Bplay -- BlackBerry Mobile Entertainment

Owned and operated by Magmic Games, Bplay is a leading mobile entertainment products shopping destination that offers a robust suite of content including games, music, graphics, themes and lifestyle applications, tailored expressly for the BlackBerry audience. Through Bplay.com, users can purchase products and download them directly to their BlackBerry devices.
Highlights of Bplay:
Owns an estimated 80 percent of the BlackBerry entertainment products market
Publishes top game titles and brands for BlackBerry devices, with titles such as Guitar Hero III Mobile, Golden Tee, Monopoly, World Poker Tour 2 and much, much more.
Strategic partnerships with Research In Motion (RIM) and many popular mobile entertainment publishers.
The top destination for BlackBerry themes
Known for one of the best Customer Support operations in mobile gaming.
Owns a userbase of nearly 500,000.
Strong conversion rate of nearly 15 percent conversions per visitor.
Through its affiliate program, Bplay offers a standard commission rate of 20 percent, with higher rates available to high volume publishers. For more information, email Bplay at info@bplay.com.

Into the: Games for your BlackBerry

Download Our Recurring Billing Publisher Guide

Posted by: Kristen M., Marketing Communications Manager

As you have probably heard by now, ClickBank offers the ability to sell recurring billing products. The main benefit of recurring billing products, of course, is the ongoing income they provide.

Do you have a good idea for a recurring billing product, but aren’t sure how to get started?

Recently, we released a ClickBank Recurring Billing Publisher Guide. The PDF includes detailed instructions and screenshots to help you get started. The following key questions are addressed in the guide:

• What is ClickBank Recurring Billing?
• Why use ClickBank Recurring Billing?
• How does recurring billing work?
• How do I implement recurring billing?
• What does the customer see when purchasing a recurring billing product from ClickBank?
• What do I see when someone purchases my recurring billing product?
• How do affiliates find recurring billing products in the Marketplace?
• How am I notified of my recurring billing sales?

We’re working to expand our educational materials. Please leave a comment if you have an idea for a future topic or if you have any feedback about this guide.

Internet’s largest digital products retail network now transacts business in 4 languages, 13 currencies

BROOMFIELD, Colo. - Oct. 28, 2008 - In an effort to significantly expand the moneymaking capability of affiliates and product publishers using its powerful online sales platform, ClickBank, a world leader in online retail of digitally downloadable products, now enables commerce in French and German and accepts payments in 13 global currencies.

ClickBank’s upgraded transaction platform enables all interactions between the customer and ClickBank to be conducted in English, Spanish, German or French-including the order form, confirmation page, customer service emails, phone support and customer service pages on ClickBank’s Web site.

ClickBank’s international e-commerce capability has been further broadened to accept payments in the Australian dollar (AUD), Canadian dollar (CAD), Swiss franc (CHF), Danish krone (DKK), Euro (EUR), British pound (GBP), Hong Kong dollar (HKD), Japanese yen (JPY), Norwegian kroner (NOK), New Zealand dollar (NZD), Swedish krona (SEK), United States dollar (USD) and South African rand (ZAR).

“As a global enterprise with clients and customers worldwide, providing the ability to transact sales in multiple languages and currencies is critical for continued international growth,” said ClickBank CEO Bob King.

ClickBank began its platform globalization effort in March with the implementation of Spanish language transaction capability. Industry statistics estimate that 102 million Internet users worldwide speak Spanish and 118 million users worldwide speak French or German.

Since it began offering Spanish language capabilities, ClickBank’s Spanish language sales have grown 20 percent month-over-month on average. More than 400 products have been created and approved for the Spanish sales platform.

In 2007, ClickBank’s revenue grew 26 percent to more than $300 million, and the company is on track to achieve another year of double-digit revenue growth in 2008.

