Earlier this week, Mozilla launched the latest version of Firefox. The news got plenty of people (including me) excited about the updated look, feel and features of version 29.

You may have heard about the Heartbleed OpenSSL vulnerability in the news. This particular vulnerability affected (and may still affect) approximately 70% of the websites on the Internet, BrandVerity included.

It’s always hard to fully take in everything from a conference. There are so many people to meet, conversations to have, and things to learn, that it can be tough to retain everything. That’s why I always try to jot down some notes at the end of each day—just to keep reminders about what I learned and what happened over the course of the day. Here are some of the key points I remember from the recent Affiliate Management Days in San Francisco.

BrandVerity is thrilled to announce the launch of Content Monitoring! We've been developing, testing and iterating on Content Monitoring for months now, so we're happy to share this news. We think Content Monitoring will be a very useful tool for ensuring that the content on your affiliates' and partners' sites is compliant with your policies—streamlining your process and saving your team valuable time.

We're excited to announce the launch of our new custom processes with Google and Bing! These processes enable us to provide feedback directly from the search engines about the status of your trademark complaints, giving you better visibility into your results whenever you report a trademark violation through our system. Our hope is that these new improvements will make it easier than ever to protect your brand from third-party trademark abusers in paid search.

The Oscars are fast-approaching and will air this Sunday, March 2nd. Web searches for related terms tend to spike in the days leading up to the show, and this year seems to be no exception. Just check out this Google Trends graph and you can see the uptick starting to form.

Valentine's Day sure seems to bring out the creativity from paid search teams. Maybe it's easier to stand out when so many advertisers are using the traditional jewelry and chocolates narratives, or perhaps it's just fun to manufacture relevance to the topic of love.

This year's Super Bowl broke a record for online streaming. More people than ever chose to watch the game online, with an average of 528,000 devices tuning into Fox's online broadcast each minute.

Yahoo made an interesting move a few years ago by introducing branded favicons for certain paid listings. The concept made a lot of sense at the time (and to this day). Not only would the new visual element encourage clicks—it would also add a level of trust for the searcher. Considering the potential for brand confusion with search ads (via tactics like ad hijacking, search arbitrage, and various other forms of trademark abuse), this was a win-win for brands and consumers alike. Brands could make themselves stand out. Consumers could be assured that they were heading to their intended destination.

2013 brought a number of interesting twists and turns for the affiliate marketing industry. We experienced the abrupt shutdown of the Google Affiliate Network, some tough new questions to answer about disclosure, and even a public denigration of the entire industry as a "scam".