Groupon Scheduler is an online appointment service that provides merchants with an easy way to manage their schedules and accept bookings from consumers.

OpenCal launched at the end of 2010, so the acquisition was quick, although probably not overly lucrative. OpenCal was co-founded by Shiva and Simon Vallee, who also helped to found Sitemasher, another Canadian web service, which was acquired by Salesforce.

From a relatively unknown player, AdParlor burst onto the online advertising radar when it landed an exclusive deal to handle Groupon’s entire Facebook ad spend. Other high profile clients for the company include Ubisoft, Sega and agencies like Digitas and OMD.

AdParlor offers three ways of working together: a fully managed service for clients spending more than $25,000 a month; a self-service tool called Pulse; and a white label solution. AdParlor bills its clients based on either cost per acquisition or number new fans or app installs: the company claims to deliver some five million Facebook application installs per month. On the ad side, AdParlor serves over 30 billion impressions a month.

Adknowledge has been on a buying spree: in the last three years, it has made eight acquisitions. Its last purchase was the cost-per-action network Hydra Group. It also made a previous buy in Canada when it acquired Vancouver’s Super Rewards in 2009.

AdParlor’s CEO Hussein Fazal (who will keep that title post-merger) said the deal was important for the company to get into places like London, New York City and Chicago where a physical presence, which AdKnowledge has, is needed. Fazal and co-founder and CTO Kristaps Ronka were named to Inc.com’s 2011 “30 Under 30” list.

AdParlor will operate as an independent unit within Adknowledge and will keep its Toronto offices and 20 employees.

SlimCut Media’s new FreeSkreen lets readers decide, when they come across a premium article, whether they want to pay for access, or read the piece with ads for no cost. Readers decide which articles will display ads on a story-by-story basis rather than a blanket up front setting.

If you choose the ad option, FreeSkreen then prompts you to choose one of three targeted ads before continuing on to the content. Once you’ve watched one ad, you receive unlimited free access to that article.

While we always welcome new ideas on how newspapers can better monetize their content, FreeSkreen seems rather cumbersome: would you really want to go through the choose-and-watch-an-ad process for each piece of premium content that strikes your fancy? A blanket requirement to watch an ad once and then have access to all of a website’s content for a specific time period – as we’ve seen on many sites in the past, like the old Salon – makes more sense to us, at least from a usability perspective.

We’d direct you to SlimCut Media’s website to read more about it, but we you can’t…unless you’re in Canada that is. For the rest of the world, the site indicates that FreeSkreen “is not available in your country yet.”

Adicio’s recruitment, automotive and real estate Web platforms are already optimized for mobile. With the new service, Adicio clients can now offer advertisers their own branded mobile classified presence, with custom content, vanity URLS, flexible color themes, instant alerts and more.

Sony's recruitment mini-site in behalf of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

The mini-sites maintain the functionality of Adicio’s full-blown mobile platforms. Job-seekers can use them to see an employer’s latest listings and apply for jobs. Home buyers can view properties and contact Realtors for showings. Auto buyers can see an auto dealer’s inventory and schedule test drives.

“Adicio’s Mobile Mini Sites put job seekers, home shoppers, and car buyers in touch with online classifieds from their mobile phones,” CEO Rick Miller said in a release. “With almost 80 percent of the nation’s population using mobile phones and 71 percent of smartphone users searching for products and services after seeing an ad, this solution merges the power of mobile with the power of advertising to customers on the go.”

It’s a premium service to Adicio clients. Price depends on volume, Chief Alliance Officer Tony Lee told us, and whether the request includes a “wrap” – Adicio parlance for indexing listings from specific advertisers’ sites. “It depends on the number of mobile mini-sites we create for advertisers on behalf of the client,” he said. “Some clients will want a few just for their top advertisers, while others we’ve spoken to anticipate selling hundreds of them each month.”

Adicio’s full release is here.