Clearspring - Your Content. Everywhere.

Just a week away from Thanksgiving, we are counting our many blessings here at Clearspring. We’ve just been named among the AlwaysOn 2011 Venture Summit Mid-Atlantic Top 100 for being among the most promising private companies “creating new, vital solutions that will lead to industry disruption and huge value creation.” The honor stems from nominations by several top firms including Morgan Stanley, Technology Partners, DFJ, SAP and KPMG.

It’s great to be recognized, especially on the heels of a very busy past couple of months. In late September, we welcomed Ramsey McGrory, formerly of Yahoo! and RMX as our new CEO. In October, we took a look back at five years of sharing and analytics as we celebrated the fifth anniversary of our social sharing platform, AddThis (check us out in Adweek). Last week, AddThis hit another milestone as the largest social sharing platform  – in a 24 hour period, we saw 3,000,000,000 (that’s 3 billion!) views. And, we recently announced our acquisition of data science company, XGraph. Together, we’ve created the largest multi-graph platform on the open web. By  multi-graph, we mean that our understanding of an audience is multi-dimensional where a single-graph would only represent one dimension of how people are connected (like social ties, for instance). Based on 1.2 billion users, the extensive multi-graph capability has incredible implications for all of our partners across the board.

Whew! It’s been busy and we wouldn’t have it any other way. It couldn’t be more appropriate that all of this comes right before we each take a moment to give thanks. We are incredibly grateful to all of our clients, partners, investors and supporters. Thank you AlwaysOn, those that nominated and voted for us for this honor, and all of you for continuing to keep us motivated and inspired. As always, please reach out and let us know how we can better serve you.

It’s been a very busy week here at Clearspring with the announcement of XGraph joining the family. So busy, we didn’t get a chance to blog about our very first Halloween Costume Contest!

To give a quick rundown from some of our offices — Winnie the Pooh was spotted writing code and the iCloud was shedding “water droplets” all over the floors at HQ in McLean, VA. NYC was was raided by a zombie and a Richard Simmons exercise video extra showed up. LA even saw dead people.

Here are some pictures, including the winners of the three categories – Funniest, Scariest and Most Creative.

HQ’s Elizabeth Leiser won Most Creative with her rendition of the iCloud.

HQ’s Collin Hughes won Funniest for dressing up as fellow Clearspringer Ted Pearson. Here’s a reference:

LA’s Will Watson won Scariest for his interpretation of Dia de Los Muertos.

Some honorable mentions:

Rebecca Salerno of our NYC office dressed as a hostess turned zombie. She has rats in her hair!

NYC’s David S. just got back from filming his latest exercise video with Richard Simmons.

Charlie the Pooh.

We’re excited to announce that Clearspring has acquired XGraph.

XGraph is the leading data science company focused on modeling web-wide connections between people.  Clearspring’s scalable data processing and massive reach via AddThis coupled with XGraph’s technology create the largest multi-graph platform on the open web—mapping 1.2 billion user’s connections by brand affiliation, intent and social behavior.

The social graph, the data structure that maps the connections we have with our friends, has taken the web by storm.  This has proven to be a powerful platform, but this single graph only represents one dimension of how we are connected to one another.   XGraph not only models these social connections, but also multiple other types of connections such as how we are related by brand affiliations, intent and more.  This is the multi-graph.

With our new multi-graph platform, Clearspring has a truly differentiated capability to deliver powerful results to our advertisers and publishers.  For advertisers, agencies and trading desks, we will immediately be able to provide the only scaled multi-graph audience targeting capabilities available on the web.  For publishers, we will use this same graph platform to enable deeper audience insight, monetization and actionable data products in the near future.  And, that’s just the beginning.

Thank you, as always, to our customers, partners and investors for making this possible. Welcome XGraph into the Clearspring family!