Sports Field Holdings, Inc. (OTCQB: SFHI), through wholly-owned subsidiary FirstForm, Inc., is a product development company focused primarily on the design and construction of athletic facilities and the commercialization of its proprietary PrimePlay™ synthetic turf products within the sports industry. The FirstForm brand, which was originally announced in April of this year, highlights SFHI’s position at the forefront of the U.S. turf industry, which is bolstered by the company’s unwavering commitment to putting the safety and experiences of athletes first, through both product and facility innovation. To date, this commitment to excellence has played a key role in SFHI’s success in securing a number of high-profile jobs across the country, including playing surfaces at the ESPN Sport Science Lab in Burbank, California, and the renowned IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida.

“Our new brand communicates to both current customers and potential customers that we continue to put our customer FIRST as we help them to FORM their vision into reality,” Jeromy Olson, chief executive officer of SFHI, stated in a news release earlier this year. “We look forward to providing continued excellence in our products and the delivery of world-class athletic facilities to the entire community of sport across the nation.”

Just before unveiling its rebranding efforts, SFHI announced that it was awarded its largest purchase order in company history for the creation or replacement of eight athletic fields owned by Richland County School District One in Columbia, South Carolina. The company beat out five major competitors to land the $5.8 million purchase order, and it’s successfully capitalized on the momentum provided by this contract in recent months.

In August, SFHI’s new PrimePlay™ turf systems were highlighted as a favorable alternative to potentially dangerous crumb rubber turf fields by the National Council of Youth Sports (NCYS), which represents over 200 member organizations serving more than 60 million registered youth athletes. FirstForm, Inc. was also approved by the NCYS as a ‘Recommended Provider’ of the replicated grass systems. In a recent news release, Olson took the opportunity to point out the important differences between existing crumb rubber turf products and SFHI’s PrimePlay™ alternatives.

“Existing crumb rubber turf products on the market are known to contain carcinogens, and their safety has been challenged by numerous national agencies,” he noted. “FirstForm’s infill products are all natural and organic and do not shift during play. We believe they are better and safer than anything else out there and can be tailored to nearly every sport.”

Leveraging this versatility, the company has also made moves to capitalize on new and emerging market opportunities by targeting the fast-growing indoor soccer and lacrosse facilities markets. This strategy appears to be sound, particularly when studying the current sports landscape across the country. According to data from IBISWorld, the indoor sports facilities market is valued at more than $900 million, and no companies currently have a dominant share of the niche. In order to better position itself within this market, SFHI has enlisted recognizable brand ambassadors from across the sporting community, including future NFL Hall of Famer Ray Lewis and former MLB pitcher Rick Honeycutt.

With a proven track record across multiple sports on both indoor and outdoor projects, SFHI’s potential for growth in the coming years is immense, and demand for sports turf appears to be on course to support this performance. According to a 2015 report by research firm ReportsnReports.com (http://dtn.fm/4QUwK), rising demand for quality playing surfaces is expected to spur a compound annual growth rate of 12 percent for the global artificial grass turf market from 2015 to 2019. With ongoing investigations into the safety of existing crumb rubber turf products, this forecast positions SFHI to greatly expand its market share moving forward.

“The safety and risks associated with crumb rubber remain an unknown to athletes, parents, and athletic facilities nationally, and we at Sports Field support the government’s investigation into their long-term health impacts,” concluded Olson. “We are pleased to be installing our unique alternatives with PrimePlay™. Our rubberless Replicated Grass™ and similar sport-specific turf products offer a compelling, crumb rubber-free solution in the industry.”

For more information, visit http://ir.firstform.com

Medical practice has come a long way since the time when barber surgeons doctored to the masses. Physicians, in those early times, mostly attended to the wealthy. The ordinary man would have his blood let by the same tradesman who cut his hair. And although they had to earn a daily bread, no physician, presumably, took up the vocation because he considered it a business. Business enterprise was deemed vulgar and beneath one who took the Hippocratic Oath.

