owning the map's most zoomed out country view will support branding initiatives while local advertisers may choose to regionally tune their messaging and target the local, street, neighborhood, or urban level audiences.

85% of all Internet users use online maps * but this audience has been virtually out of reach to advertisers until now. Other ad serving technologies currently competing for the online marketer’s dollar are not optimized for the Ajax and Flash/ActionScript technologies used to build interactive map sites, so they experience key issues with ad relevancy, ad refresh, and reduced usability due to forfeited screen real estate.

“Lat49 opens a new and growing interactive distribution channel through which advertisers can execute local, hyper-local, and brand advertising strategies,” commented IDELIX CEO Philip Attfield. “On the publisher side, we’ve had tremendously positive feedback from the developer community and large commercial sites for whom lat49 presents a revenue model ideally suited to their user behavior and site traffic.” 
"The high visibility of lat49 ads is a key factor in making map based advertising successful for both publishers and advertisers,” noted Andrew Bidochko, founder of Mapbuilder.net, a rapid mashup development tool that allows users to build custom Google and Yahoo maps without any API/JavaScript knowledge.

Lat49 publisher websites target a range of vertical markets that include travel, social networking, sports and recreation, traffic, weather, news, events, and more.  Profiles of some members of the lat49 network and featured advertisers are available at http://lat49.com/partners/websites.php.
“We have a compelling approach to location-aware advertising, which is a huge, growing market,” states IDELIX Chief Technical Officer Dr. David Baar.  “Whether delivering ads appropriate to the user’s area of interest as expressed by where they are looking on a map or by any other indicator of location such as those available on mobile devices, we have in lat49 a precise, intuitive way for advertisers to geotarget.  Lat49 includes precisely defined coverage areas and ad selection/presentation heuristics that are easy for both advertisers and site publishers to understand and work with.”

See a live demo of lat49 in the Demo Pit at TechCrunch 40 on Sept 18 or visit http://lat49.com for more information, or to start mapvertising now.