Partnership to provide innovative talking avatar tools to help drive sales and conversion rates.

SitePal, a speaking avatar technology platform, and Uplinkearth, a web hosting and Internet solutions provider, today announced a new partnership to offer SitePal talking avatars for all Uplinkearth customers. Through the partnership, Uplinkearth customers will have access to SitePal's basic avatars at no charge and with no obligation or time limit. The company states that customers will then have the option to upgrade to enhanced versions of the product at an additional charge.

The company mentions that SitePal, which was developed by oddcast, allows small business owners and webmasters to create speaking, animated characters or avatars for their web sites, especially on pages where visitor conversion rates are critical. The avatars feature either text-to-speech generated audio or are linked with a voice recording, provided by the user or created by talent at oddcast.

"The data at this point is quite clear—these innovative avatars dramatically increase conversion rates, and ultimately, the efficacy of Web sites," said Adi Sideman, CEO of Oddcast. "Uplinkearth, with its largely small business customer base, is a company we look forward to working with for many months and years to come. As the Web continues to grow more competitive and interactivity on pages becomes even more crucial to maximize monetization, we are confident that uplinkearth's small business customers will see the incredible value that speaking avatars bring to any Web site."

"One of our key initiatives over the past several years has been to introduce a wider variety of distinctive member benefits for our customers, and continue to distinguish our company's specialization in meeting the unique needs of small to medium sized businesses. Through this partnership with SitePal, we hope to offer yet another sales and marketing tool for our customers, with which they can grow their businesses," said Michael Yablonowitz, president and CEO of uplinkearth. "In the end, when our customers succeed, we do too."