Dan has a nice write up on our site redesign.
February 22, 2008
CBS Fans Only’sphere
If you like keeping up with sports, videos, tidbits and scoops, you’ll want to check out the new CBS sports Network site, Fans Only. If you’re a serious sports fan, I think you’ll love their new site. It’s a social networking platform that you can personalize (similar to NetVibes or PageFlakes) to display up to the minute news from thousands of sources, virtual tailgates, blogs and game picks. Fans can free create pages to follow their favorite teams, adding multimedia content such as streaming video highlights, statistics, polls, rankings and chats. This is very novel. It’s fun, it’s interactive, confident and progressive to let readers “slice and dice” media.
I’m a big sports fan, the kind of guy that naively believes the Cubs are going to (more…)
February 21, 2008
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!
February 20, 2008
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.
February 19, 2008
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 (more…)
February 18, 2008
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 (more…)
February 17, 2008
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 (more…)
February 9, 2008
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:
February 8, 2008
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.
February 1, 2008
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 (more…)
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