Retro Medicine: Doctors Making House Calls (for a Price)

CHERI ELLISON-CARROLL did not know where to turn when a red rash raced up her leg late one night while she was on a business trip in Phoenix last spring. Scheduled to give a keynote speech early the next morning, she didn’t want to sit in the emergency room all night. So she picked up the phone and had a doctor sent to her hotel room.
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He took the subway, top, to travel to the apartment of a patient, Kayla McDermott, who had a sore throat.
Ms. Ellison-Carroll called a service named Inn-House Doctor, and two doctors, a husband and wife, were at the hotel within an hour to diagnose her condition. It turned out that the rash was a reaction to a bug bite, and the doctors administered topical antibiotics. Ms. Ellison-Carroll got some sleep and was able to give her speech the next morning. The cost to her was $450, and she paid for it out of her own pocket.
“They were immediately available,” said Ms. Ellison-Carroll, who lives in Menlo Park, Calif. “It was a service that was priceless to me.”
A new kind of medical practice is flourishing nationwide that offers to go to where the patients are — whether a home, an office or a hotel — to treat ailments as diverse as a sprained ankle or a bad case of bronchitis. Some services may even wheel in a mobile X-ray machine or an ultrasound machine, depending on the ailment, or perhaps pull out kits to test for strep throat or to draw blood. They may dole out medication on the spot or arrange for pharmacies to deliver prescriptions.
“When you call, you can speak to a doctor in five minutes, and that doctor can be there with you within the hour. Where else do you get that kind of delivery?” said Walter Krause, founder of Inn-House Doctor. The company says it has 40 physicians on call in Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Philadelphia and Washington; some of the doctors are in private practice or work in hospitals, and they make house calls during their time off.
The convenience comes at a price. Appointment fees can range from $250 to $450, with additional tests and medication extra. And payment is due at the time of the appointment.
Much of the time, that payment comes out of the customer’s own pocket. Some preferred-provider insurance plans may reimburse members for the fees for certain cases — much as they would any other out-of-network physician — or may apply the fee to the deductible. Depending on the insurance policy, the reimbursement is typically 70 percent to 100 percent of the cost. But most health maintenance organizations would not typically cover any out-of-network house calls.
These doctors will see patients for most kinds of medical problems, except potentially life-threatening conditions like chest pain, shortness of breath, loss of consciousness, serious trauma or problems with a pregnancy. In those cases, people should head to the hospital.
Doctor delivery is one of many new approaches springing up to address the demand for faster, more convenient medical care. Walk-in clinics are opening in places like pharmacies, retail stores and airport terminals, though not everyone thinks this is a good idea. The desire of consumers for better access to a doctor has also given rise to “concierge medicine,” in which they pay thousands of dollars annually to get convenient, no-wait appointments. There is a separate fee for an actual appointment.
