VentureBeat

Sprout, the company that makes it easy to build interactive multimedia widgets in the Flash format, is now letting companies customize its widget maker for marketing campaigns. You’re probably thinking, “Pfft, marketing widgets, what’s special about that?” But Sprout’s FanKits — starting with a kit for the upcoming Sony movie Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist — are interesting because they’re essentially a branded and customizable version of the Sprout platform, allowing fans to build the widgets, and to further customize them whenever they’re shared.

San Francisco- and Honolulu-based Sprout has been getting a bunch of great reviews because its tool makes it ridiculously easy to create top-notch widgets through a WYSIWYG (”what you see is what you get”) graphical interface that’s similar to Photoshop.

With the Nick & Norah kit, for example, users can build a widget with pages of videos, pictures and music (from music site imeem) that you choose. And it’s not just the limited selection provided by Sony, but pretty much any media you can find online and want to use  — Sprout chief executive Carnet Williams says FanKits can be “as open or as closed as a company wants.” Even better, when another user sees one of the promotional widgets, not only can they embed it like a normal widget, they can also “remix” it — basically using the existing widget as a template to build a new one.

There are tons of widget advertising companies already out there, and some of them have pretty similar offerings. But I don’t think Sprout is trying to compete directly with Clearspring, an ad network that uses widgets — in fact Sprout works with Clearspring and other networks to distribute its widgets). It’s just trying to provide the tools for making widgets, and to create different products to make money from those tools. FanKits are a good first step.

Here’s a widget that the company made promoting the Sony deal and FanKits in general.

Sprout has raised about $8.3 million venture backing.

Sprout, the startup behind an easy-to-use tool for creating Flash applications, has been having a very good year. It launched in January at DEMO (where it snagged a “DEMO god” award), made its app builder publicly available in March, then released a bunch of new features in April. Now it has raised $5 million in a second round of venture funding.

Through Sprout, you can use a “what you see is what you get” interface reminiscent of Photoshop to build applications that the company calls “sprouts”. The apps are basically widgets, but with the interactivity of a Flash website. The process is made especially accessible through Sprout’s templates, which can be customized with just a few clicks.

Sprout added compatibility with a number of other sites and applications in April. Now, you can use your sprout to display your Twitter messages, make phone calls via Ribbit and feed user survey information directly into Google Spreadsheets. Even better, Sprout released a software developer kit that allows other web services to integrate with Sprout’s platform.

The release of Sprout Verision 2.0 is imminent, says chief executive Carnet Williams, and the new funding will be used expand the engineering, business development, marketing and support teams. The round was led by Polaris Venture Partners, with participation from existing investor Global Venture Capital and Lotus founder Mitch Kapor. The San Francisco- and Honolulu-based startup was previously raised $3.3 million.

Sprout, an easy, in-browser tool for creating Flash applications, is about to launch publicly. The company has been generating buzz since it launched in January, and chief executive Carnet Williams says the tool will leave its private testing phase today at noon Pacific time.

Sprout’s big selling point is its “what you see is what you get” interface, which allows users to build Flash applications (basically widgets, although the company calls them “sprouts”) using tools reminiscent of Photoshop. If users start with one of Sprout’s templates, they can build a fairly rich widget by just making a few clicks and typing a few lines. (See the screenshot of Sprout’s “promote a cause” template below.)

The company wants to make publication easier too, Williams says. Once users have created their sprouts, they can distribute them using Clearspring, Gigya and SpringWidgets.

While there are other WYSIWYG Flash editors out there, most of them (like Flypaper) are focused on creating graphics and presentations, rather than the range of apps that Sprout supports. Williams sent me links to some of the sprouts that have already been created: promotional widgets for an author, a record label, a politician and a movie. The best of these sprouts have the content range and interactivity of a fully-fledged Flash website.

My favorite example of Sprout’s capabilities was actually posted to the company blog. Apparently, after spotting this simple countdown widget to promote the new Indiana Jones movie, Chief Product Officer Jason Ricci was inspired to create the much richer widget here, which includes photos, news and links.

Williams says the company decided to create Sprout to address problems it faced under its old business model — making fundraising widgets. Williams’ team members wanted a quick, easy way to alter the widgets without having to go in and rewrite the code, so they first created Sprout for in-house use. They also had to wait for the right technology, Williams says — an early version was attempted with Action Script 2, but it didn’t really work until Adobe released Flex. (You can read our coverage of Flex 3’s release here.)

Since Sprout’s private launch, Williams says users from 30 countries have created 3,000 sprouts. The company has also added some new features, including integration with PollDaddy and Google Gadgets.

The Hawaii- and San Francisco-based company is self-funded at $3.3 million, Williams says.