At the DEMO ‘08 conference, Sprout unveiled Sprout Builder, an authoring platform that allows anyone to quickly and easily build “Living Content” – widgets, mashups, mini-sites, and other forms of interactive and distributable web content.
Users create content (“sprouts”) by dragging and dropping rich media such as video, audio, images, text, shapes, and interactive services such as chat (Meebo), phone (Ribbit), fundraising (ChipIn), surveys (PollDaddy), and more. The resulting Flash file can be embedded onto any Web site, blog, or social networking profile or published via widget platforms such as Gigya, Clearspring and SpringWidgets.
The Sprout team demonstrated the power of its Sprout Builder onstage at DEMO ‘08, building a sprout live and in less than five minutes for the band Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals. The sprout, which included video, a jukebox, calendar, and RSS feed, will be embedded on the band’s Web site (www.benharper.net) and MySpace profile, where it can be copied and shared by their fans, allowing the band to reach new audiences and keep their fans constantly updated with the latest news, tour dates, song releases, and more.
Sprout has a range of features appropriate for both novice and advanced users, resulting in quick and easy creation of sophisticated multimedia content.
1. Pre-Built Templates
Pre-built templates make building a sprout real easy. Choose from templates for musicians, politicians, causes, sports teams and more. Drag in your content to the placeholders and your done. You’ve just mad a professional looking sprout in just a few minutes time.
2. Maximum Flexibility
Building a sprout from scratch gives you maximum flexibility. Choose from dozens of standard sizes or make your sprout any size you want. Sprouts can have from one to thirty pages (and the thumbnail bar like the one below means you don’t have to worry about creating inter-page links) Set your master page foreground and background then start building!
3. Easy Asset Management
You can upload and then add all sorts of multimedia to your sprout, including images, video, audio, Flash files, and much more. Manage your assets by type and by sprout so that using them in other sprouts is a matter of dragging and dropping.
4. Dozens of Components
Sprout comes with advanced components that you can add by simply dragging and dropping. Choose from slideshows, jukeboxes, RSS feeds, and more. Or “mashup” any of components from our web service partners including Meebo, Ribbit, ChipIn, and others.
5. Final Touches
When it’s time to polish up your sprout, you can adjust the properties of any piece of content and create shadows, glow effects, links and much more. And each component has its own set of properties to make them look and act exactly as you want them to.
6. Flexible Publishing
Publishing your sprout is easy, too! You can copy the code to embed in any Web site, use the quick post feature to place in your blog or social networking profile, or for advanced options you can choose to distribute via Clearspring, Gigya, and SpringWidgets. And once your sprout is live, your audience can virally spread it just as easily.
7. Advanced Tracking
Once your sprout has spread, you can track the number of times it has been copied, the number of times it has been viewed, and even data on video plays, link clicks, and more.
Sprout is a FREE service and is currently in beta testing.
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