Wow, this month really caught me off guard! Been away from the blogging desk for so long it feels strange to be getting back to grips with my byline.

A good part of January was spent running ourselves ragged showcasing our technologies and business to the Technology Top 100 adjudicators. The TT100 is the most prestigious awards for technology excellence in Africa – you could call it the “geek’s oscars”.

From thousands of entries this year we were selected as one of the top 100 emerging and established enterprises in South Africa for 2008. We’re obviously thrilled at being recognised as a leading global player in the online advertising and marketing industry and we’re pretty chuffed that our ForgeInsight Analytics patent was singled out as an industry leading innovation.

So, what did we do the next day? Got right down to working hard to deliver for our clients and improve our technology. After all, you’re only as good as your next award aren’t you?

ForgeBusiness today secured patent on our methodology ‘Method of and System for Creditng and Online Publisher in an Affiliate Marketing Relationship’ as it applies to multi-network affiliate tracking in the United Kingdom.

This will allow us to confidently roll out multi-network tracking solutions to affiliate programs in the highly competitive UK market. The UK is a prime example of a particularly fragmented affiliate industry with many networks competing in the same space.

Affiliate managers looking to run campaigns in this market typically need to be on one or more networks, resulting in wasted hours reporting and aggregating data from disparate networks and validating sales across the networks.

More about ForgeInsight:

ForgeInsight allows merchants to track multiple affiliate networks, aggregate data and reporting and protects merchants from Fraud and duplicate transactions – to highlight just a few benefits.

Think of it as ‘Google Analytics’ for the Affiliate Space with a good measure of ‘protection’ thrown in!

For more information visit http://www.forgeinsight.com/

Phew, another week and more change at Forge! As you may note I’ve been radio (or blog) silent for some time now – both here and at revenews, my other regular hangout – entirely due to time pressure and the pace of change I assure you – not at all laziness on my part

So, let me update you on the last few weeks.

Forge has sold its Trafficonomy skill and online gaming business in a management buyout to a consortium led by my long time partner and friend Mark van Diggelen, CEO of Trafficonomy. It was Trafficonomy’s burgeoning success in the online gaming market and its need for independence that was the main motivation for the buyout.

Forge’s primary business focus lies in delivering performance marketing consulting and affiliate marketing solutions. Our primary markets are the USA, Europe and South Africa. We felt that both companies’ strategic business interests could be best served by spinning off the Trafficonomy gaming business. This would be enabling both businesses to focus on their core business without hampering growth or opportunities in either.

Trafficonomy was a great investment and now that it’s got its independence it’ll be able to pursue more diverse gaming opportunities and we’re looking forward to seeing some amazing products and innovative marketing opportunities being generated from our continued business relationship with Mark and his team.

It’s no secret to those of you that know us well that we’re looking to a public offering in the future and we need to be supremely focused on our core business to ensure we remain on top of our game and add value to our clients and shareholders.

With this in mind we’ve ‘retooled’ out Consumer Portal Development unit (which was part of Trafficonomy) into a new division, codenamed…..\ForgeTouchPoint (F.T.P.) I thought of it all by myself, lol.

Werner Coetzee is going to head up FTP. and will be working with our seasoned affiliate marketing teams to build better micro-sites and landing pages to help our clients convert better. Werner’s team will also be tasked with leveraging elements like MySpace, YouTube and other Web2.0 communities to develop branding for our affiliate marketing clients.

We’ve all just returned from an exhausting 2 week trip to the US where we hosted the Ad-Tech Real Results Party in New York and had 2900 revelers up until 4AM networking, dancing and partying with the Forge Team and then exhibited at WebMasterWorld in Las Vegas…. but I’ll post more about those later in the week.

As always, we’d value your comments and questions