NetZero 2011 Annual Report Download - page 20

Table of Contents
to recognize and act on trends. An internal quality assurance team monitors the performance of our customer support vendor and provides
feedback to improve their skills and establish consistency throughout our customer support functions.
Technology
Each of our services, including our floral network services, our online nostalgia services, our online loyalty marketing service, and our
Internet access services operates on a separate and distinct technology platform. Each of our services is generally provided through a
combination of internally-developed and third-party software, industry standard hardware and outsourced network services. We maintain the
web properties that power these services. We have internally-developed order processing, order transmission, message processing and customer
service systems which provide communication to our floral network members and third-party suppliers. We also have developed software to
enhance the functionality of certain components of our services, including connectivity, web services, billing, email, customer support, logistics
and fulfillment for floral products, data analysis, customer loyalty applications, and targeted advertising. We maintain data centers in multiple
locations in the U.S. and Europe. In most cases, we have redundant systems to provide high levels of service availability and connectivity. We
host or outsource the majority of our data center services in third-party, co-
location facilities and we outsource all of our bandwidth and managed
modem services.
We license from third parties a number of our software applications and components, including applications for our billing, customer
support, advertising, and database systems, our client and server applications, and portions of our dial-up Internet access accelerator services.
These licenses generally have terms ranging from several years to perpetual.
Government Regulations
We are subject to a number of international, federal, state, and local laws and regulations, including, without limitation, those relating to
taxation, bulk email or "spam," advertising, user privacy, data protection, and consumer protection. In addition, proposed laws and regulations
relating to some or all of the foregoing are continuously debated and considered for adoption in the U.S. and other countries, and such laws and
regulations could be adopted in the future. For additional information, see "Risk Factors," which appears in Item 1A of this Annual Report on
Form 10-K.
Proprietary Rights
Our trade names, trademarks, service marks, patents, copyrights, domain names, trade secrets, and other intellectual property are important
to the success of our businesses. In particular, we view our primary trademarks as critical to our success. We principally rely upon patent,
trademark, copyright, trade secret, domain name laws, and contract laws to protect our intellectual property and proprietary rights. We also
license some of our intellectual property rights, including the Mercury Man logo, to third parties. We continuously assess whether to seek patent
and other intellectual property protections for those aspects of our businesses and technologies that we believe constitute innovations providing
competitive advantages. We generally enter into confidentiality or license agreements with our employees, consultants and corporate partners,
and generally control access to, and distribution of, our technologies, documentation and other proprietary information. We consider our United
Online, FTD, Interflora, Memory Lane, Classmates, NetZero, Juno, StayFriends, and MyPoints trademarks to be very valuable assets, and most
of these trademarks have been registered in the U.S. or, in certain cases, in other countries.
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