Once I came out of my daze from being at beautiful outdoor lunch where I met lots of great CJU attendees, I started to focus more on gathering some information and less on schmoozing.

The Monday afternoon sessions offered a more in-depth look at Commission Junction’s path. “Take a Ride on Commission Junction’s Roadmap” led by Frank Gerstenberger, CJ’s director of product development, offered a glimpse into what’s in store over the next 12 months.

The company is still working hard at creating a single platform that combines the best features of BeFree and CJ Marketplace. No word on exactly when that will be completed. The key areas of focus are reporting initiatives, Web Services, relationship management and action life cycle.

For the remaining half of 2005, the company is looking at implementing Phase 2 of its reporting initiative, which includes more robust reporting and tracking features. The company is working to offer new transaction reports for a greater view into transactions. They want publishers to be just two clicks away from seeing all the data they are most concerned about when it comes to their transactions. The new tools will also let advertisers view top relationships and how those are trending. The ability to create new reports and share them will also be available.

Web Services offerings will enable customers to access systems via a programmatic interface using industry standards. This means that CJ clients will be able to simplify the building of solutions that are simple or complex - such as catalog data. They will also be able to publish that data and include links, advertiser details, etc. There were more details on this in a later session, which I had to skip as it overalapped with another session.

There was also lots of talk about insuring network quality by automating some of the processes and enhancing the publisher’s application process.
I have some more info on those features as well as the relationship management functionality, but I’ll have to discuss more later this week.

Right now I’m having some wirless connection difficulties and CJ’s technical staff has generously let me use their lab facilities at the conference (Thank you, Todd!!) so I need to wrap this up and before the first session starts and I’m kicked out.

Anyway, on to the Horizon Awards, which were given out Monday night at a lovely ceremony under the stars. The reception was great. I got to put a lot of faces with the voices I talked to on the phone and exchange email with. There was some mighty good mixing and mingling.

BTW: Congrats to Beth Kirsch on her new job at LowerMyBills.com. Welcome to sunny California.

The actual awards part of the reception was short and sweet. No acceptance speeches. There were three categories: People, Greatness and Innovation:

Without further ado…drum roll, please…

In the People category: the winner for advertiser was Real Networks. The winner for publisher was CouponCabin.com.

In the category of Greatness: the advertiser winner was LowerMyBills.com. The winner on the publisher side was Ravenwood Marketing.

In the Innovation category the winner was publisher Jeremy Palmer for his site QuitYourDayJob.com. And in the first-ever Global Vision category the award went to eBay.

Ok, now I have to rush off to more sessions this morning. No matter how much I want to I can’t be blogging all day folks.

Let me know if you were at CJU and have something interesting you want to share. lisap@revenuetoday.com