Clearspring

Posted on December 20, 2008

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Clearspring Technologies is a privately held Web 2.0 software company that offers a web widget platform. Clearspring’s viral distribution product enables web widgets to be shared and distributed across blogging, social networking sites, and personal Web sites. Clearspring’s product offering also includes two approaches toward advertising with widgets: widgets that are served as ad content through an ad server, and an ad network that provides advertisers the ability to serve advertisements within a widget or across multiple widgets. Clearspring’s analytics suite enables the tracking and analysis of widgets on its platform.

Clearspring Technologies was founded by Hooman Radfar and Austin Fath out of the school of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. The two engineering students won a Phase 1 funding investment from the school’s Pennsylvania Cyber Security Commercialization Initiative (PaCSCI) program in 2005 for their project “A Secure Semantic Info Architecture (Clearspring)”. The two company founders went on to be named “Tech’s Next Gen: The Best and Brightest” by Business Week in March, 2007

The company established offices in Arlington, VA and later received $2M in funding from Novak Biddle Ventures on November 6, 2006. On February 26, 2007, AOL founder Steve Case and Ted Leonsis contributed $5.5M in a second round of funding to the company. The company went on to raise an additional $10M in funding in July, 2007 by an undisclosed individual investor. In May 2008 the company raised a further $18M in a series C funding round that included leading venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Novak Biddle Venture Partners and other previous investors.

In November, 2006, Clearspring Technologies launched its widget syndication platform to enable the sharing and tracking of widgets across the Web. The company now offers the ability to serve widgets as ads , ads within widgets and also announced a partnership with Pennsylvania based PointRoll to deliver widgets within rich media advertisements, SnaggableAds.

Advertising

Widget Ad Network

Clearspring’s “Widget Ad Network” was announced in December 2007. The network provides the capability to advertise within a widget and across widgets. Clearspring’s first Widget Ad Network advertisers were Virgin Mobile, Blockbuster, and Lionsgate.

Snaggable Ads
Example of a SnaggableAd Created by Clearspring

Clearspring’s product name for widgets served as standard IAB banner ads is “SnaggableAds”. This product was launched as a partnership with PointRoll in December 2007. Widgets served as advertisements provide the capability to be shared among and between users within social networks and across social network boundaries with the source being an advertisement. This allows advertisers to extend their campaigns beyond their initial buy as users viewing the widget as an ad can post the widget to their own site.

Viral Posting
Example of a Launchpad

“Launchpad” is a product by Clearspring that was released October 30, 2007. The product allows Web publishers to convert Web content into portable widgets for viral distribution. Launchpad provides a set of customizable sharing menus and buttons that can be placed anywhere on a Web site, allowing end users to grab and post digital content in the form of a widget. The sharing tools within the widget serving product allow users to post the widget to social networks, start pages, blogs, desktop or personal Web sites. Launchpad users can access Clearspring’s analytics suite to monitor distributed widget activity.