clearspring.com

Clearspring Launchpad Sends Widgets To All
If you have content on a website, all it takes to make that content an embeddable widget is a little bit of code, which Clearspring happens to have available for free.

New Clearspring tool converts Web sites to widgets
Clearspring Technologies Inc. Monday announced the release of Launchpad, a set of tools that will let developers convert Web sites to widgets that can be posted on social networks, blogs or other Web sites.

Netvibes Expands Universal Widget API Relationships and Launches Premium Widgets
"We are proud to be compatible with the Netvibes UWA format," said Hooman Radfar, founder and CEO of Clearspring, one of the Web's leading syndication platforms that distributes widgets to multiple social networking sites.

Wave of Widgets Spreads on the Web
"The standard Internet advertisement is so familiar that most people tune it out: a billboard stripped across the top of a Web site, waiting for consumers to surf by and maybe click on it.

Now a young generation of online-ad creators are pushing a newer idea: putting a brand on a mini-site so fun or useful -- a video game or a spruced-up calculator or a live sports update -- that people download it, paste it on their personal blogs or social networking sites, use it again and again and share it with friends."

Tech's Best Young Entrepreneurs
"Widgets are spreading like wildfire across the Web. Suddenly everyone's creating, disseminating and attaching these fungible nuggets of code to add icons, videos, dialog boxes, and other content to Web pages. "Widgets are the Web á la carte," says Fath, who, with Radfar, founded Clearspring in 2004 to help companies package and distribute their content in widget form and then track where it goes. Clearspring, which counts the National Basketball Assn. and Universal Pictures as customers, serves 30 million widgets a day."

Universal Turns to Social Nets
"Unlike simply uploading the clip to YouTube, custom widgets give advertisers more control. Universal can update the widget with additional promotional footage, and it is tracking the results of the application program through tools provided by Clearspring Technology, the company that provided the widget platform. It will be able to ascertain how many fans have embedded the trailer and how many have viewed it on what sites."

AOL Alumni Seek Excitement of Start-Ups
"When Chris Marentis joined America Online Inc. 10 years ago, the fledgling Internet empire was growing at a frenzied pace. As senior vice president of business development, he worked 60-hour weeks and spent holidays closing multimillion-dollar deals. He held strategy meetings by trading instant messages while his family slept."

New Media: Marketers Wend Widgets Into Interactive Tactics
"Widgets are also making the leap from desktop to Web pages. Blogs and social networks are fertile ground, said Chris Marentis, CEO at Clearspring Technologies, Arlington, Va., a leading provider of widget syndication services, which last week launched a platform that enables content providers to easily deploy, track and analyze content assets. Users of MySpace, for instance, are already adept at pasting snippets of code that embed photo slide shows, YouTube players and other special effects. By tracking widget downloads, advertisers will "start to see the viral hubs and see where their influencers are," said Marentis."

Clearspring Launches Widget Syndication Service
"Clearspring Technologies , a venture-backed firm based in Arlington, plans to launch its widget syndication service today. The company, which received $2 million in funding from Novak Biddle Venture Partners and other investors in April, distributes online content and tracks it through social networks, blogs and personalized Web sites."