Today that stigma no longer stains commercial endeavor. The good medical practitioner can be a good businessperson as well. In fact, the modern Doctor of Medicine (MD), Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (DO), Nurse Practitioner (NP) or Licensed Midwife (LM) must be. And the suite of Electronic Health Record (EHR), revenue cycle, transcription and data management applications from Medical Transcription Billing, Corp. (NASDAQ: MTBC) (NASDAQ: MTBCP) is helping those professionals be just that. In the healthcare information technology (HIT) market, the cloud-based business administration solutions from MTBC are proving to be quite a hit.

The healthcare landscape is rapidly changing. As in other industries, information technology is altering methodologies and holding out the promise to improve the quality of services while keeping costs down. The industry is under a mandate to move from a fee-for-service approach to a value-based reimbursement one. Under fee-for-service, providers are paid on volume: number of visits, number of tests, etc. With value-based reimbursement, other more sophisticated quality control metrics will be used.

To manage the data generated by these new performance measures requires wholesale adoption of new information technologies. In addition, there is an imperative for providers to move to electronic health record (EHR) systems. The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, enacted as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, provides incentives and penalties to physicians and others to adopt EHRs. These two developments have given rise to a virtually new field of healthcare information technology.

The chief financial officer of MTBC, Bill Korn, discussed the implications of these forces for the company with The Wall Street Transcript (TWST) (http://dtn.fm/u096T) and the opportunities lying ahead. Korn, a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School, has been with Medical Transcription Billing since June 2013. He was a co-founder of the IBM Consulting Group, now IBM Global Services, the creation of which marked IBM’s highly successful transition from hardware to services. Korn has been CFO of six other growing technology businesses.

He described MTBC’s business:

“MTBC is a health care IT company. Our clients are doctors’ practices. We typically work with smaller practices, meaning one- to 10-doctor practices, and we provide them with a variety of services. We do their billing, submitting all the claims to insurance, preparing and mailing statements to their patients, and giving them electronic health record software that allows them to record notes of the visit. We provide practice management software for the front office staff to schedule appointments, check insurance eligibility, send out automated reminder calls and text messages about flu shots, etc.”

In addition to these services, practitioners and patients have access to a suite of mobile applications, including apps that the doctors can use to refill prescriptions, apps that the patients can use to look up their records, set up appointments, request prescription refills and check in when they arrive at the practice. Doctors who do not want to type their notes into the EHR can dictate into an app on their iPhone or Android, which will be sent automatically to MTBC personnel, who will listen to it and type the notes into the electronic health record software.

MTBC’s main competitive advantage is its ability and track record to deliver these services effectively and at a cost far less than any competitor. Part of the reason for this, Korn pointed out, is that the company has bought or established a number of overseas subsidiaries, sourcing expertise and talent for much less than is obtainable in the U.S. MTBC’s two largest offices are in Pakistan ‘where we employ 1,500 people at salaries of approximately one-tenth what you would pay in the United States for similarly skilled and educated labor.’

MTBC had 2015 revenues of $23.1 million, an increase of 26 percent over 2014. Now Korn wants to make a quantum leap to $230 million. Can MTBC pull it off?

According to a MarketsandMarkets report (http://dtn.fm/XoA2B), the global healthcare IT market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 13.4 percent over the next five years, from $117.7 billion in 2015 to $228.8 billion in 2020. Getting just 0.1 percent of that pie five years down the road would certainly do it.

For more information, visit www.mtbc.com, and see the company’s fact sheet at http://ir.mtbc.com/events.cfm.

Earlier today, eXp World Holdings, Inc. (OTCQB: EXPI), through eXp Realty, announced the latest addition to its Agent-Owned Cloud Brokerage® – Darren James of Darren James Real Estate Experts in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In his 15 years operating in the real estate industry, James has earned a number of noteworthy honors, including being named the number one REALTOR® in the Gulf States region for total individual production in both 2014 and 2015. His brokerage has recorded similar success, with the Darren James Real Estate Experts team having been ranked just outside the top 50 in terms of transactions by the Wall Street Journal in 2015.

