2007 – that was fun!

What a difference a year makes – a year ago, we launched our Contextual Widget as a Web 2.0 Showcase Company. Since then, we’ve had a lot of fun building innovative, highly customizable contextual products, adding some very talented/ adaptive engineers to our team and then partnering with some A-list publishers and micro-publishers. Our products are scaleable and super light touch to deploy. Our business model is simple and working ahead of plan. We treat our partners, at all levels, with genuine admiration – anytime someone partners with you, it’s a compliment and we take that to heart. By year’s end, we solidified our spot as the #1 provider of contextually relevant content tools, achieving very high/ consistent growth that continues to accelerate.

While our posting on this blog is sporadic (at best), we’re going to try (really) to offer monthly updates on how we’re doing. Before doing so, let’s start by offering a recap of 2007. It was a pretty good year for us. Here’s some data – Sphere is…..

• live on 2.0+ billion article pages every month (and growing weekly)
• generating 100+ million page-views of available ad inventory (and growing weekly)
• working with lots of leading publishers and micro-publisher brands like The Wall Street Journal, CNN, The Washington Post, MLB, CBS, AOL, TIME, US News, Reuters, ZDNet, TechCrunch, GigaOm, Captains Quarters, Cool Hunting, TMZ to name but a few (and the list will double soon)
• generating over 1.0 billion related content links every month to blogs and publisher content (and growing weekly)
• live on over 40,000+ blogs with our Contextual Widget (and growing weekly)
• offering more products than ever: Contextual Widget, Contextual Embedded In-line, Contextual Buzz Clouds, Contextual RSS feeds, Contextual Video

…..despite a small team of 10 people and virtually no marketing, a really bad web-site and very little sleep for our team!

For 2008, we’d like to partner with a broader set of partners. We’d like to expand our product offering, integrate multi-media more widely into all of our products. We’re committed to make all of our products self service with self service customization. And most importantly, we want to continue to play a role in the convergence of mainstream and micro-publisher content – our mission is to help make connections that enable bloggers to join the conversation as well as help the individual voice reach a broader audience of readers.

Some exciting stuff coming up soon, stay tuned.