Engage 2008: Sprout
Sprout is a way to take content from any website and make it portable; it appears to be like Apple’s Dashboard creation stuff and made generic across platform.
You’ve got a Flex-based Sprout Builder app that appears to be a content manager; you snip content, store it in their builder, and then use it. Actually, as they demo more features, it’s more than that–it’s more like a way to take web content, componetize it, and create mash-ups renderered with Flash. The resulting mashed-up widget is called a “Sprout.”
You can built small widgets and full-size websites with Sprout.
But that’s not all! In addition, they have analytics built-in. They aren’t focused on distribution–they pawn that out to partners–but you can see reports on your content’s usage right in the builder environment.
As I watch them do the demo, Sprout seems like an intriguing combination of content scraper, content manager, website publisher, widget creator, and analytical engine–all rolled into one.
Ben,
Thanks for the post! If your readers are interested, here is a back door private beta invite:
http://sproutbuilder.com/friendsofsprout
Click on the top “get started” button. You do not have to create an account until you save or publish a sprout.
carnet
February 25, 2008 at 6:03 pm
[...] So, even though it was a bit frightening to realize how limited my view of user interface development has been, it was exciting to begin to understand what is now possible as the web and the desktop blend with platforms like Adobe AIR. There were a number of cool applications / features demonstrated. One of the coolest applications was Sprout, for assembling content from anywhere. [...]
Jon Rose’s Blog » Blog Archive » Starting to Get With Adobe AIR
March 10, 2008 at 12:00 am