“We have that perfect storm. The current system doesn’t work well for patients or physicians,” said Dr. Rick Kellerman, a doctor who works in Wichita, Kan., and is president of the American Academy of Family Physicians. "More doctors are coming up with new home business practice models. They’re exasperated with paperwork and insurance regulation.”
The demand for primary care physicians outweighs the supply in many cities, so patients can wait weeks, and even months, for appointments, and hospital emergency rooms are becoming overloaded with nonemergency cases. Health insurance premiums, meanwhile, have continued to rise.
Some doctors are doing things like taking only house-call appointments or operating “micropractices” in which they work without front-office staff and nurses and see their patients in a smaller one-room office, Dr. Kellerman said.
When making house calls, “you get paid,” said Dr. Steven Meed, one of eight New York physicians working for Sickday Medical House Calls, which started last year and serves patients in Manhattan. “The paperwork overhead is kept at a minimum, the fee is fixed and it’s not going to be reduced.”
Still, these kinds of doctor-delivery services are not likely to solve a big problem in health care: the 47 million uninsured Americans, many of whom probably cannot afford to shell out hundreds of dollars for an at-home appointment.
Nor do these new businesses always address the need for continuity of care or the sharing of patient information among hospitals and doctors about any tests performed or medication prescribed, said David Barton Smith, a professor emeritus of health care management at Temple University. “There’s no common record-keeping,” Professor Smith said.
My Home Doctor, based in Miami, does require its doctors to send an e-mail record of their appointment to each patient’s primary care doctor within hours of the visit and to follow up with phone calls to patients for the next 48 hours.
Alex Leeds, a Miami mother of three, received two follow-up phone calls from My Home Doctor after a physician visited her home to examine her 3-year-old daughter in May. “That follow-up never happens with my pediatrician’s office. Never,” Ms. Leeds said.
She called My Home Doctor after her daughter developed a fever late one evening after the pediatrician’s office had closed. Her husband was out of town, and she didn’t want to haul her daughter and two other children, ages 7 and 10, to the emergency room. The physician arrived, diagnosed a throat infection and gave her a two-day dose of an antibiotic until she could get to a pharmacy.
“It was great,” Ms. Leeds said. “For me to go to a pharmacy with three kids is very inconvenient.”
She called My Home Doctor a second time when her daughter had a respiratory infection. Ms. Leeds said she was trying to convince her H.M.O. to reimburse her for emergency visits for the two separate $300 fees she paid.
IN other situations, employers provide some reimbursement to patients. Sickday in Manhattan has sent some of its eight doctors and four physician assistants to 20 advertising agencies, financial services companies and law firms to provide check-ups and other medical services for employees. The idea is that employees can have medical problems handled on the spot and get back to work quickly.
“Would you rather have a lawyer who is billing $500 an hour be gone half the day for a doctor’s appointment or have Sickday come to your office?” said Aaron Baca, the C.E.O. of Sickday. “This mirrors people’s lifestyles better. People don’t want to wait to be seen.”

