Virtual Champagne

Our co-founder, Martin, celebrated his birthday today. Working in a company with a virtual office, the best we can do is offer a Virtual Champagne toast – here’s to you Martin, Joyeaux Anniversaire!

WP’sphere

Recently, the Washington Post introduced Sphere It results throughout their site. While an honor for Sphere to partner with such a venerable publisher brand, it’s also another great opportunity for bloggers to join the conversation as well as reach a broader audience of readers than the early adopter blog crowd that has been immersed in blogs since 2003. Always a good thing.

You can find Sphere links under the Who’s Blogging module in the middle left column on all Washington Post articles. As an example, go to this article – Obama takes Hawaii and Wisconsin – click on the “Links to this article” and our Contextual Widget will open up, displaying blogs linking to the article as well as blogs writing blog posts that are contextually relevant to the article. Here is a screen-shot of the Washington Post Contextual Widget.

Washington Post has been one of the most progressive publishers in recognizing the value blogs add to the conversation – in addition to empowering bloggers to link to their articles, they’ve launched a growing list of WP blogs and have established an ad network for a select group of blog partners. Thanks to Atil Erkin, John Alderman, Brendan Monaghan and Jim Brady for embracing the blogosphere and for their unwavering support in partnering with us.

Jobs @ Sphere

Sphere is growing like a weed. If you have a full set of teeth and are passionate about building web-based applications for all kinds of publishers, you may be a great fit for one of our five open positions. We don’t care where you live, we just want people who love to innovate. Click here to see if one of these sound like you.

A few things that are super important for [Read more]

Sphere Facelift…

In case you haven’t seen our new freshly designed site, go take a look around and tell us what you think – www.sphere.com. Sphere’s new look and feel is the result of a team effort led by Dan Cederholm over at Simple Bits.

As our business has blossomed and evolved, our [Read more]

CBS’Sphere

I recently attended the Paley Center Gala honoring Sumner Redstone for his outstanding contributions to the media industry. It was a bit of a Who’s Who affair, Tony Bennett sang, Charlie Rose was the emcee, The NYC Media was in Black tie, joining Barbara Walters and countless stars who attended.

One of the great things he shared during his speech is [Read more]

HOPE

A company blog is an odd thing. Often it’s just one voice that navigates the conversation. In our case, that role has been mine. Our team is diverse, global and has different perspectives on politics. Thus, our blog isn’t a tool for political discourse and we all know how dangerous that topic can be amongst a large group of people. Thus, this post isn’t a company point of view. But, last week we were approached to run an ad in our widgets for Barack Obama’s campaign. The campaign was called VOTE HOPE. We agreed and as always, I click on the ad to see what happens. This campaign pointed readers to a Video called DipDive. Every so often, something really grabs you in media/ advertising and you just want to pass it along – in that spirit, for inspiration, I wanted to pass this along: HOPE .

UPDATE: If you had a chance to click on the HOPE ad for Obama, you might find this one sadly funny, just click on this image:

A Chat with Alternative Search Engines

I got to share some thoughts about Sphere with Charles Knight and Natalya Murakhver at Alternative Search Engines – you can see the post here.

January Wrap-up

End of last year, we decided to open up our data so everyone can follow along. Growth has been very strong since we launched our first related content application (contextual widget) in December, 2006. January was a pretty good and fun month around here [Read more]

Sphere is Always On!

We received an email from Tony Perkins last Friday letting us know that AlwaysOn chose Sphere as one of the top 100 emerging media companies that are disrupting user behavior and creating new opportunities in marketing, advertising and branding. It’s our first award and I have to say it feels good to see our efforts recognized It’s especially nice to be recognized alongside so many company’s that we gawk at for having developed really innovative technology. Congratulations to the entire Sphere team for this award.

Humanism Triumph’s Over HAL (yet again)

Congrats to the Automattic gang for being recognized last night at the Crunchies. Matt accepted the “Most likely to Succeed” reward for WordPress and Toni was named “Best CEO for a Start-up “. You can see the full list of winners over at TechCrunch.

Toni and Matt sporting their new hardware

As for the post title……………...