“The eXp Realty business model is more progressive and agent-centric than any I’ve seen in my 15 years in this business,” James noted in this morning’s news release. “This is a tremendous opportunity, not just for me and for my family, but for all of the agents who have been great and loyal contributors to my success.”

James will be officially introduced to the eXp Realty community during this week’s leadership meeting, which can be viewed on the company’s YouTube channel (http://dtn.fm/mg5PA) on Friday at 11:00 am ET.

eXp Realty has been in a period of rapid growth for much of 2016, and it continues to attract leading real estate professionals from across North America with its aggressive revenue sharing program and collaborative, cloud-based resources. Earlier this month, the company announced that its family of agents and brokers had grown to include more than 1,900 members across 41 markets in the United States and Canada, representing an increase of roughly 120 percent from the beginning of this year. EXPI aims to build on this growth throughout the balance of 2016, expanding beyond 2,200 agents by year end.

“Increasingly, eXp Realty is the destination for top producing teams and for brokerage owners looking to increase profitability, achieve scalable growth across markets, and deliver the opportunity of ownership to their valued agents and team members,” Jason Gesing, chief executive officer of eXp Realty, stated in this morning’s news release. “As a company, we are committed to offering a value proposition that is so strong that it would be professionally irresponsible for an agent to affiliate with any other brokerage.”

The announcement that Darren James and his real estate team have joined the Agent-Owned Cloud Brokerage® comes on the heels of two similar announcements over the past two weeks. On October 14, the company announced the addition of Miguel Herrera, the top international luxury agent in all of South Texas, to the eXp team. EXPI followed up on this announcement on October 17 when Sacramento’s Brent Gove team, one of the top real estate teams in California, joined the growing brokerage company. The opportunity for agents and brokers to become owners through eXp Realty’s innovative business model is proving enticing for top real estate professionals from a number of markets.

“The eXp Realty business model is the strongest in the industry,” Herrera noted in a recent news release. “This is the future of real estate and I want to be a part of it.”

For more information, visit the company’s website at www.eXpWorldHoldings.com

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Before the opening bell, OurPet’s Company (OTCQX: OPCO) reported record revenue of $7.26 million for the fiscal quarter ended September 30, 2016, marking a year-over-year increase of 21 percent. The company’s net income for the three-month period of $495,669, or $0.025 per share, was also up 21 percent from the previous year. All told, when discounting the effects of a one-time U.S. Custom exam refund of $94,000 that was received during the third quarter of 2015, OPCO’s adjusted net income grew by a staggering 57 percent between the third quarters of 2015 and 2016. Dr. Steven Tsengas, president and chief executive officer of OurPet’s Company, reiterated the strong results in this morning’s update.

“With the resumption of shipments to our major specialty pet retail customer, we were firing on all cylinders this past quarter,” he stated. “With the strong third-quarter sales, we are up almost 10% for the nine months of 2016, more than double the pet industry average.”

To view OurPet’s Company’s full third quarter results, visit http://dtn.fm/WxAE3

Over the years, OurPet’s Company has established a position in the growing global pet products industry through a commitment to quality and innovation, and this dedication played a key role in the company’s third quarter growth. Leveraging a sizable intellectual property portfolio that includes more than 170 patents in either issued or pending status, OPCO recently commenced initial shipments of both its environmentally-friendly Switchgrass Natural Cat Litter™ with BioChar (http://dtn.fm/SeMk8) and its technology-powered Intelligent Pet Care™ product line (http://dtn.fm/jPs9U). Based upon the early market acceptance of these innovations and initial sales bookings for the month of October, OPCO’s management team is currently “guardedly optimistic” about the company’s prospects for sustained growth in the fourth quarter of 2016 and beyond.

“Beyond 2016, our strategy is to achieve double-digit growth in sales and net income with an emphasis on developing and launching proprietary, innovative products and entering appropriate new market segments,” continued Tsengas.

