It has been a bit of a quiet period at Sprout this past two weeks. A couple of our developers took time off to rest after the last sprint. New employees are getting settled. I have been totally focused on interviewing new team members. It is amazing how much time it takes to recruit great people for the company. We are maniacal about spending the time and energy now to make sure that everyone that joins Sprout not only has the skills and experience, but have the passion and drive to match our current culture. I have seen too many times where startups hire as fast as they can rather than hiring the best that they can. We are taking the long view on everyone that joins us. As Matthew says "hire slow, fire fast."

So what is the culture at Sprout? We try to keep it very simple. First and foremost we all respect each other. We share a common goal and vision for making Sprout a success and that means that we all roll up our sleeves and do whatever is needed. There is no "that's not my job" mentality. In Hawaii there is a word and concept called "ohana" which loosely translated means "family." That is how we work... we don't always get along, but in the end we realize that we are all in this together.

The calm before the storm is about to be over. We are working on our V2.0 roadmap and will be starting a new sprint soon for that launch. Deep breath!

Cool video that Loic and the gang at Seesmic shot last week.

Had a great dinner last night with Mike Hirshland and Ariel Poler to talk about Dog Patch and met some great folks. The theme of the evening was to talk about how startups can better work together to create a community effort for success. I think the first step is to meet good people who are all focused on the same thing.. building a great company. Last night I was in awesome company as we talked about ads, recruiting people, social graphs and other random thoughts. We started Sprout in Hawaii, but now that I am based in San Francisco, it is nice to start building a network of friends and advisers.

So what does this have to do with Sprout? Well, we are building an Internet Content Platform and in order for us to be the glue that binds content online, it is important that we continue to work with companies that are generating the raw material we need to mash together in Sprout Builder.

We sprinted the past two months to release V 1.5 and now the team is taking a deep breath to rest up for the next big push for V 2.0. We reviewed the roadmap today with Jason and it is exciting to see the new features we have planned. I can't wait until it is done!

The two week sprint of conferences is finally over and we are back at the office trying to catch up on all the leads generated while also building more capacity in the team. Todd and I sat down this morning to review four new positions in the Marketing/BD area along with expanding our SDK and Internalization teams. I can hardly believe how fast we are growing, but the time is ripe to capitalize on all the great momentum we are building. As they say, grab the opportunity with both hands.

It is easy for startup companies to grow up too fast.. without a defined strategy. Todd has been great at helping us focus on why we are hiring, not just hiring people and then finding a place for them. The key for us to to build a team that is scalable. That means having specific job responsibilities and then finding the right people to fill them.

We have been getting some nice video coverage lately so wanted to post some of them today:

This video is Ryan Stewart interviewing me at the Adobe Engage event when they launched Air/Flex. It was two weeks after our DEMO launch.

Web 2.0 has come to a close and now the work begins. I promised to not work today and rest, but I could not pass up a quick post to show off Jason being interviewed by KRON tv here in SF.

Vrooom vrooom. The past 24 hours have been a blurr since we launched the new V1.5 of Sprout. Actually it is now V1.5.2 thanks to all the great feedback we received from you all. We appreciate your patience as we work through a couple little kinks. We made some huge changes to the underlying system to allow us to have a per page history palette and also new animations and effects.

We also got a couple really nice reviews from our blogging friends. Thanks everyone for helping Sprout bloom!

Techcrunch

Mashable

Read Write Web

Jaccblog

College Media

Zoom

We just had Jack Johnson's Kokua Festival go on here in Honolulu, Hawaii which was a super good time (check out the sprout created in partnership with Kanu Hawaii). I always think it's real funny to see people wearing shirts of the bands that are playing at the concert they're seeing. Really, we get it. You just paid $50 in TicketMaster fees, I know you're a die-hard Jack Johnson fan. No need to wear the shirt to prove it.

I mention this, not to confuse you dear blog reader, but to admit I'm guilty of a similar, and possibly nerdier, atrocity. Let me explain. We just announced the Sprout SDK today, which I'm very stoked on. This will allow developers to create their own Sprout components and integrate them into Sprout.

