We are turning off our old products so we can commit all of our resources to advertising. You can read more on the Retire page. Expect a lot more from our ads soon. Thanks to all our dedicated users, it’s been a fun few years!

I’m pleased to announce that Spongecell has been selected as an AlwaysOn East 100 Winner in the Digital Media category.  Congratulations to the team on this award!

Because most of us Sponges are graduates of Carnegie Mellon, we’ve got a shared passion for the lovely city of Pittsburgh and it’s many charming idiosyncrasies. If you haven’t had the pleasure of eating a JonesBurger at Fatheads and washing it down with a pint of Yuengling, you need to stop reading this post and immediately add that to your personal “to-do” list, right after “Read Spongecell Blog”. And then after that, add “Attend Spongecell’s Monday Night Football Party”, because it’s going to be a great time.

We’re throwing the shindig on November 3rd, so prepare yourself. We wanted to do it a bit earlier, but we decided that it would be best to coincide it with a Steelers game – again, we’re from Pittsburgh – in order to make the celebration all the more epic. So come on over, have some beers and BBQ on the house, watch the game and find out as much as you can about the cool stuff we’re doing. I don’t mean to overplay it, but trust me, it’s cool.

Here is the Facebook event link, as well as the one for Upcoming. See you there!

Like that kid with the unibrow in the 80s movie, we here at Spongecell want to be big. Not big like Shaq, but big enough to count some of the heavyweights of industry as our partners. We’re ecstatic to report that we’re on our way, as we are proud to announce our latest ad partnership with the biggest name there is in the computer industry – Microsoft. We’ve had our share of partners since we launched our rich media advertising solution but none are as big or as well-known as Microsoft, and we’re happy to be on board!

Specifically, we are working with Microsoft to help drive traffic and interest in their Small Business Summit, which is a free conference for small businesses to learn different tactics to get a small business started on the right foot in the marketplace. As a small business ourselves, we definitely could have used some of their lessons when we were first getting started, but now that we’re partnered with such a huge name like Microsoft, perhaps all of the late nights at our Spongeatorium are beginning to pay off. It must be all the chow mein we’ve been eating.

Stay tuned, though! More big news and big names coming soon. In the meantime, you can check out the ad screenshot, or read more about the summit.

I just got back from Berlin where I was in attendance representing Spongecell at RailsConf Europe. In addition to my great presentation I was inspired by Yehuda Katz’s presentation on jQuery and Justin Gehtland’s talk on loosely coupled applications. We have been using the Prototype library for a long time at Spongecell and although it has made improvements recently, I’d still like to try out jQuery some day.

Spongecell has worked on many products and although most of what we have is built off a single code base, we have built some applications that live off of our API. Gehtland spoke on ways to split an application into sub-applications, such as how sign-in credentials and databases can be shared to give seamless transition between parts. However, there are some limitations, such as memory. Rails takes a lot of space, and when you’re just launching an app, having each part load the rails stack could be significant cost.

RailsConf Europe was slightly smaller than what I’ve seen in Portland, but the food catered in Berlin was incredible and the presentations were definitely on-point. Feel free to check out the e-commerce example site I created and view the ActiveMerchant presentation.

Pictured is Melissa Shin, Operations Manager, deciding which resource recovery receptacle to use for her  beverage container at the Slow Food Rocks festival on Sunday here in San Francisco. With the patient help of an attendant, she decided to put her made-from-corn-cup in the compost bin.

Similar to deciding which resource recovery receptacle to use is deciding how to add an event to your life once you have discovered it online. Spongecell makes this decision easy by giving you all the options you need. Check out examples in Spongecell’s Advertisement Gallery. I decided to download the Slow Food events into iCal and then sync it to all the calendars in my digital life. The food was delicious and G-Love was of course fantastic.

A hearty thanks and a tip of the hat to Nimbology, for their post regarding their experiences with our advertising platform and specifically, my little ad-hoc demonstration at SFBeta.

It’s always a great feeling when people you talk to and meet out in the real world understand what you’re trying to do and the value of your product. We work on the platform all day, every day. We know the product inside and out, and we strongly believe in the value we provide to display advertisers and interested consumers. However, just like anything else you commit yourself to, it’s hard to see the outsider perspective – so it always brightens our day when someone comes along and gives us feedback like that.

Just a reminder: this Thursday, August 21, Spongecell will be hosting Lunch 2.0 at our HQ office here in San Francisco, CA. We strongly recommend showing up earlier rather than later, as the response to the event has blown us away. Hope you can make it!

Spongecell CTO Chris Hobbs will be presenting at the Rails Conference Europe on September 4, 2008 in Berlin Germany. The RailsConf Europe is organized to meet the increasing demand for skill building, and to spread the developments of Rails to programmers and IT managers alike. The most innovative and successful Rails experts and companies from around the world, including Spongecell’s very own CTO Hobbs, will provide examples of development paradigms and design strategies to enable businesses to take advantage of this new generation of services and opportunities.

Hobbs will be presenting “Add E-Commerce to Your Website in Less Than One Week Using ActiveMerchant”. For more information on the conference or registration, click here.

Last Thursday, some of our East Coast office made an appearance at Mashable’s SummerMash at Touch in NYC, where there was lots of socializing about Web 2.0 over food, drinks and live music. The event was the grand finale of Mashable’s cross country Summer Tour, and a couple hundred people came out to celebrate. We had a great time meeting folks and talking up our new Rich Media. If anyone from SummerMash didn’t get a chance to run into us and wants to grab a drink and recreate SummerMash, get in touch and we’ll make a date!

Spongecell’s CEO Ben Kartzman was recently inducted into The Internet Oldtimers Foundation, erzognized as being as a leader in the digital advertising community. The foundation highlighted Ben’s experience in the digital and online advertising worlds alike, writing:

“Ben Kartzman has emerged as one of the leading minds in the creation and management of highly usable software products. He is a qualified expert in interactive advertising and possesses particular strengths in global team building and development.”

The Internet Oldtimers Foundation was founded in 1999 and represents the leading decision makers in the digital media and marketing industry. Read more about where New Media goes for experience and perspective here!