Clearspring Technologies, the developer of social sharing platform AddThis, is launching its mobile strategy today, unveiling optimized technologies for the iPhone, Android and mobile web.
For background, the AddThis button sharing tool is currently deployed on 9 million websites worldwide and allows users to easily and quickly share content with others through more than 300 social networking services in 70 languages. → Read More
Oh, Google. Hate to do this again, but you really need to lock up these partners and get your PR in order.
A week after we got a pitch from a partner NFC company all-but-confirming that Google’s New York City event would be about their mobile payment system (Google Wallet), another partner has reached out ahead of another announcement. This time, an email seemingly confirms that Google is going to launch their +1 button for websites tomorrow. → Read More
The name Clearspring Technologies may not be terribly familiar to you, but chances are you’ve often clicked on or at least come across its AddThis buttons, which are plastered on publisher sites Web-wide.
The U.S.-based social sharing platform company this morning announced that it has raised a whopping $20 million in a Series D round of funding led by Institutional Venture Partners, with existing backers such as NEA and Novak Biddle Venture Partners participating. → Read More
Like Twitter, AddToAny turns five years old this week. It doesn’t garner even a fraction of the attention that venture-backed competitors like Clearspring (AddThis), Gigya and ShareThis do, but it has definitely put its stake in the social sharing widget ground.
Note: the above-cited rivals have raised roughly $90 million combined, while AddToAny has never taken outside financing since it was founded back in 2006. → Read More
OExchange, a simple specification for URL-based content sharing on the Web, was introduced today by a number of online service providers and social networks. The open link-sharing protocol has gained support from Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Digg, Instapaper, StumbleUpon, Clearspring Technologies and a handful more.
So what’s it all about?
OExchange essentially establishes a common way for services like Posterous and Google Buzz to receive content. The protocol defines how third-party tools, e.g. Clearspring’s bookmarking and sharing service AddThis, can dynamically discover and share content to these services, as well as how sharing tools can read and set a user’s sharing preferences. → Read More
Seems like widget distribution startup Clearspring is another victim of the economic meltdown forced to make some tough decisions. We heard rumors floating that the company laid off about 20% of its staff in early December, and we’ve now confirmed with Clearspring that several people have in fact been let go, although they’re not sharing the exact amount of firings. CEO Homan Radfar says:
Late in Q4 last year, we decided to reduce our workforce. Even though we had a great year with tremendous growth, the economic uncertainties caused us to lay off colleagues. I am sad to part with them
Worse, the company has to find a replacement for President and COO Jay Rappaport, who joined the company in April 2007 and brought a lot of experience in-house as the ex-President of Vonage and former COO of AOL. We’ve added Clearspring to our Layoff Tracker. → Read More
We’re not exactly sure how long it’s been around (it appears to have launched late this Fall), but we recently came across a simple widget service with no press coverage to date called Hyplet that helps you create digital business cards and flyers. You can spread them around the web by embedding in blogs, social networks, websites, and emails. Hyplet’s end product is nothing fancy, just a simple HTML snippet that references an image hosted on the company’s servers. Most of the service’s value comes from its user-friendly image creation tool that lets you arrange text and images, pick styles, and add links from within the browser. It’s obviously targeted at people with little or no knowledge of Photoshop or similar graphics programs. While Hyplet has templates for both business cards and flyers, you can modify them and add your own images to create widgets for any purpose. I can see individual MySpace users taking advantage of Hyplet to put flyers on each other’s profiles, but I can’t see the service being used for serious viral campaigns. The themes are too limited and the publishing options require you to manually add your widgets in one place at a time (there’s no help from widget distribution services like Gigya or ClearSpring here). There’s also the issue of monetization; Hyplet doesn’t appear to have any source of revenue yet so I’d be concerned that my hosted images wouldn’t be around in the future. It’s also really easy to take out the part of the HTML that promotes Hyplet itself, which I did to the business card above so it could be floated to the left (and no, that’s not my real contact information). Get your own Hyplet! → Read More
Google gadgets came to the Mac today and now Yahoo is releasing an update of their own. They’ve upgraded their Konfabulator widget platform to 4.5 (not currently up) and overhauled their site’s user interface to incorporate better user feedback. While you can get all the technical improvements from Yahoo’s own upcoming announcement. The highlights are support for Flash and HTML and the addition of some new partners. Flash and HTML support mean that widget development won’t only be more familiar to web developers, but also more easily support new applications such as video. Yahoo is also following through on some previous partnership announcements, making Netvibes UWA available as desktop widgets as well as adding the widgets from widget analytics services Clearspring and MuseStorm. CrunchBase Information MuseStorm ClearSpring Netvibes Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Clearspring is announcing today at ad:tech in New York a new service called “Clearspring for Advertisers” that will deliver advertisements in the form of interactive widgets. The announcement does not bring anything particular new to the web, since companies such as Sony Pictures Entertainment, The CW Television Network, Comedy Central, DreamWorks Animation, and Warner Brothers have already distributed ad widgets through the service. We’ve embedded a widget below that was used to advertise the movie Superbad. The arguments in favor of widgets over regular banner ads depend on the increased engagement levels they provide and their viral nature (fans of a product can embed the widgets in their blogs and social network pages). More information about the service can be found here on Clearspring’s website. CrunchBase Information ClearSpring Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Since last November, Clearspring’s widget syndication platform has served up analytics on over 4.2 billion widget views for clients like Time, NBC, Universal, and Maxim. Tonight, Clearspring is opening up their platform to any developer, letting you write, track, and distribute web widgets across a multitude of websites and platforms. They will also feature a forum to support their developers. The announcement puts them into competition with WidgetBox’s analytics and distribution platform, and Widgipedia’s knowledge base. Clearspring’s platform lets developers code a widget once and dynamically serve it an embed on any websites, Google Gadgets, Netvibes, Pageflakes, and Live.com within their wrapper. All a developer needs to do is point Clearspring to their widget’s source code. Clearspring’s wrapper tracks analytics for your widget and dynamically sets parameters for your widget. It also includes a customizable “grab it” button that lets you get the embed code or import it into a variety of social sites. All the analytics data is available through a dashboard. The dashboard breaks the data down by type (visits/uniques), source domain, and geography of the visitor. Within the dashboard you can also analyze how your widget is spreading and identify the “viral hubs” helping your widget take off the ground. Since Clearspring can set your widget’s parameters, it not only means users can edit the widgets settings, but that you can create widgets on the fly through their API. One example of a dynamic widget is the NBA player card below, which can generate a card for any NBA player based on the parameters fed to Clearspring. http://widgets.clearspring.com/o/45881d714d8ff0fd/466ef9af70d2cb55/lebron_james/fccb82d0 Clearspring is funded by $8 million from Novak Biddle, ZG Ventures, along with various angels. Check out more in Clearspring’s profile. → Read More
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