Central to these development efforts is a newly-announced partnership with Paulee Cleantec Ltd., an international leader in eco-friendly solutions for the management of human and animal waste. Through this partnership, the two companies will seek to jointly develop and commercialize a portable solution to the growing environmental concerns associated with improperly managed pet waste. Paulee Cleantec has already developed a powerful proof-of-concept waste system that uses an exothermic oxidation process to “convert animal feces into an odor-free ash fertilizer in less than a minute.”

“In addition, we recently completed contracts with a leading direct TV (DRTV) marketing company to test market several of our new electronic interactive cat toys for a possible DRTV campaign to launch sometime in the second quarter of 2017,” added Tsengas. “We have many ‘irons in the fire’ and are very excited about the future.”

For more information, visit the company’s website at www.OurPets.com

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Leading healthcare information technology provider Medical Transcription Billing, Corp. (NASDAQ: MTBC; MTBCP) this month completed its acquisition of medical billing company MediGain in a move widely expected to significantly boost its overall revenue in 2017 and offer improved services to its now enhanced customer base. According to Medical Transcription Billing Chief Financial Officer Bill Korn, the $7 million acquisition of Texas-based MediGain, LLC and its New Jersey subsidiary Millennium Practice Management, LLC, is the largest acquisition in the history of his company.

Medical Transcription Billing has made an initial payment of $2 million for the MediGain assets and will pay an additional $5 million in early 2017. This is a significant discount compared to the industry norm of greater than one times revenue, Korn explained. For organic growth, one of the largest IT companies in the healthcare industry, athenahealth (NASDAQ: ATHN), spent roughly $230 million on sales and marketing last year, with a revenue growth of $172 million, so MTBC paid less than others might spend to grow the business organically.

The deal marks a major corporate milestone for MTBC and shows the power of its acquisition-based growth strategy, Korn said. He added that the revenue cycle management customer accounts and other assets acquired from MediGain have annual revenues of more than $10 million, which is expected to contribute significantly to Medical Transcription Billing’s revenue growth in 2017. In turn, the company expects to greatly improve its operations and services as a direct result of this revenue growth, which will most likely push MTBC further up the list of top providers of technological solutions to the healthcare industry, alongside companies such as athenahealth. In addition, the profits resulting from the MediGain acquisition are expected to exceed the company’s capital costs, so the transaction should be accretive to the shareholders next year.

Another direct result of the MediGain acquisition is the expansion of Medical Transcription Billing’s team. The acquisition enabled the company to add many new members to its North America team and expand its team in Asia to additional countries such as India and Sri Lanka, where there is a highly-qualified and cost effective medical billing workforce. In Sri Lanka, for instance, MTBC now has the largest team of healthcare technology professionals in the country. Also part of the acquisition, MediGain’s former chief operating officer, Gary Smith, will now lead MediGain Practice Management.

As it integrates MediGain and the new revenue cycle management customer accounts, Medical Transcription Billing will continue to leverage its proprietary technology and global team of professionals to improve operations and provide world-class service to all its clients. The company is already serving a wide range of healthcare entities and customers, from individual physicians to medium size medical practices, and has partnered with various healthcare organizations to expand its reach nationwide and globally.

For the Seeking Alpha article on MTBC’s Acquisition of MediGain, visit http://dtn.fm/Nb3Uj, and see http://dtn.fm/b3BMx for additional articles relating to MTBC.

For more information, visit www.MTBC.com

A constant theme that comes up in and often dominates the leading edge of the biopharma sector is the building of better mousetraps. This is certainly the case for New Jersey-based biopharma developer ContraVir Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: CTRV), whose phase 2a clinical antiviral candidate CMX157 (http://dtn.fm/sQXh9) is knocking loudly on the door of Gilead Sciences’ (NASDAQ: GILD) Viread® (TDF, or tenofovir disoproxil fumarate) in chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV).

