clearspring - the widget network.

On Wednesday June 25th, Clearspring accepted the award from the Northern Virginia Tech Council as the company with the “Hottest Buzz.” With the impressive cast of characters in the same category, we’re especially honored and excited to receive the award.

According to a recent report by the American Electronics Association, Washington DC has the 2nd highest amount of high tech jobs in the United States, with the winner being New York City. With Clearspring Central Command being the Greater Washington DC metropolitan area (McLean, VA), we’ve been working around the clock to solidify ourselves as a local leader in tech so that we can attract the best and the brightest talent to come work for us.

If you’re interested in joining the team, check out or careers page or e-mail our Director of Recruiting Ian Jones at jobs@clearspring.com

Well… it’s back to work. We have a lot of big plans and ideas about ways to serve you even better, maintaining the award-winning Clearspring’s position as the best widget network in the world.

From the beginning, we’ve known that top-notch analytics are an essential part of having a good widget network. Over the last year, we’ve dedicated a huge amount of time and resources to make sure that our widget analytics and reporting tools are the best in the world… giving you the most detailed and accurate numbers possible.

Now you don’t have to take our word for it. We are pleased today to announce that we’ve become the very first widget network to receive accreditation from the Audit Bureau of Circulations Interactive (ABCi).

For several months, ABCi was granted unfettered access to the processes, systems and people here at Clearspring Central Command in McLean, Virginia. They thoroughly and rigorously reviewed everything to guarantee the numbers were getting reported correctly.

The metrics included in the audit were: views, unique visitors, placements created, active placements, clicks, clickthroughs, events, geographic report, computer information, interacted views, clicked views, average time spent, and average interaction time.

This is something we’ve been working on a for a while and are super proud of. We want to raise the bar for acceptable service for a widget network, which means being held accountable to industry standards and best practices by a third party.

We know this is important to you, especially those of you who buy advertising. According to a survey commissioned by ABCi, “ad buyers indicated they would be even more inclined to advertise in emerging forms of media if audited by an independent third party.”

Despite just opening an office in England, our teams have already been working hard with a number of different European media companies and brands to talk about the value of widgets and Clearspring.

We are all pretty excited that British newspaper The Telegraph has recently launched widgets that implement Launchpad. Now you can get the latest news, football scores, tv, arts headlines, and much more all through the Telegraph’s widgets.

It’s awesome to see an organization, that was founded in 1855 (according to Wikipedia) with their broadsheet newspaper The Daily Telegraph, embrace new and upcoming mediums for communication.

Below are a few of their widgets. Enjoy them and share them.

Early this morning our Web team rolled out a redesign of our Web site and if I may say so I think it’s gorgeous. They’ve been planning and working on this project for a while. Everyone has been itching to get it out the door, for the world to see. Get your hands on it and I have a feeling you’ll be as elated with it as I am.

At the top of the page, you’ll notice a much improved top navigation bar with a much simplified information architecture. The site is broken down into the following sections: Platform, Services, Developers, and About Us.

The Platform section is brand new. It gives a high level overview and subsequent pages go into more depth of how with Clearspring you can distribute, manage, and analyze the use of your widgets.

From the Services section, you can get to the Launchpad and WidgetMedia sections of the Web site. None of this content has changed from its previous form.

We have completely revamped the Developer section. This page will be the center of activity for everything about developing on the Clearspring platform. We’re going to use the main banner on the page to highlight really hot items. We’ll aggregate all of the latest blog posts and events that Clearspring will be at. On the page, we’re going to highlight different docs that address key issues that we’re hearing about. There is also a box with more information about me and how you can get in touch.

On a regular basis on the Developer Page, I’ll be throwing up a new “Featured Widget.” This will be a widget created by someone in the developer community, who either created something cool or was able to accomplish some thing cool with their widget. If you want your widget to be considered, e-mail me the URL - justin@clearspring.com

The only pages yet to be converted to the new design are the forum and the docs. They will be upgraded soon.

If you have any questions, thoughts, or concerns, about the redesign, we’d love the feedback. Drop a comment on this post. Thanks!

Clearspring has hit another really cool milestone as a company. We’ve just opened up our office in London, England.