On the Sprout SDK developers page, we needed a signup form very quickly. I thought about programming a signup form, creating a new database table, deploying the code to the server...just to collect Sprout SDK signups. I wasn't too excited to program this form, it just seemed soooo 2007. Then, those guys at the Kokua concert popped into my head and I realized I had to create a sprout to accept SDK signups so users can develop their own sprout components for use in other sprouts. And, then in my groggy haze I realized, I am them and they are me. And then the universe imploded on itself.

After several weeks of hard work and a big sprint we are proud to announce the public release of Sprout Builder Version 1.5 today. We were lucky to get coverage from Techcrunch and Mashable this morning.. thanks guys! There are many new features that Austin will post in a Changelog, but here's a teaser:

The 1.5 release will increase the ease of use and robustness of the Sprout platform and will include the following new features:

• Undo/Redo/History: Sprout now keeps track of your last 20 actions per page in your Sprout! No more fears of moving your objects a few pixels by accident!
• Google Forms Component: Survey your users and receive feedback directly into your Google Spreadsheets
• Twitter Component: Display your Tweets directly in your Sprout!
• Ribbit Component: Make phone calls from your Sprout!
• Seesmic Video Component: Show off your Seesmic vlogs
• Help Panel: Get help, tutorials, and watch HOTWO videos while you are building your sprout.
• Animation effects: Want your videos to 'fly in from the left'? We're adding several new animation effects that you can apply your sprout's elements
• Post Sprouts to Facebook's mini-feed, events, and groups: Use the Public Sprout (seed) Page's URL to post "Facebook Shared Links"

It is Friday and there's a killer south swell hitting Hawaii. And for one of the few times this year I actually surfed this morning. I sneaked home last night catching a standby flight out of SFO and arriving home around 9 pm. I woke up early and hit Courts with Rob. Needless to say I caught my best wave of the year... a steep head high right that kept peeling all the way across to the channel. Up and down, of the top and speeding down the line. I still have a grin on my face. Even though I have spent less than two weeks home this entire year, it is good to get back and enjoy a morning out in the surf and feel the sun again.

Last week was super crazy at Adtech, but I think we really showed people there a whole new way to build Rich Interactive Content without all the fuss of programming. Here's a sample of the pitch we gave at the booth as seen by Kamla Bhatt.

Aloha,

Tonight is a big night for QA on the V1.5 release. I want to thank all our users who volunteered to help with the testing, it has been amazing to have the extra eyes on the release. The team is up late tonight putting the finishing touches on the release before our code freeze. We are going to take the next day or so to test for backwards compatibility as we added many features that touch on our core infrastructure. For those of you in SF, we have a booth at Adtech:SF this week and will also have a booth at Web 2.0 conf next week.

Our plan is to announce our launch on Monday April 21st along with some very exciting news on new partnerships in the widget ad space. Please keep an eye on the blog as we get ready to unleash Sprout V1.5 on the world. As always, thanks for all your support and we hope that Sprout continues to be a valuable tool for you to create Rich Interactive Content.

Using widgets as ad units is all the rage today. It is a low hanging fruit for how advertisers are thinking of changing their current online ad paradigm. There are numerous companies right now working to find a solution. Here are a couple of thoughts for everyone to consider:

1) You can't make widget ads look like any other ad unit. Users are not going to react to a new type of banner ad. This is all about Rich Interactive Content and it is important to make the widget ad more of a user defined experience rather than thrusting it on them. Death to Banner Ads!!

2) Content creation is a major bottleneck. There are numerous companies working on ways to combine, condense and make it easier for information to be be channeled to the end creative.

3) Compelling content is key. Why does someone want to bring a Widget into their own environment? Relevancy, fresh content, and uniqueness is key.

So where does Sprout fit within the value chain of creating new Widget ads? We are squarely focused on content creation. Our primary assumption is that if you can not quickly create content that is compelling there is no reason to distribute it. We are planning to make a major announcement regarding our Sprout Ad Network Integration Program next week at Adtech:SF. We'll post more info soon!