clearspring - the widget network.

Whenever I see a movie trailer that gets me excited, the first thing that pops into my head is “Oh I know six people who’d LOVE to see this. I need to share it with them.” This is why it makes SOOO much sense to stick a movie trailer in a widget. You can actually send the movie trailer to all of your friends.

We’ve seen a couple of great success stories. Back in December, the movie Cloverfield launched a trailer on a Clearspring widget. Just recently, the movie Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull launched a Clearspring widget which includes all its latest trailers.

Well another movie can be added to these ranks. The upcoming Lionsgate’s film The Spirit has made a widget for the movie that includes the trailer, news, a gallery, the blog, downloads, links to the fan fan forum and movie Web site. Plus the studio is doing a contest where whomever can drive the most traffic to the widget will win a trip to San Diego Comic-Con.

Being a big nerd, as most of us are at Clearspring, this definitely has me excited. Both of Frank Miller’s earlier movies Sin City and 300 were beautiful and this one seems to live up to the same standard and with the contest, how could you ask for a better prize?

So… go and share the widget with all of your friends!!! What are you waiting for?!?

Oh yeah… here’s the widget.

I can now say that if you love the environment, you need to use widgets. ABC and the Arbor Day Foundation have teamed up for a sweet campaign.

ABC has picked nine of their television show widgets that use Clearspring Launchpad. The widgets contain video trailers for upcoming episodes of their shows.

Every 10 times a video is watched in the widget, a tree sapling will be planted. This is all tracked using our analytics & reporting functionality via the widget console.

Use the ABC widgets, watch the videos, and trees will be planted. It’s that easy.

The participating ABC widgets are:

• Dancing with Stars
• LOST
• Squeegees
• Brothers & Sisters
• Desperate Housewives
• Grey’s Anatomy
• Ugly Betty
• Samantha Who?
• Bachelor

At Clearspring (right outside Washington D.C.) there’s not a tremendous amount of woodland, yet many of us have lived in places where trees are far more abundant. When you experience this difference you really start to appreciate trees even more. Thus, we’re all really excited about this campaign.

While widget girl (aka our Jodi McDermott) is a BIG fan of Grey’s Anatomy (of course :-), I’m a big fan of the TV show LOST.

Here is the LOST widget:

So what are you waiting for? Watch the videos, share the widget, put it on your blog, personalized start page, and social networking profile, and let’s get some trees planted.

The good folks over at Clicky are holding a contest for widgets using their APIs. For all of you widget developers out there looking to do something interesting with analytics, go to town by August 12th and you can even get some cash or be included in their product.

Here are the details:

• their API
• the deal with the contest
• a demo of their stuff, if you have no idea what they do

Have fun!

So Google is running kind of an interesting promotion, as discussed at length on the blogosphere today:

• $5000 to a widget that gets 250K views/week
• $100K for building a business around Google

Full details are here on Google

Want to make some money with your cool widget? Go for it!

This also raises those interesting questions that all those Facebook app developers are having to answer: how do you handle all the load when you actually manage to build the super-successful viral application/component and all of a sudden are dealing with a huge server need?
One thing you can be sure of is that we won’t slow you down — we’ve got the best back-end in the business, folks. Seriously, our team is crazy good (not me, mind you, but the folks that actually do the work), and our scalability is one of the things that lands us those big content provider deals.

Go forth and multiply!