We’ve brought on Matt Nash as Director of European Business Development and Nick Wilkinson as European Sales Engineering Manager. They’re both really awesome guys and will be responsible for our existing and new European activities.

They were just out here at Clearspring Central Command for a few weeks to get orientated and are now back in England to get things rolling.

Personally, I’m really pumped by this. There are so many hot spots in Europe (including London) where there are some really amazing things happening on the Web. Matt and Nick are perfectly placed to help get Clearspring in there.

I’m definitely putting myself on the list to come over and visit and soon as possible.

If you want to get in touch with Matt and Nick, just drop us a line in our contact form and make a note that you’re based in Europe. In addition, I’m more than happy to pass notes on to the UK guys, just e-mail me at - justin@clearspring.com.

(Photo - the office building where the office is in London)

Recently, Clearspring held a hackathon.

Of course this is a fun opportunity for our teams to stay up all night, having fun, coding, and bonding. In a larger sense, hackathons are an opportunity for the company to take a break from the day to day and look towards the future. It’s an opportunity try new things and innovate.

For right now, all the projects that were developed are super double probation-style top secret but they may be integrated into products or productized in the future. In the mean time, here are some photos from the fun:

Yesterday morning, our main web site (http://www.clearspring.com) went down and was on and off for a number of hours, with forum access down for much of the day. The RAID controllers for a primary server blew up (figuratively, though almost literally) in a most disastrous way. In a complex chain of events that put Murphy’s Law to shame, it took a while for us to get it all back up, validate all backup data, and turn the forums back on.

During the site outage, all of your widgets continued being served and all analytics data was collected.

All in all, there was no data loss of any kind, though we know not having the console available was an issue for many of you. During the downtime, our standard site maintenance page was up, though in this case, describing the issue as “scheduled maintenance” was not accurate. For that confusion as well, we apologize.

Thanks for bearing with us during a bumpy day, and we sincerely apologize for any problems or confusion the Web site down time may have caused for you. We’ve taken a number of steps on the web side to ensure it doesn’t happen again, and hope the track record of our core widget serving proves that we can meet that goal.

As always, if you have any thoughts, problems, concerns, or comments, don’t hesitate to drop me a line. E-mail me at - justin@clearspring.com

This week there are two big events that Clearspring will be at. One on each coast.

On June 9 to 11th, O’Reilly’s Graphing Social Patterns conference will be in the Washington, DC area. Organized by our friend Dave McClure, the conference is one of the premier events that addresses and discusses the issues surrounding the Social Web. A West coast version of the event was held in San Diego back in March of 2008.

Clearspring will be at Graphing Social Patterns East in a BIG way. In addition to being a Gold Level sponsor, our CEO Hooman Radfar will be giving a talk on “Widget Strategies & Social Platforms” and our Director of Product Management for Analytics Jodi McDermott will be on a panel entitled “The Joy of Widgets: Everything You Want to Know But Were Afraid to Ask” with folks from CenterNetworks, Goowy Media, RockYou, and Sprout.

On June 11th in San Francisco, our friend and CEO of RateItAll Lawrence Coburn is moderating a panel with SF New Tech entitled “Widgets up the Wazoo!” Our Director of Business Development Mike Harkey will be sitting on the panel and demoing Launchpad.  There will also be representatives from Seeqpod, Gydget, Triggit, Add to Any, Disqus, and Sprout. This will be a great opportunity to hear about the issues around widgets from the leaders in the space.

If you’re going to be at either of these events, come find us and say hi.

It sounds really cliche to say but… Clearspring is really like a big family.

We’re all different. We all have different skill sets, passions, and interests. Some are technical and some are not. Outside of work, folks do everything from playing in a funk band to coaching a tee ball team. Some are married, some have kids, and some are single.

Regardless, we’re all united by this common goal of making the company as successful as possible by serving and meeting the needs of our users.

One of the perks of working at Clearspring is that we get lunch catered to the office everyday. A week or so ago, we did lunch a little differently. We had an outdoor BBQ.

For an hour/hour and a half, people relaxed, spent time together, ate, and some threw around the football. It was great Clearspring family time. Here are some photos: