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Sprout Raises $5 Million for Flash Widget Creation
I’m not the only one who was impressed by Sprout, a browser-based tool for creating interactive widgets in Flash that debuted in February.
The Honolulu and San Francisco-based startup has collected $5 million in venture funding to fuel its operations. Polaris Venture Partners led the round, with previous investors Global Venture Capital and Mitch Kapor participating. Mike Hirshland of Polaris will join Sprout’s board of directors.
Sprout is notable for the power it gives non-techies to design impressive pieces of distributable content, which can be used primarily for viral marketing campaigns. These pieces, called “sprouts”, are like mini-websites in that they can contain pages with elements you’d find on regular webpages: text, links, graphics, video, audio, and even interactive components like polls and maps.
In April, Sprout announced an SDK that could be used by 3rd party developers to integrate functionality into the Sprout creation tool, thereby turning it into a platform of sorts.
The company has, of course, created a sprout to mark its funding announcement. We’ve embedded it below.
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Wix: The Bold Web Content Creator
Cluttered and candy-coated are two ways to describe Wix, a new Flash-based website and widget creation tool that we’ve been anticipating for months. It’s also feature-rich, very well-designed, and - sorry - still in private beta.
Wix joins a multitude of browser-based website creators such as Weebly, Synthasite, and Google Pages. But it reminds me the most of Sprout, a widget-creation tool that can also be used to make websites, since both provide fluid Flash interfaces that appeal to your inner designer.
Both of these companies are blurring the line between content that’s meant to stand alone as distinct websites, and content that’s meant for syndication over blogs, social networks, and other destinations. It’s because of this obfuscation that they’ve opted to use the unspecific, yet self-referential, names “sprout” and “wix” when referring to their creations.
Whereas Sprout is mainly marketed as a tool for spreading media content, Wix most certainly appeals to a younger population that’s obsessed with expressing themselves online (call them MySpacers, if you will). Wix does have a collection of tasteful business themes, but the vast majority of its templates are for fun and fall into categories like “street art”, “emo”, “playground”, and “sexy”.
Once you pick a theme for your new website (or widget, just depending on your dimensions), you are taken to a popup Wix Editor that provides you with an overwhelming number of ways to spice up your creation. You can add shapes, clipart, photos, videos, songs and animations; you can tweak colors and set visual effects for user behavior; and you can add text paragraphs and headlines. Photos can be uploaded manually or pulled in from either Flickr or a royalty-free stock collection; videos can be embedded from YouTube; and there’s also a collection of free song clips that can be used in a range of skinnable music players.
Each wix supports multiple pages with links between them. When you want to edit a particular object on a page, you click on it and options for rotating, resizing, and positioning are revealed. A Mac OS-looking doc at the bottom of the screen also provides icons for setting effects, behaviors, animations, and more. You really need to play around with Wix to fully appreciate how much flair and how many customization options it affords.
As you work on your wix, you can hit a preview button to see what it will look like. And once you’re done with it, you can publish it either as a website hosted on the wix.com domain or as a widget to be embedded or sent to friends via email.
One of the major complaints many have about Flash is that it doesn’t allow for indexing by search engines. Wix gets around this by producing content that’s a hybrid of HTML and Flash, despite the fact that it’s editor is entirely Flash-based. This will be a huge benefit to anyone who uses Wix to set up a serious website, but it probably won’t make any difference to widget creators.
Update: Wix is giving out a couple hundred private beta invites to readers who email info@wix.com with requests.
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Sprout: Now A Viral Distribution Platform for Web Services
Sprout - the impressive browser-based tool that debuted at DEMO in January and suddenly made it feasible for non-developers to create rich Flash-based widgets - has got even better with the release of v1.5.
One of the most promising things about Sprout was that it integrated third-party services. At launch, publishers could add to their widgets, among other components, polls from PollDaddy and maps from Yahoo. Since there are countless other web services that could potentially widgetize themselves, Sprout has decided to release an SDK that effectively turns the tool into a platform.
As if to demonstrate the SDK’s possibilities, the company is debuting support for Twitter, Seesmic, and Google forms (which allow you to collect information from users in a Google spreadsheet). Expect others to follow on their own volition.
In addition to the SDK, Sprout is adding some simple animation effects for when users interact with the various parts of a widget. You can now, for example set shapes to bevel or blur when someone clicks or hovers over them. Simple undo functionality has also been added, although I’m still waiting for proper layers.
Sprout is going from strength to strength, and as word about its capabilities spreads further, we can expect it to become quite the acquisition bait. This is a marketer’s dream tool in an era of social media/advertising, and Sprout shouldn’t have any trouble monetizing its service given that widgets are effectively advertisements for many publishers. Now with the SDK, Sprout should also attract the attention of many startups, too.
The company says that 30% of its widgets have been posted to MySpace, 20% to Facebook, 25% to other social media sites, and 25% to general websites. The largest segment creating Sprout widgets are labels and artists, followed by religious and non-profit organizations, venues, and events. See a sample widget from Universal Music (which unfortunately I can’t embed because it auto-plays music).
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