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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

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 iStrategyLabs CEO Peter Corbett has recently launched with the District of Columbia Apps for Democracy. It’s a challenge to developers and agencies from around the country to take the public data produced by the District of Columbia (DC) government and create interesting applications and visualizations that will help make lives easier.

This is a great opportunity to innovate and find new interesting uses for this otherwise not that exciting data. Plus, At the end of the contest, 60 prizes will be handed out ranging from $100 to $2000 for a total of $20,000. Oh and it’s not limited to people in the DC area.

So if you have sometime this weekend, bang out a quick app or widget. You could potentially make some cash and help make people’s lives easier.

I’d love to see someone make some Clearspring widgets for the contest. If you make something, send it my way and I’ll try and highlight it on the blog. My e-mail address is – justin@clearspring.com

This Sunday Clearspring had a picnic for its Virginia office, which was a BLAST and I’ll be posting more about it later.

One of the highlights was when one of our engineering ninjas Charlie Reverte brought out his paraglider and we set it up out in the field. Our CEO Hooman Radfar decided to see whether or not he could take flight by running across the field. Well, you can see the results below…

Last Thursday was the Washington DC Twin Tech Party at the U Street club Local 16. Hundreds of local executives, designers, developers, sales people, entrepreneurs and enthusiasts from local companies came to celebrate their common interest in continuing to make the Washington DC metro area a hub of activity for the Web and technology industries.

We had a nice posse of Clearpsring folks there. We all met a ton of great people. Due to the nature of the event, there was a bigger cross section of folks at this then the usual DC tech event. We also handed out A LOT of stickers, which people proudly wore. If you’d like some stickers, see my previous note.

The whole event, was inspired from a blog post written by Zach Goldfarb for the Washington Post. He noticed from two simultaneous events happening on the same day that there were two tech communities in the Washington DC area. My good friend and CEO of iStrategyLabs Peter Corbett took the initiative and decided to throw a joint party that would unite the two communities.

The event got even more exciting when Business Week and best selling author of “Once Your Lucky. Twice Your Good” Sarah Lacy decided to come to Washington DC as part of her user-generated book tour. She came to the event and got the opportunity meet the local tech scene, as well as sell and sign books.

Sarah is someone that’s seen the inside and outside of Silicon Valley. She was able to impart a lot of valuable advice to us about how we can grow the local community for it to become even more of an exciting place to work and grow a business.

Having Central Command here in the Washington DC area is definitely a source of pride for us here at Clearspring. We want to do our best to contribute and support this community. We hope there will be many more parties like this in the future.

Kudos to Peter for putting on such a great event and thanks to Sarah for coming out.

(Photos taken by and used with permission of Kenneth Yeung)