We've teamed up with Universal Pictures to do a "Build a Hellboy II Widget" contest, in conjunction with the "Hellboy II: The Golden Army" movie premier on July 11. Sprout users can build their Hellboy widget using the assets found in the Hellboy II template, enter it into the contest, and have a chance to win up to $500 plus have their widget featured on the official Hellboy II movie site!

For more information, including contest rules, please go to http://sproutbuilder.com/hellboy. Contest entries will be accepted through June 30th, so get started now!

Lots of you have been asking us if you can remove the bar containing the Sprout logo that is automatically placed at the bottom of every sprout when published. And now you can! Upgrade your account to “Pro” and the "Sprout bar" will be removed. There is no fee for the Pro account at this time, and to upgrade, simply log in to the builder and look for the “Go Pro” text link in the upper right corner.

If you are at the HOW Conference in Boston today (or, if you are in Boston, period), then come have drinks on Sprout:

When: 7 pm tonight, Monday May 19

Where: Charly's Bar, 284 Newbury St. (Cross street Glouster).

Who: Look for people in Hawaiian shirts

Top-Secret Password to Join Party and Have Drinks on Us: "I'm Blooming"

Hope to see you there.

We'll be exhibiting at the HOW Design Conference (http://www.howconference.com) May 18-21 at the Hynes Conference Center in Boston. We're introducing Sprout to 3,000+ design professionals so we expect some real high-end sprouts to be built soon after! Our intrepid CEO, Carnet, will be running a session called "Fast Flash Creation With Sprout" on Wed. 21st at 8:45-9:30 a.m. If you are attending the conference then stop by, say hello, and we'll show you the latest that's going on with Sprout!

Well, the SanFran MusicTech Summit. We'll be there, May 8, Hotel Kabuki. If you are in San Francisco and love music and technology(!), you should be there too.

And of course, a SanFran MusicTech Summit sprout for their home page...

http://sanfranmusictech.com/

Yes, we'll also be at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco next week. More details to follow...

Today was the first day of the Ad:Tech conference and we showed off Sprout to lots of ad industry folks. If you happen to be attending the conference (or just happen to be in San Francisco) please stop by our booth (#5274) tomorrow, to get a sneak peek at our 1.5 release and see us styling our Aloha shirts!

Sprout is optimized for Internet Explorer (IE) 7.0, Firefox 2.0+ and Safari 3.x+, as well as Flash 9. We recommend that if your browser or Flash player is an older version, you upgrade to the latest before using Sprout.

You can get IE 7.0 here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=9AE91EBE-3385-4...

And Firefox 2.0 here:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

And Flash 9 here:

http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=Sho...

Happy building!

No, not me. Your sprouts. You've built them, published them, and now want to know how exactly they are doing. Are they getting viewed? Are they getting clicked?

To find out, log in to the builder and click the "reports" link in the upper right corner. A window will open which will show you key stats for each of your sprouts, as follows:

- views: how many times your sprout has loaded on a Web page

- posting interface loads: how many times you or someone else has clicked the "share" link and gotten to the share menu

- sprouts posted: how many times your sprout has been embedded in a web page, by either you or your audience

- custom events: how many times someone has clicked on a "custom event" that you set up in your sprout.

The "custom events" are a very useful feature. If you want to track clicks on any asset in your sprout, be it an image, text link, button, etc, just do the following:

- click on the asset and then go to the "properties" bar on the right. On the properties bar is a "links and tracking" section. Under "track" use the pull down menu to select "click". Then you will be prompted to enter a name for this tracking action (custom event), so for instance if you were tracking clicks on a button that links to your home page, you could label it "home page button". Then, when you go to the reporting, you will see "home page button" as a custom event, and you will see all the clicks that this button has gotten.

Thank you very much to all our initial beta users. We've gotten tons of feedback on specific things that need improving and this is invaluable - our mission is to build a better product for you and without this feedback this couldn't happen.

We're going to be adding much more "help" related content soon, including detailed FAQs, how-to videos, a user forum, and much more. In the meantime, keep those comments coming!

Cheers!

Todd