Coming out of the box strong after notably successful phase 1 safety and efficacy trials, ContraVir was quite proud to recently announce (http://dtn.fm/8NxXL) that the ongoing head-to-head phase 2a (multiple ascending dose) clinical study of its highly potent prodrug of tenofovir (TFV), CMX157, is showing serious potential versus Viread. With data points like a 99 percent reduction in viral load (http://dtn.fm/vtJ59) among patients orally dosed with 25 mg of CMX157, compared to a 300 mg TDF dose, the company is obviously excited about CMX157’s ability to deliver significant viral load reduction safely, at a much lower dose. Delimiting systemic/liver toxicity issues has long been the industry brass ring, and it now looks like that goal is considerably within CTRV’s striking distance.

ContraVir sees CMX157 as the backbone of a rapidly emerging combination therapy approach to HBV, where the liver-targeting capabilities of its prodrug candidate help to reduce impact to other tissue systems. There are a list of significant potential advantages for CMX157 over something like Viread at the point of sale, and ContraVir is bucking hard to not only cure HBV, but slice off an ever larger piece of the global HBV therapeutics market, a market that is on track to do a modest 2.4% CAGR through 2024, when it will reach upwards of $3 billion (http://dtn.fm/Y6Qux). The enhanced bioavailability of CMX157’s novel structure compared to existing indications (which also helps deal with liver damage by reducing the indication’s overall circulatory footprint), is now starting to really come to light through the latest clinical results.

Early on, when the company began touting CMX157’s ability to exploit natural lipid uptake mechanisms, and how this candidate showed in vitro HBV aggression 97 times greater than TFV during its phase 1 days, investors should’ve been paying closer attention. The data from this latest clinical work is consistent with extant data stretching back to preclinical work on CMX157, and with around 786,000 people dying worldwide each year (http://dtn.fm/0dQoF) (mostly due to HBV-related liver disease like cirrhosis and liver cancer) from HBV, ContraVir’s work has become a hot topic. CMX157 has previously been found to be well tolerated at dosages up to 100 mg, so the fact that this stuff is basically doing Viread numbers at 25 mg already spells big things for the ongoing dose escalation work being conducted by CTRV.

CMX157 is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg that is ContraVir’s growing pipeline of candidates, a pipeline which includes an impressive next-gen cyclophilin inhibitor with enhanced potency and selectivity, known as CRV431 (http://dtn.fm/5pmBl). With IND-enabling study work in the offing and a target sometime next year for CRV431 clinical trials, CTRV is really shaping up to be one of the leading alternative HBV therapy developers. CRV431’s ability to attack the life cycle of HBV at numerous points along the arc is a key advantage, and that combination therapy strategy the company keeps pushing really starts to make sense when you take a closer look at the potential advantages of CRV431.

These advantages include a sharp reduction in HBV DNA (in vivo), without toxicity, meaning that liver fibrosis can be hugely downgraded as a complication. Pair that up with a demonstrated ability to actually block entry for HBV into liver cells, and it is little wonder that ContraVir is looking to the horizon for a combination approach with CMX157 as the situation commander, and ancillary indications like best-in-class potency CRV431 on street-sweeper detail. Talk about laying down cover fire: CRV431 is anticipated to be effective against all HBV genotypes, offers broad-spectrum blockage of a large portion of specific HBV protein interaction with host cell cyclophilins, and provides a clearly complementary method of action for CMX157.

In short, the company has both the vision and the technology to deliver on a promise to HBV patients that first became apparent with the emergence of what is now basically a lifetime cure for hepatitis C. The HBV field has been driving hard toward this goal, inspired by what has been done in hepatitis C, and it now appears that New Jersey’s own CTRV could be the one to run this ball into the end zone. Moreover, it was very encouraging to investors to see how the New Jersey Economic Development Authority’s highly competitive Technology Business Tax Certificate Transfer Program (which allows New Jersey-based companies to sell R&D tax credits or net operating losses for up to 80 percent of value), provided $1.8 million in non-dilutive funding (http://dtn.fm/ZiI0h) for CTRV, which has been instrumental for this homegrown biopharma success story to put the pedal to the metal on its HBV pipeline.

