Like that kid with the unibrow in the 80s movie, we here at Spongecell want to be big. Not big like Shaq, but big enough to count some of the heavyweights of industry as our partners. We’re ecstatic to report that we’re on our way, as we are proud to announce our latest ad partnership with the biggest name there is in the computer industry - Microsoft. We’ve had our share of partners since we launched our rich media advertising solution but none are as big or as well-known as Microsoft, and we’re happy to be on board!
Specifically, we are working with Microsoft to help drive traffic and interest in their Small Business Summit, which is a free conference for small businesses to learn different tactics to get a small business started on the right foot in the marketplace. As a small business ourselves, we definitely could have used some of their lessons when we were first getting started, but now that we’re partnered with such a huge name like Microsoft, perhaps all of the late nights at our Spongeatorium are beginning to pay off. It must be all the chow mein we’ve been eating.
Stay tuned, though! More big news and big names coming soon. In the meantime, you can check out the ad screenshot, or read more about the summit.
I just got back from Berlin where I was in attendance representing Spongecell at RailsConf Europe. In addition to my great presentation I was inspired by Yehuda Katz’s presentation on jQuery and Justin Gehtland’s talk on loosely coupled applications. We have been using the Prototype library for a long time at Spongecell and although it has made improvements recently, I’d still like to try out jQuery some day.
Spongecell has worked on many products and although most of what we have is built off a single code base, we have built some applications that live off of our API. Gehtland spoke on ways to split an application into sub-applications, such as how sign-in credentials and databases can be shared to give seamless transition between parts. However, there are some limitations, such as memory. Rails takes a lot of space, and when you’re just launching an app, having each part load the rails stack could be significant cost.
RailsConf Europe was slightly smaller than what I’ve seen in Portland, but the food catered in Berlin was incredible and the presentations were definitely on-point. Feel free to check out the e-commerce example site I created and view the ActiveMerchant presentation.
Pictured is Melissa Shin, Operations Manager, deciding which resource recovery receptacle to use for her beverage container at the Slow Food Rocks festival on Sunday here in San Francisco. With the patient help of an attendant, she decided to put her made-from-corn-cup in the compost bin.
Similar to deciding which resource recovery receptacle to use is deciding how to add an event to your life once you have discovered it online. Spongecell makes this decision easy by giving you all the options you need. Check out examples in Spongecell’s Advertisement Gallery. I decided to download the Slow Food events into iCal and then sync it to all the calendars in my digital life. The food was delicious and G-Love was of course fantastic.
A hearty thanks and a tip of the hat to Nimbology, for their post regarding their experiences with our advertising platform and specifically, my little ad-hoc demonstration at SFBeta.
It’s always a great feeling when people you talk to and meet out in the real world understand what you’re trying to do and the value of your product. We work on the platform all day, every day. We know the product inside and out, and we strongly believe in the value we provide to display advertisers and interested consumers. However, just like anything else you commit yourself to, it’s hard to see the outsider perspective - so it always brightens our day when someone comes along and gives us feedback like that.
Just a reminder: this Thursday, August 21, Spongecell will be hosting Lunch 2.0 at our HQ office here in San Francisco, CA. We strongly recommend showing up earlier rather than later, as the response to the event has blown us away. Hope you can make it!
Spongecell CTO Chris Hobbs will be presenting at the Rails Conference Europe on September 4, 2008 in Berlin Germany. The RailsConf Europe is organized to meet the increasing demand for skill building, and to spread the developments of Rails to programmers and IT managers alike. The most innovative and successful Rails experts and companies from around the world, including Spongecell’s very own CTO Hobbs, will provide examples of development paradigms and design strategies to enable businesses to take advantage of this new generation of services and opportunities.
Hobbs will be presenting “Add E-Commerce to Your Website in Less Than One Week Using ActiveMerchant”. For more information on the conference or registration, click here.
Last Thursday, some of our East Coast office made an appearance at Mashable’s SummerMash at Touch in NYC, where there was lots of socializing about Web 2.0 over food, drinks and live music. The event was the grand finale of Mashable’s cross country Summer Tour, and a couple hundred people came out to celebrate. We had a great time meeting folks and talking up our new Rich Media. If anyone from SummerMash didn’t get a chance to run into us and wants to grab a drink and recreate SummerMash, get in touch and we’ll make a date!
Spongecell’s CEO Ben Kartzman was recently inducted into The Internet Oldtimers Foundation, erzognized as being as a leader in the digital advertising community. The foundation highlighted Ben’s experience in the digital and online advertising worlds alike, writing:
“Ben Kartzman has emerged as one of the leading minds in the creation and management of highly usable software products. He is a qualified expert in interactive advertising and possesses particular strengths in global team building and development.”
The Internet Oldtimers Foundation was founded in 1999 and represents the leading decision makers in the digital media and marketing industry. Read more about where New Media goes for experience and perspective here!
The first challenge that we set out to solve when we started Spongecell was to figure out how to make it easy for consumers to move relevant content from a transient place on the web into a permanent one in their lives. It has always been our mantra to take the interest that is created by content on the web and find an easy way for consumers to convert that interest into real-world participation. Since we’re all more likely to do things when we have a social connection to them it’s natural that we would want to tell our friends, through email and social networking platforms, what we’re doing. That correlates directly to interest as placing that content into one’s cellphone, social network or calendar makes one that much more likely to participate in it offline.
It is this thesis that has us and our advertisers so psyched about our Rich Media Ads platform. I grabbed this from Brad Burnham’s post on Meetup:
“for the web to have a greater impact going forward it will not only have to touch the real world, it will have to reach real people.”
This really is one of the key tenets of our offering. Display advertising is such an incredible way for brands to reach interested consumers, but for too long the only option within display ads was just to click through to learn more or engage further. In our eyes, the real opportunity for all brands and advertisers in using display ads is reaching people with relevant content, and then giving them an easy way to pull that content into their lives.
First things first, let me introduce myself. I’m Nik, the creative director here at Spongecell. I joined up with the team about seven months ago after a two year stint at Yahoo!. Before that and like most other members of the team here at Spongecell, I attended Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where I graduated with a Bachelors in Information Systems/Communication Design, and a Masters in Information Systems Management.
Whew! Glad that is out of the way.
Last night, I had the distinct pleasure of demoing the new Spongecell Rich Media Ads platform at SFBeta, a very highly visited and respected tech meetup in Downtown SF. I got to meet some great people, received a lot of great feedback, and had a blast doing it. It really seems like people are taking to the product and our value-adds over traditional display advertising, which is great to see.
As a company, we’re planning on a lot of different things, and we’re thinking about different ways to open ourselves up to the community. Yesterday was SFBeta, but tomorrow might be Lunch 2.0, and the day after that might be a softball game in Golden Gate Park against DIgg. Who knows - just keep your eye out!
Because most of us Sponges are graduates of Carnegie Mellon, we’ve got a shared passion for the lovely city of Pittsburgh and it’s many charming idiosyncrasies. If you haven’t had the pleasure of eating a JonesBurger at Fatheads and washing it down with a pint of Yuengling, you need to stop reading this post and immediately add that to your personal “to-do” list, right after “Read Spongecell Blog”. And then after that, add “Attend Spongecell’s Monday Night Football Party”, because it’s going to be a great time.
