Sprout
4 result(s) displayed (1 - 4 of 4):
Beachfront Launch: Hawaii's Startup Community
In 2006, in an essay entitled How to Be Silicon Valley, Y-Combinator's Paul Graham laid out what it would take to build the next generation of emerging startup hubs. According to Graham, all that is required are nerds, rich people, personality and a willingness to tolerate odd (but brilliant) ideas. Hawaii probably isn't the first place you'd think to launch a startup but given the fantastic quality of life and key components of a good tech community, it's certainly a viable option.
Sprout Adds Social Platform Support
Sprout, developer of a unique drag-and-drop widget creation service, announced today that its development platform now supports the Facebook Platform, Facebook Connect, and OpenSocial. According to the press release, this will "enable brands and agencies to focus their time on the creative campaign development and still reap the rewards that social networking applications offer.." Which means, if you are using Sprout for your ad campaigns already, you now instantly have access to three more social platforms to deploy on. If you aren't using Sprout, why not?
SproutBuilder Grows Up, Releases SDK
SproutBuilder, the drag and drop Flash authoring environment for widget building we fell in love with at the DEMO conference, released a much more sophisticated version of its service today. Authoring controls are much improved and the new Software Development Kit offers a taste of the kind of extended functionality that will now be available to users.
Sprout users can now integrate Twitter, Seesmic, Brightcove and other web services into their widgets. The SDK will be opening up slowly to support as many services as developers can imagine.
Concept Albums and Blogs
At the risk of going off-topic, I'm currently deeply into IMHO the best album I've heard in years - Green Day's American Idiot. It's a concept album and I often wonder how such a thing could be done in blogging. It's common wisdom that a focused blog is the best way to gain a following in the 'sphere. But I reckon bloggers could complement their chosen topic by producing concept-driven 'blog albums' from time to time. I wrote about this a year and a half ago, in a post comparing blogs to albums. While my position has changed on a couple of points in that Sept 2003 post, this extract illustrates what I mean:
"...in the tech blogging world, Don Park has recently written an album full of posts about Wikis, Dave Winer is in the midst of recording his thoughts on political blogs, Jon Udell has written a variety of classics on topics such as Universal Canvas. There are even the blogging equivalent of Unplugged albums - check out Mark Pilgrim's These Days."
While I encourage ambitious bloggers to be topic-focused, variety is the spice of life. An excellent way to keep things interesting is to explore a different concept every week or month (or whatever time period suits you). I have to keep reminding myself of this too. As I said in the Sept 03 post:
"Perhaps I'll start writing weblog "albums" - there'll be about 10 posts per album and each album will have a different unifying theme."
Hmmm. I have some ideas about how to do this in my Web 2.0-focused blog. Stay tuned ;-)
bonus link: Wikipedia list of concept albums. Includes this description of the Green Day album: "A Bay Area suburbanite named Jesus of Suburbia flees his broken home to experience city life, transforming into the rebellious St. Jimmy. Notable as a punk rock opera." More here (I heart Wikipedia).
Movable Type search results powered by Fast Search