Hepatitis B is most prevalent in the regions of sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia, where as much as 10 percent of the population in certain areas is chronically infected. Globally, the number of infected ranges upwards of the CDC/WHO official figure of 240 million, and with as many as 2.2 million chronic hepatitis B cases in the U.S. alone, CTRV’s technology could mean that the company is sitting on a potential goldmine, a goldmine that could provide a beacon of hope for millions.

The broader therapeutics market for liver diseases was around $7.5 billion in 2014, and a recent report published by Grand View Research sees the antiviral segment as the most promising, with 8.9 percent growth anticipated through 2022 (http://dtn.fm/sLM3O). The overall liver disease therapy market is on track to surpass $12 billion during that same interval, with the Asia Pacific region expected to do a CAGR similar to the antiviral segment, running around 8.8 percent. There is a huge external market for CTRV, and the possibilities of pipeline commercialization are indeed tantalizing.

Many investors are already talking about how instrumental the addition of biotech veteran Thomas H. Adams, Ph.D., to the CTRV Board back in September has been with regard to all of this, by the way. After all, this is the guy who founded antisense biotech innovator Genta, as well as Gen-Probe, which was acquired by the same Chugai Pharmaceutical (http://dtn.fm/50p7O) that later ended up in a strategic alliance with biopharma juggernaut Roche (OTC: RHHBY). Even without addressing the company’s pivotal phase 3 trial of its FV-100 indication, engineered to reduce incident rates and severity of shingles (herpes zoster), as well as the severe post-herpetic neuralgia (PHN) pain associated with shingles – CTRV is the kind of near-commercialization contender that many biopharma investors dream of.

The market for FV-100 shows a lot of upside potential, in particular, due to a rapidly accumulating adult population across developed countries. In the U.S., the number of persons 65 years and older is projected to go from just 14.5 percent of the overall population two years ago, to 21.7 percent or more of total population by 2040 (http://dtn.fm/S874v). FV-100 has demonstrated safety and efficacy with clinically meaningful reduction in PHN rates versus GlaxoSmithKline’s (NYSE: GSK) Valtrex® (valacyclovir).

With as much as 10 percent fewer of 350 patients treated with FV-100 requiring some form of narcotics for pain control, this fast-acting, low-dose, once-daily, oral antiviral could really become one of CTRV’s money makers. PHN is the most common/clinically relevant complication with shingles, and FV-100’s pivotal phase 3 trial could spell much needed relief, especially for elderly patients who already have trouble sleeping, or who suffer from other quality of life-diminishing problems associated with shingles.

There is a lot to like about ContraVir, take a closer look by visiting www.Contravir.com

Before the opening bell, NetworkNewsWire (“NNW”), a multifaceted financial news and publishing company that delivers a new generation of communication solutions for business, announced the online availability of an interview with Bill Korn, chief financial officer of Medical Transcription Billing, Corp. (NASDAQ: MTBC; MTBCP). During the interview, Korn joined NNW’s Stuart Smith to discuss MTBC’s operations, recent achievements and the company’s ongoing execution of an acquisition-based growth strategy in order to maintain a competitive edge in the sizable healthcare IT market.

“MTBC has two cores strengths that distinguish us from most of the 1,500 other healthcare IT companies,” Korn explained in the interview. “We have an integrated cloud-based technology platform, which we developed in-house, and we have wholly owned offshore subsidiaries with 1,600 employees in four countries, with labor costs that average about 10% of the labor costs in the U.S. This allows us to provide services which are labor intensive even though we use our technology, and we can deliver these services much less expensively than our customers or competitors can provide them.”

To hear the full interview, visit http://nnw.fm/mtbc-interview-oct-2016

Thus far in 2016, MTBC has successfully achieved a number of milestones. The company has recorded three quarters of positive EBITDA since its IPO in 2014; raised $7.5 million of non-convertible stock on the NASDAQ; and, earlier this month, closed on the acquisition of MediGain, LLC and its Millennium Practice Management, LLC affiliate, marking MTBC’s largest acquisition to-date. The MediGain acquisition was not only completed at “a significant discount as compared to the industry norm,” according to Korn, it is also expected to play a major role in MTBC’s efforts to promote financial growth in the coming months, with the company’s CFO predicting that the acquisition “should be accretive to… shareholders in 2017.”