Recalls Make Toy Shopping a Source of Anxiety

“Get this, Mommy,” said Thalia, 2, on a recent morning at a Target in Brooklyn, as she handed her mother, Liz Gumbinner, a plastic horse made by the Schleich company.
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Ruby Washington/The New York Times
Thalia, 2, at a Target in Brooklyn, where her mother, Liz Gumbinner, made sure to check where the toys were made.
“We have a lot of these; they’re made in Germany,” Ms. Gumbinner said, then checked a white sticker on the hoof and shook her head. “No, it’s made in China. I’ve been misled by the German name.”
With more than 20 million toys manufactured in China recalled for lead paint and other hazards this summer — and some children being hospitalized after swallowing the magnets of recalled toys — a lot more parents are looking carefully at what they buy and where it comes from. But it is not easy to find many exceptions to the rule that most toys come from China.
Ms. Gumbinner pulled a package of Lincoln Logs off a shelf. “If these are made in China, I’ll be upset,” she said. “No, China. I was holding out hope that something called ‘Lincoln’ would be American.”
As the holiday season nears, parents are waiting for Barbie’s other plastic shoe to drop. When a Mattel toy is recalled for having lead paint, should they avoid just that toy, or all Mattel toys, or all painted toys from China, or all toys from China? Or, since Mattel admitted recently that the problem with loose magnets is not in the manufacturing process but with Mattel’s domestic design, is anxiety toward China misdirected?
“Nobody wants to be a paranoid parent,” said Ms. Gumbinner, 39, of Brooklyn Heights, who works as a creative director for a Los Angeles advertising agency and is a co-founder of the site coolmompicks.com. “I mean, where do you draw the line between cautionary and crazy?”
Other than purging the toy chest of all recalled products, many parents are at a loss. The steady drumbeat of recalls over the last three months has led some parents to wonder whether it is just a matter of time before more of their children’s playthings will be found hazardous.
In the absence of hard and fast rules, the range of reactions has been mixed. Some parents are shrugging off the potential danger as remote or unavoidable. Others are going out of their way to avoid anything even faintly suspicious.
Among the signs that concerns are escalating: pediatricians and health centers report that more parents are bringing their children in for lead tests, which doctors say are never a bad idea.
From June, when the first Thomas the Tank Engine lead-paint recall was issued, through August, the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, for example, conducted 3,046 lead tests, an increase of 81 percent from the 1,684 in the period last year.
And some parents are trying to test their children’s toys themselves. Sales of a First Alert home lead test are up 900 percent over last year, according to the company. On Thursday, the product was the 17th best seller in the broad Home Improvement category on Amazon.com, although some product safety experts say that home tests are unreliable.
In an effort to offer some guideposts for parents, retailers like F.A.O. Schwarz are highlighting countries of origin of their merchandise. EBay, where used toys that have been recalled occasionally pop up for sale, recently began directing bidders to toy company recall lists.
Some people are thinking twice before buying used toys. “My girlfriends and I are concerned about going to garage sales, and people are actually staying away,” said Beth Blecherman, who lives in Menlo Park, Calif., and helps run a blog called Silicon Valley Moms. “You hope that toys in stores have been vetted, but how do you know if something you get at a garage sale has been recalled? This has really ruined the whole secondary market for toys.”
Even in the market for new toys, shoppers are puzzled. Is a toy that is assembled in China from parts manufactured elsewhere any safer than one made entirely in China? Does a “made in Indonesia” label inspire any greater confidence?
“I think people are kind of stunned because they don’t know what to do,” said Greg Allen, who writes a blog for fathers, daddytypes.com, and has a 3-year-old daughter. “You can’t just cut out every made-in-China toy. It’s just not realistic.”
On a recent visit to the Toys “R” Us in Times Square, Mr. Allen paused at a section of Playmobil toys, which he said are popular at his house. He trusts the brand because the toys are made in Europe and known for high quality, but he said that the recent spate of recalls has made him question even those assumptions.
“The Thomas the Tank Engine recalls were shocking,” he said. “Then when the Fisher-Price recalls hit, that’s when the problem of the lack of regulations started to become clear.”
As for what all this portends for holiday toy shopping, retailers are unclear, and many parents are trying to figure out how to proceed.
“I don’t think the industry is going to see a big nose dive in terms of dollars,” said Lane Nemeth, who founded Discovery Toys in 1978 and sold the company to Avon a decade ago. “You’re still going to want gifts under the tree at Christmas. There’s just going to be a shift in what people buy.”
Ms. Nemeth said that if she had a toddler, “I’d avoid anything that is painted — I’d just wait until the industry shakes itself out.” Besides, she said, “by bringing home wooden blocks that are unpainted, you’re probably helping your child’s creativity.”
But plain wooden blocks alone probably will not satisfy most toddlers. Danielle Wiley, a 33-year-old publicist in Chicago, recalls a recent tantrum that her 2-year-old son, Max, had in the bathtub.
“I knew a new toy would help,” Ms. Wiley said, but the only one in the house was a Fisher-Price Diego toy that had just been recalled for lead paint. Nevertheless, “I handed him the toy and he stopped,” she said. After the bath, she said, she discarded the toy.
Back in the toy aisle at Target in Brooklyn, Ms. Gumbinner was examining a toy car made by Mattel from the Pixar movie “Cars,” when another shopper, Dunia Sunnreich, a stranger to her, offered some unsolicited advice.
“I don’t think that one’s in the recall, but another one in the series, Sarge, is,” said Ms. Sunnreich, who was shopping for her 3-year-old son, Simon. “I’m glad I can get online on my phone — otherwise I’d have to carry around an extra little bag just for the recall lists. It’s total madness.”

