clearspring - the widget network.

2008 was an exceptional year for Clearspring. Although it was a year marked with progress, these achievements were bittersweet.

We increased revenues by orders of magnitude, secured financing from world-class investors NEA, and have built and acquired two industry-leading platforms in the widget and sharing spaces, respectively, that reach over 400MM unique users globally. We have over 200 leading media companies and agencies as partners, and over 300K users leveraging our platforms.

Like many companies, however, we had to make adjustments in response to the economic uncertainty. In the fourth quarter of 2008, we reduced our workforce to focus on key growth markets and concentrate development efforts around core products and services. We are confident that this move positions us with ample runway to grow our business in 2009. We will continue to deliver our superior level of customer service and lead the industry as we pioneer widget monetization and sharing technologies.

We are sad to have parted with our friends. We couldn’t have done it without you, and it goes without saying you will be missed.

Love (actually),

Hooman
CEO, Clearspring

There is currently a situation in the State of California where the legislature has yet to pass a comprehensive budget solution for the state. This is causing ramifications for the state’s many public services and has also caused great frustration for California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Governor Schwarzenegger needed a way to share his frustration with the rest of the world and also let the world express their frustration. They created a widget that uses Clearspring’s widget distribution & tracking platform, Launchpad.

The widget shows how many days the legislature has gone without passing a budget. It also shows an approximate dollar figure that the State of California has gone in the red.  With Clearspring’s Launchpad, you can easily share it with all of your friends.

Here’s the widget:

As we approach the end of 2008 here at Clearspring World Corporate Headquarters in McLean, VA, we’ve been pretty heads down to make sure that we end the year with the same intensity, passion, and excellence that we started it with. We’ve also been working pretty hard to plan for next year.

Last Friday, we took a bit of a break from the action to unwind, eat some good food, drink some good beers, and just hang out as a company; We had our 2008 Holiday Party. Below are some photos…

So our office manager Carol, the one who really keeps Clearspring running smoothly, organized this amazing spread of food and tasty adult beverages:

After we ate the delicious meal, we sat and relaxed:

Later, we tried to figure out who could beat Hooman at ping pong. Turns out it’s everyone… Just kidding. Hooman’s an awesome ping pong player, as you can see from the photos:

Happy Holidays from all of us at Clearspring Technologies!!!

Over Thanksgiving break, a certain faction of the engineering team decided to start a new tradition here at Clearspring. Every year for the month of December, we’ll have a Clearspring Beard Growing Competition. It’s been about 20 degrees outside here in the greater Washington, DC area so having a beard is a greatly advisable way of keeping your face warm.

Well Friday at our Holiday Party (which I’ll be posting more photos of later), our master of all things creative Jeff Wong took photos of all of the contestants. Thought I’d display them for you guys so that you all can throw in your votes.

Who do you think has the best beard? (Bonus points for whomever can name the people in all of the photos.)

It’s my pleasure to announce that Clearspring has won Blogger’s Choice for Embeddable Widgets in Mashable’s Open Web Awards. We were selected by Mashable’s panel of over 100+ blog partners from around the world.

We want to thank you guys, our community of users, for helping us to get here. Together, we’ve built the leading widget distribution platform.

Before you head off to grab the celebratory latte, we still need your help. Voting for Mashable’s Open Web Awards “People’s Choice” doesn’t close till this Sunday night at 11:59 pm PST. So… please continue to vote for both Clearspring and AddThis.

Here are the voting widgets:

Thanks! Oh… and feel free to drop me a line any time. I always love hearing from our users. - justin@clearspring.com or @thorpus on Twitter.

Note: Lately, we’ve been so heads down on making Clearspring and its products as good as they can be that I thought it’d be fastest just throw this press release up on the blog so that I could share this news with you guys. We can’t thank you all enough for using our products and helping us to get where we are. We wouldn’t be able to report this exciting news without all of you. - Justin

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comScore Reports Second Consecutive Month of Sharp Gains in Unique Visitors for Clearspring

Category leadership gap continues to widen with growing popularity of social media

McLean, Va. – Dec. 3, 2008 – Clearspring Technologies, the leading widget and sharing network connecting publishers and advertisers to audiences on the social Web, experienced a greater than 30 percent increase in worldwide usage of its sharing service between September and October. This increase comes on the heels of a 59 percent increase from August to September after Clearspring acquired social bookmarking leader AddThis. The company attributes this most recent increase to a number of factors including organic growth and new partnerships.