“We believe that our newly acquired business will contribute to our positive adjusted EBITDA by the first quarter of 2017,” Korn concluded. “By growing our overall revenue greatly through this acquisition, MTBC expects to generate significant operating leverage.”

For more information, visit www.MTBC.com

According to PSFK’s founder and editor-in-chief, Piers Fawkes (http://dtn.fm/Z7pRQ), “Travelers today are looking for an intuitive, rapid and personalized experience. They understand the trail of contextual data that surrounds them and they expect the smartest travel brands to leverage those data to serve them appropriately.” This is made more obvious by the fact that smaller companies are struggling to fully capitalize on the increasingly connected world we live in.

With Americans spending approximately $814 billion on domestic travel in 2015, according to the U.S. Travel Association (http://dtn.fm/52hVA), it is no wonder they are also investing a lot of time in planning these trips. But with advancements in technology, consumers are looking for a more unique and personalized but also more rapid travel planning experience.

CEO of the online fare aggregator Kayak, Steve Hafner, believes technologies are now changing how travelers book their holidays, saying that customers’ booking experiences will be less point-and-click websites, and more spoken word and chat bots. In an interview with CNBC’s On The Money (http://dtn.fm/uyN4x), he stated, “What we’re seeing is there’s a whole generation of people who are more familiar with text messaging and voice via Siri who are looking for a different interaction with an online travel agency.” Consumers have a need for more rapid, personalized, and mobile booking experiences, requiring companies to build more intelligent systems that offer a modern and on-the-go way for people to book their trips.

An example is Monaker Group’s (OTCQB: MKGI) NextTrip.com, a real-time booking engine that offers customers the opportunity to book various types of accommodation as well as flights, car rentals, tours, and more. NextTrip.com provides an all-in-one travel planner for every aspect of a person’s trip. The NextTrip planner enables travelers and holidaymakers to choose from some eight million trip ideas, and it gives users the opportunity to import bookings to one place on their mobile devices; discover a variety of nearby hotels, bars, and restaurants; save and attach important links to their devices; and collect travel money to split travel costs among friends and family. The free travel planner is an all-inclusive platform that is mobile friendly and allows consumers to book and save information about their trips, no matter where they are in the world.

For more information, visit www.MonakerGroup.com

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Short Message Service (SMS) or text messaging has come a long way since Friedhelm Hillebrand and Bernard Ghillebaert first proposed the concept in 1984. Now, according to the Pew Research Center (PRC), texting is the most widely and frequently employed application on a smartphone, with 97 percent of Americans using it at least once a day. Some 23 billion messages per day, or almost 16 million messages per minute, crisscross the globe, about 26 percent, or 6 billion, of which are in the U.S. Singlepoint, Inc. (OTC: SING) is gearing up to capitalize on that ubiquity with its Pay-by-Text™ technology.

This Australian University of Technology Sydney website (http://dtn.fm/LihH1) outlines some of the virtues of text messaging. Even the simplest of phones can handle the technology, because it was designed to work with early telephony systems. It was the first communications technology to offer guaranteed delivery. If a recipient is switched off, out of range or if there is a network outage, the SMS message will be stored in the network and delivered when the recipient announces its presence, or when the outage is rectified. SMS can be sent or received during voice or data calls since it makes use of a separate channel, which is normally used for transfer of control messaging to transfer its packets. Furthermore, the low-bandwidth required to transmit short alphanumeric strings allows messaging worldwide with very low latency.

OneReach (http://dtn.fm/6ra2L) sets out the many other advantages of SMS. It is widely accepted, with 96 percent of smartphone owners using text. And some 98 percent of text messages are opened by the recipient as opposed to the 20 percent open rate of email. Text messaging has a 45 percent response rate, while email only has a 6 percent response rate. 55 percent of heavy text message users (50+ texts per day) say they would prefer to receive a text rather than a phone call. (In 2011, the PRC found that 31 percent of Americans preferred text messages to phone calls.) And it takes the average person 90 minutes to respond to email, but only 90 seconds to respond to a text message. Text, it seems, is the new lingua franca of our communications technological age.