Assembled Off Site, the Somewhat Homemade Family Dinner

MEALS can get a little fraught around our home. I like cooking, but often run out of time and creativity. My younger son has become increasingly picky, so that he now suspiciously examines every morsel of food, worried I have slipped in an onion or maybe polonium.
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Alan S. Orling for The New York Times

Eager to abandon the takeout treadmill, or even worse, the expensive eating-out habit, I was looking for different dinner options. I had heard of places that supply all the recipes and ingredients. You just put the components together and bring the meals home to cook.
While searching for these places on the Web, I had to figure out what they were called. Prepared meals? Meals to go? No, it is meal assembly, a strange phrase, but one that has become increasingly popular in the last several years. There is even an association, the Easy Meal Prep Association, that says about 1,149 such stores exist nationwide. That is up from four stores in 2002.
I went to www.easymealprep.com and clicked on Directory. A search showed five meal assembly places within a 20-mile area.
I called my friend Nancy Winkelstein, who has a certificate in holistic health counseling, to join me.
While I sometimes read the ingredients on cans — although not with the microscopic intensity of some of my friends — and I more or less know (if not always adhere) to what is considered healthy, she could offer the more critical insight.
We went to Let’s Dish in Scarsdale, N.Y., part of what is now the sixth-largest chain of meal assembly places, with 33 outlets across the country. Dream Dinners is No. 1, with 225 franchises, and Super Suppers, with 207, is No. 2, according to Bert Vermeulen, founder of the Easy Meal Prep Association.
Let’s Dish required a four-meal minimum for $94, with each meal serving four to six people; I had ordered ahead on their Web site (www.letsdish.com). Other places like the Super Suppers near me (www.supersuppers.com) do not have minimums and welcome walk-ins.
Nancy and I were allowed to share the meals. Each recipe, propped up on the counter where we were preparing the meal, has two sides — one for the whole portion and one if you are splitting it.
We were first asked to don bandannas and aprons and wash our hands, and also instructed to wash our hands between each meal we prepared. We went to the first station, where the raw pork cutlets awaited for our pork piccata with linguine.
The measuring spoons are color-coded for size; the necessary ingredients were all sitting out in plastic containers, chopped or grated as dictated, or in the refrigerated compartment below the counter.
It felt a bit like playing house. Measure, mix, put in the plastic bag, set aside, measure, mix, stir. The closest we got to cooking was melting butter (precut) in the microwave.
At the end of an hour, we had four meals, wrapped in plastic and foil containers labeled with cooking instructions. We left the dirty bowls and measuring spoons for someone else to wash.
Nancy was pleased that the ingredients at Let’s Dish, like chicken base, were mostly natural and did not have a lot of additives. Nutritional information for all meals is listed on the Web site.
But she did not (and I agree) like the environmental waste. In many cases there seemed to be an excessive use of plastic bags to wrap items.
“My bottom line is there is nothing I did there that I couldn’t as quickly and as easily do at home in the same amount of time,” she said. “It didn’t have the fresh herbs and had less fresh vegetables than I had hoped for.”
She acknowledged, however, that she probably cooks more at home than most people, and “it’s a step up for people who don’t cook,” she said.
But those who like such places really like them. Suzanne Kelly and Lisa Marinelli, both elbow deep in raw meat, said they had been coming to Let’s Dish for about six months, often with five or six friends.
“It’s a lot easier than going to the cookbook,” Ms. Kelly said. “And for the cleanup, we just walk away. And I haven’t made one thing that my children say is icky or yucky.”
Like many such places, Let’s Dish will cater to specific diets like wheat-free or kosher, and play host to meal-making parties. I did wonder about the quality of the meat; the owner, Terese Hunersen, said the chicken was free of hormones and antibiotics, although the beef was not.
“We’re working on that,” she said. All the meat is also fresh, not frozen, although some of the vegetables are flash frozen.