According to comScore, Clearspring logged more than 332 million unique visitors worldwide in October, easily outdistancing its nearest competitor by over 150 million visitors. In addition, comScore revealed that the company further extended its lead in the U.S. market in October with over 120 million unique visitors, an increase of 19 percent from September.

“The comScore data points to a much larger trend in social media that is continuously gaining steam,” said Hooman Radfar, chief executive officer and co-founder of Clearspring. “The value of sharing various types of content across the Web combined with the excitement displayed by Internet users to do so is clearly demonstrated by the frictionless growth of widget media.”

As announced in September, Clearspring acquired AddThis, the No. 1 bookmarking and content sharing service on the Internet, helping the company to grow to a size comparable in reach to the fourth largest property on the Web. Clearspring has since delivered on promises to add to and improve the features of AddThis, recently announcing optimization of the sharing button and language support for 17 additional languages, among other improvements. The company anticipates that this will continue to fuel growth of its sharing services.

comScore is a leading source of data and metrics for both the digital world as well as mobile usage that is trusted by brands such as AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Best Buy and more. Statistics quoted in this release are found in comScore’s October 2008 Worldwide report.

About Clearspring

Clearspring is the leading provider of distribution, management and monetization services for widgets and other distributable Web content. Clearspring’s free sharing services enable publishers and developers to distribute and track viral digital content to the most popular destinations, including social networks, start pages, bookmarking sites, blogs, mobile devices and desktop platforms. The company delivers billions of impressions every month working with the world’s most prominent brands, media companies and Web 2.0 businesses. With the recent acquisition of AddThis, the No. 1 bookmarking and sharing button on the internet, Clearspring has dramatically increased in reach and visibility. The company also provides new monetization opportunities for publishers and developers using the Clearspring platform by allowing them to seamlessly integrate advertising-based services in their distributable Web content. To learn more, visit www.clearspring.com.

Bill Rubacky, Clearspring Technologies, (703) 677-3999, press@clearspring.com

Travis Murdock, A&R Edelman, (650) 762-2807, travis.murdock@ar-edelman.com

I’m a big fan of old movies. Seems like every old Western has a shot that pans across the front of the Post Office and you see the WANTED posters flapping around in the wind that had been hung by the town sheriff or local law enforcement. It makes perfect sense. If you want to catch criminals, put up their photo in places where people spend the most time.

Well, today more of the world is spending their time online in online communities and social networks. Noticing this trend, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has made the list of their top 10 most wanted fugitives shareable with Clearspring’s widget platform Launchpad.

Now any user can grab the list, get the faces of these criminals in-front of their community, and hopefully help the FBI catch the bad guys a lot faster.

Here’s the widget:

This morning Clearspring Board of Directors Chairman Ted Leonsis was on CNBC. He talked about the current state of the economy and how Washington, DC is becoming a center of economic growth. He later goes on to talk about how in 2009 we’ll see consumers play an increasing role in advertising and how analytics, tracking, and targeting will become an even bigger focus as people look how to smartly use their advertising budgets. Check out the video of Ted.

Our friend and founder/editor of Facebook blog AllFacebook.com Nick O’Neill has recently launched a new service where he reports statistics around Facebook application usage through these really rad flash charts.

In and of themselves, these charts as they are on AllFacebook.com are incredibly useful but they could do so much more. If I was a blogger and wanted to write about a specific application, it’d be great to be able to take the chart and embed it in my blog post.

So… Nick came to us here at Clearspring. Together we made his charts shareable with Launchpad. With ease, a blogger can now grab a chart and place it wherever they want. By making his content shareable, Nick is extending his potential reach and increases the chances that new people who aren’t familiar with his content will stumble upon it.

Here’s an example widget:

Note: This was cross posted on the AddThis Blog.

Friends, I have some great news. With your help, we’ve been nominated for three categories of Mashable’s Open Web Awards. Clearspring has been nominated for best in Embeddable Widgets. AddThis has been nominated for best in Blog Plugins and and Social Bookmarking.

All I can say is THANK YOU!. Your nominations & votes mean so much to us. We wouldn’t be where we are today without you. It’s all of your time, thoughts, and feedback, which have helped to make our tools best-in-class. We’re absolutely a team in this process.

Well, we need your help again. We’re on to Round 1 of voting for the Open Web Awards. Mashable has created these handy dandy widgets to help with the voting process. (See them below) We’ve taken their widgets and wrapped them with our widget platform Launchpad so that you can place them and share them all over the Web.

Until midnight on November 30th, you can vote once for Clearspring and AddThis every 24 hours in the categories we’re in.

Thanks again for all your help with this. Here are the widgets: