NEWSPAPERDIRECT ADOPTS AKAMAI'S DYNAMIC SITE ACCELERATION SOLUTION FOR PRESSDISPLAY.COM AND SMARTEDITION DIGITAL NEWSPAPERS

NewspaperDirect Adopts Akamai's Dynamic Site Acceleration Solution for PressDisplay.com and SmartEdition Digital Newspapers
Source: NewspaperDirect Official Release, PRWeb

Akamai's Dynamic Site Accelerator enhances the user experience for NewspaperDirect's millions of visitors from around the world

Vancouver, Canada (Vocus/PRWEB), November 15, 2007— NewspaperDirect Inc., the world leader in multi-channel newspaper and magazine content distribution, announced that Akamai's Dynamic Site Accelerator service has been integrated into its line of digital publication services: PressDisplay.com, ND Press and SmartEditions.

Because its audience is globally distributed, NewspaperDirect wanted to maximize quality of service by locating its content as close as possible to its users without deploying hundreds of new servers. By pushing traffic to Akamai's globally distributed platform of over 28,000 servers worldwide, PressDisplay.com readers and dozens of SmartEdition subscribers—from newspapers like The Washington Post, The Times Online (UK), The Age (Australia), Le Figaro (France), Bangkok Post (Thailand), Jerusalem Post (Israel), and Kommersant (Russia)—can enjoy an engaging and compelling user experience.

"To ensure that we continue to provide superior performance to all of our visitors, regardless of where they are in the world, we needed a solution that could keep up with the demands of our rapidly expanding subscriber base," said Alexander Kroogman, CEO of NewspaperDirect. "We chose Akamai because it has the proven infrastructure we can trust to maximize the performance of our online businesses today and well into the future."

Since implementing Akamai's Dynamic Site Accelerator service, NewspaperDirect has offloaded an average of 70% of its existing infrastructure to the Akamai platform. By relying on Akamai's globally distributed platform, NewspaperDirect can avoid the costly hardware build-out that is required to support the increased load brought on by richer content.

NewspaperDirect provides online access to more than 500 full-content newspapers and magazines to six million visitors at home, at work, on the road and in hundreds of libraries, government offices and corporations around the world. PressDisplay.com, the world's largest online newspaper kiosk, is rich with multimedia content and advanced features such as instant translation and newspaper radio. It has been proven to retain visitors ten times longer than other newspaper sites, and as a result, its popularity and traffic have grown exponentially in the past year. NewspaperDirect needed an on-demand performance technology that was not only predictable and reliable, but scalable to meet its explosive growth.

"Publishers are increasingly looking to add richer and more dynamic content to drive traffic to their sites and to extend the reach of their content to a wider audience," said Brad Rinklin, vice president of marketing, Akamai. "Akamai's Dynamic Site Accelerator offering enables businesses to improve site performance and brand loyalty while reducing site abandonment rates. By leveraging Dynamic Site Accelerator, customers with large Internet audiences like NewspaperDirect can deliver a highly interactive, high quality and unique online experience to their visitors from around the world."

The Akamai Dynamic Site Accelerator solution can provide performance improvements of up to five times over that available through the origin Web infrastructure.

About Akamai
Akamai® is the leading global service provider for accelerating content and applications online. Thousands of organizations have formed trusted relationships with Akamai, improving their revenue and reducing costs by maximizing the performance of their online businesses. Leveraging the Akamai EdgePlatform, these organizations gain business advantage today, and have the foundation for the emerging Web solutions of tomorrow. Akamai is ‘The Trusted Choice for Online Business.’ For more information, visit www.akamai.com.

About NewspaperDirect Inc.
Founded in 1999 and based in Vancouver, Canada, NewspaperDirect Inc. is the world leader in multi-channel newspaper and magazine content distribution and monetization. NewspaperDirect offers hundreds of newspaper and magazine titles through a global network of more than 1,200 print locations in more than 90 countries, delivering them to hotels, libraries, cruise ships, corporate offices, retail outlets, home subscribers and Web browsers everywhere.

PressDisplay.com from NewspaperDirect is the world's largest online newspaper kiosk, providing instant access to hundreds of newspapers and magazines from around the world. Users can view publications online, download titles for offline viewing, instantly translate articles into 12 different languages, listen to publications on their PCs, Macs or mobile devices, and enjoy reading hundreds of publications that have been optimized for smart phones, BlackBerry devices, the iPhone and the iPod Touch. NewspaperDirect has also adapted PressDisplay.com for the library, corporate, airline, hotel and OEM markets.

NewspaperDirect’s SmartEdition ePaper solution, powered by PressDisplay technology, fits every publisher's needs with zero investment and zero operational cost. With SmartEdition, a publisher's subscribers benefit from anywhere/anytime access to current and back issues of their publications, while enjoying premium digital features such as voice, translation, sharing, blogging and advanced searching. NewspaperDirect provides full hosting, payment acceptance, customer service management and technical support.

Today, SmartEdition is already integrated into the workflow of hundreds of publishers. It operates premium sites for local, national and international newspapers around the world, including: Washington Post, New York Post, Newspapers & Technology, The Age (Australia), The Daily Telegraph (UK), The Times Online (UK), Daily Mail (UK), Le Figaro (France), and all 11 CanWest publications, including National Post (Canada).