Seeking a Joint Effort for Greener Athletic Shoes

Jeffrey B. Swartz, the chief executive of Timberland, is frustrated.
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JEFFREY B. SWARTZ
He has seen makers of athletic shoes and outdoor wear — companies like Nike, Patagonia and certainly his own — act in concert to end child labor practices. And he has seen these companies use more organic cotton and use solar and wind energy.
But he has yet to see an industrywide effort to adopt the greenest methods for making, transporting and selling shoes. Green technologies are readily available, he says, but shoe companies have been excruciatingly slow to adopt them.
The main reason, he says he suspects, is that while most of the industry’s chiefs really do care about environmental issues, they are indulging in parallel play.
In a recent conversation, Mr. Swartz elaborated on why his industry will make environmental progress only if its chiefs agree to an industry standard for greenness and use their combined clout to get their suppliers to meet it.
Following are excerpts:
Q. Shoe companies easily collaborate on human rights issues, so why are they having such a hard time with environmental matters?
A. When you are talking about child labor laws, for example, people from the manufacturing team or from the social enterprise team take charge. And at that level there are wonderful informal networks among the companies.
It’s not Timberland and Patagonia collaborating, its Betsy from Timberland networking with Casey from Patagonia. Its activist to activist, not company to company. The companies are sponsors, but not originators of ideas.
That works for some environmental issues, too, of course. Nike developed a way to gasify waste leather for use as fuel, and someone from their team told someone from our team about it.
We’re putting gasification online at our Dominican Republic plant.
Q. Why wouldn’t that same approach work for adopting other environmentally sound practices?
A. Very few of us do our own manufacturing. Probably 90 percent of the footwear sold in America is made by the same five or six global manufacturers, who are operating out of huge manufacturing complexes that serve many clients.
We all probably use Pou Chen in China, for example. So sure, I can go to the head of Pou Chen and say, “Why don’t you try wind energy? I use it in the Dominican Republic.”
But then another customer says, “No, try solar energy.” We need to go as an industry and say, “We’ll invest with you to explore greener energy.”
And lower-level people cannot make that kind of commitment.
Q. In other words, you should band together to apply pressure on suppliers. But aren’t your customers — the retailers and the consumers — applying that kind of pressure on all of you to provide “green” shoes?
A. Not really. We ask people who just bought a pair of shoes how they made their choice, and the immediate answer is that the price was right, or they liked the look or the color.
Ask people what they know about the human rights or environmental track record of the brand they just bought, and they walk away. People buy on the basis of product attributes, not brand attributes.
Q. But why must they make that choice? Wouldn’t consumers flock to an environmentally friendly shoe that is also fashionable and inexpensive?
A. They wouldn’t avoid it. But as an industry, we position our products as more waterproof, or worn by the hottest celebrities. We haven’t positioned environmental attributes as aspirational, as qualities that will make people who buy our shoes feel good about themselves.
The result is that people may think of green shoes as things that they should buy, but not necessarily as things that they want to buy.
It’s like community service — people have come to think of that as something that judges force celebrity drunk drivers to do, not as something that people joyfully embrace. It’s all couched in terms of guilt and penalties, not in terms of aspirational activities.
Q. But how could even a coordinated collaboration of shoe industry chiefs break through such strong psychological resistance?
A. If the industry breaks through its own resistance, the consumers will follow.
We could start by developing industrywide standards. Timberland has begun putting green index tags on some of our shoes, which show how they rate in terms of their impact on the environment. We hope to eventually have tags on all of them. And we hope other shoe companies will adopt similar tags.
If we all make the tags bold and colorful, shoppers will notice them. And if they are on all the shoe boxes, it will become automatic for shoppers to compare green tags among brands, just like they compare price and color.
And then they’ll notice which boxes aren’t labeled, and they’ll ask the sales associate why not. The sales associate will tell the store’s buyer, who will call the manufacturer and ask for labeling, just like they now call and insist on colors or styles.
When that happens, we’ll all be fighting to have the best tag. No car company wants to be known for the worst gas mileage, and no shoe company will want to be known for the least environmentally friendly shoes.
Q. So why don’t you get the collaborative ball rolling, and convene a meeting of your chief executive counterparts?
A. Good question. Our competitors are so much bigger than we are, and that makes me reluctant to place the call. But maybe I really should do less lamenting that C.E.O.’s aren’t getting together, and pick up a phone. Maybe that’s the answer: I should lament less and dial more.