The Pay-by-Text™ technology by Singlepoint appears to have garnered the best features of both worlds. It makes payment transactions immeasurably easier, and it allows communications in the pithy ‘sound bite’ size appreciated by busy people.

Singlepoint’s Pay-by-Text solution enables merchants to offer a ‘swipe-less’ mobile payment option to their customers. The Pay-by-Text transaction takes place on the customer’s mobile phone, which means he or she can pay at any time and from anywhere. To set up payment, the customer just needs to text the vendor’s keyword to a five-digit number and, once set up, can essentially pay with one click on all future purchases. In addition, the app becomes a marketing tool. Once the customer has set up a Pay-by-Text account, the vendor can issue an invitation to receive text messages.

Singlepoint is in the initial stages of rolling out Pay-by-Text. For this service, the company will receive a monthly fee ranging from $10 to $100, depending on the merchant, and one percent of each transaction. Pay-by-Text was designed with temporary point-of-sale opportunities such as trade shows and farmers’ markets in mind. In the near-term, the company will focus most of its efforts on the donations market, in which the spontaneity of text messaging aptly matches the impulsive spirit with which many donations are made.

Singlepoint recently finalized the integration of Pay-by-Text with a backend payment platform from RedFynn Technologies. RedFynn provides payment-processing, point of sale, and payment solutions. Singlepoint now has the ability to provide all forms of credit card processing including Apple Pay, point-of-sale terminals, and cashless ATM. The 150,000 merchants using RedFynn’s payments technology are now automatically set up to offer Pay-by-Text, needing no additional setup.

For more information, visit the company’s website at www.Singlepoint.com

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Much has changed in the real estate industry over the past decade, with companies modifying everything from their offices and operations to the tools they use and their overall culture. Real estate companies have also changed the way they brand themselves in order to better target younger consumers looking for a more personalized buying or renting experience.

Traditionally, real estate companies have focused their branding on promoting awards and titles, such as being number one or becoming a top producer. Now, with generation X and Y part of the real estate market, things have changed. These younger markets don’t care much for titles and awards. While such new consumers are still passionate about becoming homeowners, they are looking for a wider range of services, coupled with online/mobile access to information.

Gone are the days when real estate agents could quickly and mechanically push clients through the sales funnel. Today, customers can easily switch companies, with no warning, and they expect the full package. They want someone who is going to support them, be knowledgeable, and, above all, is trustworthy from the moment they start searching for a home to the moment they finalize their transaction.

Moreover, customers are not the only ones whose needs have shifted. The requirements of real estate agents and brokers have also changed. Rather than needing an office, agents are more interested in quick availability of important resources. Advances in technology mean that they need instant access to a range of information to keep their clients satisfied, whether they are in an office or in the field.

Non-traditional offices are popping up, with agencies shifting toward smaller or, sometimes, no offices. In addition, they are now focusing solely on the consumer and using more “free” or inexpensive tools such as social media marketing applications, blogs, and search engine optimization (SEO) to reach the right audience.

eXp World Holdings, Inc. (OTCQB: EXPI), the Agent-Owned Cloud Brokerage™ that offers its services across the U.S. and Canada, has been powering higher in the industry for the better part of two years thanks to its ability to adapt to the changing perspectives of both consumers and the industry as a whole.

Through the company’s website, sellers list properties, while prospective buyers easily search real-time property listings, and both buyers and sellers have quick access to a network of professional, consumer-centric agents. EXPI has made significant operational changes compared to its competitors, shifting toward a more sustainable industry with virtual and on-the-go training techniques, virtual meeting platforms, and other tools that help agents and brokers collaborate and connect with consumers without depending upon brick and mortar facilities. Based on the changes the industry has experienced over the past decade, EXPI has tailored its services to perfectly suit buyers and sellers of the 21st century.

For more information, visit the company’s website at www.eXpWorldHoldings.com

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