clearspring - the widget network.

Now, at just about every office in the DC area, you’ll most likely see men and woman wearing suits in every direction that you turn. Well, buried in the heart of McLean, Virginia, just outside of the Beltway with the world’s largest concentration of government contractors, is a stronghold of startup culture. It’s Clearspring’s World Corporate Headquarters.

Most offices in DC will take a break from wearing suits on Fridays and dress a little bit more casual. Well, at Clearspring, we’re pretty casual all the time. We think people do the best work when they’re comfortable being themselves. So… to have a little fun, we have turned the Friday tradition on it’s head and have Formal Fridays. On Fridays, we all wear suits. Well, most do.

Not to get all gooshy but it’s this kind of light hearted yet serious atmosphere that’s created by the amazing people I work with, which helps makes it fun to come into the office everyday.

Yes, Cyrus (smiley guy in the front) is holding a Dalek. Yep, we’re that geeky. Oh, of all the smiling faces in the photo above, take a guess at who the leader of this merry band of suited rebels is. 

Enjoy more photos…

(Note: This is reposted from the AddThis blog.)

So… what do our CEO Hooman Radfar, our Board of Directors, and President Obama all have in common? Well, they’re all featured in the May issue of the Washingtonian.

Hooman and each member of Clearspring’s Board of Directors were featured as 100 of the top “Tech Titans” in Washington, DC. Oh, and I, your humble community manager, made the list as well.

I was hoping that we could point you to the link but right now the story is only available in the print edition. We’ve taken these photos as an adequate substitute:

President Obama, in the now infamous cover with a photo of him shirtless, was featured as one of the 26 reasons why people love living in DC.

Every quarter, we take some time as a company to look back at how things went during the last quarter and then talk about our plans for the next one. As usual, the respective Clearspring offices go out on the town after the meeting and have some fun together.

Well, we did it up this year.

Below is photographic evidence of the shenanigans from our various offices. We haven’t gotten the photos from the West Coast office yet. I’ll post them as soon as I get them.

Team NYC

Team Virginia

We had a little bit of fun this afternoon and created “South Park” style characters for ourselves.  Meet the Clearspring West Coast Media Services team.

The Leader

Our Favorite Pregnant One

Account Management Queen

Princess Bunny

Sales Princess

Affiliate Guy

Media Director

Tomorrow, I’ll post some other Clearspring team members.  (Bonus points to whomever can name all people listed above.)

It was a year ago today that I joined Clearspring as Community Manager.

As I look back over the last twelve months, I’m just truly blown away by all that were able to do and accomplish. I give total credit to the incredible team that I get to work with on a daily basis and to our CEO Hooman Radfar for creating and sustaining a culture where the team is dedicated to making an impact on the world we live in.

Here are some highlights from the past 12 months:

I got to meet and get to know many of you during my travels around the country. There were cities like Miami, Austin, New York City, Rochester, San Francisco, and Seattle.

We had some pretty exciting product announcements, like the Launchpad In-Widget APIs, integration with the MySpace Apps Gallery, Bebo Application Promotion, WordPress.com integration, launching a brand new version of our sharing menu, address book integration, and testing widget recommendations.

Some pretty cool widgets launched including those about and for U2 3D, the Oscars, ESRB’s Video Game Rating Search, The Spirit, The Daily Telegraph, RCRD LBL, SnagFilms, Blogs.com, SNL, ABC, John McCain & Barack Obama, the FBI’s Top 10 Most Wanted, Governor Schwarzenegger, and many more.

As a company, we achieved some pretty big milestones, like the launch of the redesign of our web site, receiving ABCi accreditation for analytics, winning “Hottest Buzz”, the acquisition of AddThis, a partnership with MTV, passing 300 million unique visitors per month, and winning Blogger’s Choice in Mashable’s Open Web Awards.

I’m really excited to see what happens over the next 12 months. I’m confident that together we’re going to be able to do some pretty amazing things.

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.)

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

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.

This is so cool. This popped up yesterday in my Google Reader and I just had to share.

The folks from Springrolled and Wijard have made their own video to describe to folks what Clearspring is and does. The best part is the video is done completely with with pieces of paper and toy gears.  Thanks guys!