clearspring - the widget network.

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Back in March, our CEO Hooman Radfar was on a panel “Widgets as a Platform: Content, Commerce, Communications” at the Digital Hollywood Media Summit. In the panel they discuss questions like:

• What widgets are most popular?
• What are the different types of business models?
• How do you make widget advertising effective?
• Is there enough revenue to share amongst all the constituencies?
• Will widgets be the next generation of ad networks?
• What is the role of the social network?
• What is the state of widget measurement today?

Well, the video of the panel is now on YouTube. Enjoy!

(Found on Widget Beat)

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.

Here at Clearspring, if we participate in a space in the industry, we work hard to be both the thought and performance leaders. A shining example is Jodi McDermott our Director of Product Management for Analytics.

Many know Jodi as “Widget Girl” because that’s the handle she uses on her blog “Widget Analytics - Measuring the widgets in the wild” where she helps to lead the community in discussion around widget analytics issues. She also represents Clearspring in the Web Analytics Association. Yeah… Jodi rocks!

Jodi writes a monthly column for the email newsletter published by MediaPost.com called The Metrics Insider. This month it’s entitled “Tools, Vendors, Methodologies GALORE!” It gives a break down of the different tools in a Web analyst’s toolbox. While the different tools may give differing results, they each serve a different purpose. The column is based on a discussion that Jodi had while serving on a panel at the E-Metrics Summit in Toronto.

Everyday we’re working to make sure that our widget analytics tools are superior to any other analytics product that you may come across. It’s incredibly important to us that we give a detailed and accurate picture about how people are using the widgets on our platform. We’re committed to leading the way.

The Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) has just released a Video Game Ratings Search Widget with our Launchpad In-Page product. With the widget, you can enter the name of a video game and find out what its ESRB rating is, identify the type of content in the game, and find out on which gaming platforms it’s available.

“Our single most important message to consumers, particularly to parents, is that they should always check a game’s ESRB rating when considering a purchase or rental for their children,” said ESRB president Patricia Vance. “Parents are hungry for this information, and research shows that three-quarters of parents regularly check ESRB ratings when making purchase or rental decisions about which games to bring home. Our ratings search widget makes checking the rating that much more convenient. We’re very excited to be offering this widget with the help of Clearspring.”

You can also customize the ESRB Rating widget based on where you want to put it. From the Web site, you can decide the background color of the widget, the language, and the widget’s size.

It’s really cool that the ESRB is doing this. They recognized that the video game rating search was a popular piece of functionality. Instead of forcing a user to continue to go to their Web site, they put the search functionality into a widget to allow parents to better integrate the search into their lives via something like a start page, make it more accessible, and ultimately drive more usage.

The widget has also gotten a bit of press. Both Ars Technica and Kotaku have reviews.

Here’s the widget:

Back by popular demand, local tech recruiter Robert Neelbauer and company are holding another Social Matchbox DC this evening. It’s an opportunity for Washington DC startups to meet local tech enthusiasts and job seekers. It’s kind of like start-up speed dating.

Our very own recruiter extraordinaire Ian Jones will be there representing Clearspring. We’re currently looking for people to fill numerous positions, like: Web Developer, Data Analytics, Java Engineers, Controller, Billing Analyst, Helpdesk/Desktop Jr. Level, Sr. Operations Engineer, and Yield Manager.

Clearspring will be sponsoring the food for the event this evening.

If you’re coming to the event tonight, make sure that you find Ian and say hello. If you can’t make it to the event, e-mail us at jobs@clearspring.com.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been working hard with NBC Universal to upgrade their widgets to work in the new MySpace framework and get posted in their Beta Apps Gallery.

Here are some of their widgets that we’ve launched as MySpace apps. Please add them
to your profile and let us know what you think of the early experience!

• The Office
• Saturday Night Live
• LoveScope

We’ve been working closely with MySpace throughout this process.  Stay tuned to the blog for future announcements, especially once the MySpace Apps Gallery has officially launched.

When I walked into the office yesterday morning, it dawned on me that I hadn’t been in the office for a week. I’ve been traveling and attending conferences so that I can meet and talk with as many of you as possible.

Last week I was in New York City for AJAXWorld. I filled in for our CEO Hooman Radfar at a talk he was going to give on “The Social Aggregator - Widgets Reshape the Social Web.” It went really well. We had the room filled with about 40 people. There was a lot of great discussion about how the Web is getting broken into pieces via widgets and about the current state of consumer-facing and enterprise tools that are bringing the pieces of the Web back together. For a good overview of the talk, check out Sean Michael Kerner’s post at InternetNews.

Unfortunately, I was only at AJAXWorld for the last day of the conference on Thursday. I had a fantastic time meeting people within the AJAX community and listening to some of the sessions. I would have loved to do more.

On Tuesday, I attended the SNAP Summit in San Francisco. It was also a fantastic conference. It focused on “the business and design of social applications.” This is such a fast growing space. It was a blast meeting a lot of the people who are behind the top social applications.

Some of the other highlights from the SNAP Summit was getting to hear from Dave Morin the Senior Platform Manager at Facebook and Jim Benedetto the Vice President of Technology at MySpace. I also had the pleasure of seeing two of my favorite bloggers speak: interface designer Joshua Porter from “Bokardo” and Forrester Analyst Jeremiah Owyang from “Web Strategy by Jeremiah”. Later that night, Jeremiah hosted and helped organize a blogger dinner, which I attended and thoroughly enjoyed.

So… what’s next? Next weekend I’m headed to Rochester, NY for BarCampRochester3, which we’re a sponsor of. As I’ve mentioned in the past, we’re big fans of BarCamps. They’re a great venue for getting folks together to discuss ideas around the Web, technology, and everything.

If you’re in Rochester, please drop me a line. I’d love to meetup. My e-mail address is justin@clearspring.com

Also… if there are any developer events happening in your area in the upcoming months, let me know about them. We’re always looking for new opportunities to get out there and meet with the community.

Our master of all things mobile Rich LaBarca will be speaking at the local user group Mobile Monday DC on Monday, March 17th at TeqCorner. He will give a talk and lead a discussion entitled, “Leprechauns? Demystifying The Mobile Content Value Chain.”

I have been to a few Mobile Monday DC events and they’re great opportunity to meet members of the local mobile industry. So come and join us on St. Patrick’s Day for discussion, good times, and probably pints of green beer later in the evening.

YouTube has recently released a whole slew of new APIs which really moves them from just being an online video destination site to an online video platform. For example, we now have access to customize the YouTube player to make it do new and interesting things.

So… yesterday, our VP of Product Joel Pulliam laid down the challenge to our developers. Steak dinner at Morton’s for the first person who could integrate Launchpad Advanced with the YouTube player user interface.

With the YouTube and Clearspring together, the user has greater power and ease to share the video with family and friends. Videos also have the potential to be seen by a wider audience.

Clay Yount, one of our ninja Flash developers on our studio team, won the challenge. Just click on the asterisk button in the player of the video below and you’ll see the familiar Clearspring share menu. This menu is embeded in the player, so it travels with the player as it’s spread.

Dylan Greene, one of our ninja JavaScript programmers, put together this implementation using Launchpad On-Page. When you press pause or the YouTube button, the share menu is placed on top of the video. This menu stays on the page and doesn’t travel with the player.

PS - Yes, we’re big fans of the video game Portal. smile