Who’s In The Sphere?

Check out some interesting stats for Blogs that have added Sphere. WordPress is our largest partner, followed closely by Blogger. Technology blogs are the biggest topic followed closely by Politics, News and Business. The first chart shows the percentage of sites adding the Sphere Contextual Widget by blog platform:

This chart breaks down of the categories of blogs in our partner network:

2007 – that was fun!

What a difference a year makes – a year ago, we launched our Contextual Widget as a Web 2.0 Showcase Company. Since then, we’ve had a lot of fun building innovative, highly customizable contextual products, adding some very talented/ adaptive engineers to our team and then partnering with some A-list publishers and micro-publishers. Our products are scaleable and super light touch to deploy. Our business model is simple and working ahead of plan. We treat our partners, at all levels, with genuine admiration – anytime someone partners with you, it’s a compliment and we take that to heart. By year’s end, we solidified our spot as the #1 provider of contextually relevant content tools, achieving very high/ consistent growth that continues to accelerate.

While our posting on this blog is sporadic (at best), we’re going to try (really) to offer monthly updates on how we’re doing. Before doing so, let’s start by offering a recap of 2007. It was a pretty good year for us. Here’s some data – Sphere is…..

• live on 2.0+ billion article pages every month (and growing weekly)
• generating 100+ million page-views of available ad inventory (and growing weekly)
• working with lots of leading publishers and micro-publisher brands like The Wall Street Journal, CNN, The Washington Post, MLB, CBS, AOL, TIME, US News, Reuters, ZDNet, TechCrunch, GigaOm, Captains Quarters, Cool Hunting, TMZ to name but a few (and the list will double soon)
• generating over 1.0 billion related content links every month to blogs and publisher content (and growing weekly)
• live on over 40,000+ blogs with our Contextual Widget (and growing weekly)
• offering more products than ever: Contextual Widget, Contextual Embedded In-line, Contextual Buzz Clouds, Contextual RSS feeds, Contextual Video

…..despite a small team of 10 people and virtually no marketing, a really bad web-site and very little sleep for our team!

For 2008, we’d like to partner with a broader set of partners. We’d like to expand our product offering, integrate multi-media more widely into all of our products. We’re committed to make all of our products self service with self service customization. And most importantly, we want to continue to play a role in the convergence of mainstream and micro-publisher content – our mission is to help make connections that enable bloggers to join the conversation as well as help the individual voice reach a broader audience of readers.

Some exciting stuff coming up soon, stay tuned.

Sphere for AppExchange

Jaime at KnowNow has a nice post on work we’re doing with them – you can see his post title “Sphere of Influence” here.

We’re big fans of extending [Read more]

Symantec in the ‘Sphere

We recently kicked off our first sponsorship campaign with Symantec in partnership with Federated Media Publishing. We are very excited about having Symantec as our first Advertising partner – an “A” list brand that has pro-actively engaged with social media. We feel they’re a fantastic fit as our first sponsor. Our partner FMP did a great job making the connection happen with Symantec.

If you have a new product to showcase or want to reach an audience engaged in the conversation happening in both Mainstream Media and Blog sites, Sphere is potentially a great place to do it:

• Sphere is the # 1 provider of related content online, reaching a highly influential audience of passionate readers w ho care about breaking news and online discourse.
• Sphere engages with millions of unique visitors per month and generates over 100 million page views/ widget impressions available for sponsorship.
• The Sphere user is more engaged than the typical online reader as they are seeking out additional content by engaging with the Sphere widget.
• We partner with venerable Mainstream Media Sites (such as WSJ; TIME; Reuters; MLB; Washngton Post) and some of the most well regarded micro-publisher sites (such as TechCrunch; GigaOm; Captains Quarters; TMZ; The Science Creative Quarterly).
• Sponsors are important to us, and we look for products and services that we feel would be relevant to our targeted and influential audience.

There are currently two ways to advertise with Sphere: permanent monthly sponsorships on Sphere pages and/ or traditional CPM-based advertising on partner sites including widgets and in-line display.

If you are interested in securing a premium sponsorship on Sphere, please contact us at conrad@sphere.com.

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