I think that Clearspring could have fetched a much higher number like $30-40 million. Why because it's about infrastructure and analytics. Online advertising is changing. Just look at Twitter. Clearspring has a bigger monetization opportunity than Twitter yet Twitter has all the VCs in a raging auction. Clearspring has a deeper opportunity.

Readers of Furrier.org know my opinion on the changing online advertising market. A new metric will emerge. Alot of us insiders know this and are racing to build the solution. Who will win? Clearspring has a great chance and is more than viable. It's a billion dollar business.  Oh yeah Clearspring has big media companies adopting as well - that's all upside.

I think that this financing represents the growing trend of convergence within online advertising and social networks.

I won't even talk about the media and search opportunity that I see with widgets and infrastructure data. Hmmmm..

All this negative thinking is a result of pondering over the $18 million in Series C funding raised by Mclean, Va.-based Clearspring from New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Novak Biddle Venture Partners and other current investors. Competitors include Musestorm and Gigya, that have come up with platforms that allow publishers to publish, distribute and monitor their widgets.

Their total funding to date is $35 million. Other investors include Steve Case, former CEO of AOL who is said to have put in a big dose of cash. One of the other investors is said to be Adobe Systems, mostly because Clearspring is a big proponent of Flash-based widgets, and at one time ADBE was rumored to be buying the company.

More than the funding, the pre-money valuation is what made me gulp hard. It is said to be in high double digit millions - somewhere north of $60 million. Why is that? Because the company is said to have some astonishing numbers...

* served over 34 billion widgets to date; that’s up from 3 billion in May of 2007
* serves nearly 4 billion widgets per month
* has 126 million unique views per month worldwide
* had 50 million unique views per month in the U.S. alone; that’s up 6.5% from February

.... not that they really matter. Because they really don't tell the story about Clearspring. First time I met Hooman Rafdar, CEO & Co-Founder of Clearspring was back in Fall 2006 at the Widgets Live conference that was co-orgnaized by me. His idea was that as widgets phenomenon spread, the widget makers would need infrastructure - platform and analytics - to publish and distribute the widgets as they grew in numbers. Then later they started old media companies and sports leagues with development of widgets and then they launched a widget ad network. So from that perspective this company is a infrastructure provider + consultant + ad network. In other words it doesn't really own the widget impressions, per se. Not that the company has to!

Radfar didn't give me any revenue numbers (typically no start-up talks about it) or divulged the percentage of widgets on his network that carry ads. He did mention $5 CPMs, which is much higher than the CPMs being reported by some of the other social media operators. Many of the widgets that carry CPM ads, have low CPMs - somewhere in the $0.15-to-$0.20 range, down from nearly 40 cents in late 2007.

I think there in lies the bigger problem with the widget sector as a whole: no one seems to have come up with a business model that makes sense. The widgets have become too successful, and have created too much inventory that keeps growing but doesn't perform as well, forcing advertisers to re-adujust their efforts. Yet you have companies like Sprout getting funded, which tells me that there is a mismatch between market reality and VC expectations and lack of understanding of this sector.

The big opportunity is in analytics that lead to a better widget advertising system does a great job of behavioral targeting. The other opportunity is in developing new kind of ad formats that can be scaled. Radfar's company plans on building better analytics that will improve the widgets and widget-based advertising. Lets hope for the sake of Radfar's investors he is right and gets there. That is before Google does.

Economic Slump Hurting Cable, Not Satellite; perception of satellite's HD programming as superior helping growth. (Reuters)

New TV Series Scarlet a Marketing Hoax; elaborate ad campaign promotes LG's new TV sets. (The Wall Street Journal)

Can DVD Sales Rebound? DVD sales held steady last quarter at $3.5 billion, but high gas prices are putting the squeeze on the shiny discs and could impact Blu-Ray adoption. (Variety)

National Geographic Channel Changes Up; site now allows video previews of upcoming episodes and makes 800 videos available. (MediaWeek)

Sling Media Updates Mobile Player; new versions add support for more handsets, improve streaming quality and add support for more set-top boxes. (TV Squad)

TVGuide.com Sees Traffic Growth; site says it is getting 12 million unique visitors a month, up 40 percent over 2007. (TVWeek)

I owe apologies to both phydeaux3 and aditya. I troubled both these persons about the issue that I had with Internet Explorer. In good faith, I believed that it had something to do with phydeaux3 instructions on how to enhance the label page element.
The truth about the matter is that phydeaux3's method is perfectly sound and it was not due to his installation scripts that caused my Blog to fail with Internet Explorer.

I hope that Aditya did not spend needless time in trying to find out what was the root of my previous problem with I.E.

Guess what caused the problem? As I went about carefully with the new template, I kept checking back with I.E. after each and every forward step that I made. It turned out that the Launchpad by Messrs.Clearspring Technologies is the cause for the blogspot.com site from successfully opening in I.E.

Right after I had Launchpad scripts entered into the Blog template as instructed by Messrs. Clearspring Tech., my new blog template stalled with I.E. and there came that horrible error message that I.E. could not open blogspot.com.

Well, from now on, one has to be very careful about introducing these new techy blog stuff into one's own Blog template.

Here are some of the best tools that can assist you with creating and sharing your own viral marketing campaign for anything you want to promote. It can be your blog, political candidate, a book or screenplay you wrote and just about anything else you can imagine. The possibilities are limited only by the imagination. Also, it can be a lot of fun too.

gydget is the easiest viral marketing service that I've tried thus far. You can create live widgets with feeds for videos, events, news and more. Whenever something changes on the source website such as your events on MySpace then the information is updated in every gydget that is loaded out there on the web! This makes the widget a useful information tool in addition to entertaining (thanks to the video feature).

Here's a gallery of existing viral marketing campaigns created with the free gydget. Most of the widgets are for music artists, but there are many that are not. For example, you will also find promotions for comedians, actors, actresses, movies, and much more. Just about anyone or anything can benefit from viral marketing tools such as gydget. This includes even non-technical people or ventures like writers and their work.

This video from a local news station shows how a fan of the Oakland Raiders uses a Gydget widget to share the latest news and information about the team with other fans.

Here are two viral marketing distribution services that allow you to setup websites to provide widgets and track them. They offer some free accounts but also provide premium services that include more bells and whistles.

http://www.gigya.com is the creator of wildfire which is most popular platform for websites that distribute viral marketing widgets such as gydget.
Here is a video promo for Gigya.

http://www.clearspring.com is a competitor to gigya and gaining some attention lately.

Final Thoughts:
I think viral marketing is a brilliant way to get the message out about yourself or anything else you want to share with the world.
Who says that press releases have to be dull and boring? Why not use some of the these tools and create exciting and refreshing new ways to spread the word?

Links:
Here's an excellent link to a free eBook on Viral Marketing as well as an insightful podcast in mp3 format.

The story has consistently been framed as an issue of getting users rather than making money. For a while the excitement was around MySpace, then Facebook opened its APIs and the widget makers rushed into a promised land of adoption and media coverage. But as social networks and widget platforms, such as Clearspring, begin to explore monetization strategies, and as widget makers such as Slide pull in large amounts of capital, the time to prove that widgets can make money is here.

There are few ways companies are doing this, with the most obvious one centered around using a widget as a billboard. If you already make money from your content and can offer something interesting, a widget is a good way to extend your brand and get people to watch your new television show, read your content or see your movie.

Examples of this type of widget includes the film widgets from the likes of MovieFone, or the widget tools The Wall Street Journal and New York Times offer via Netvibes. In fact, Netvibes is looking to take this a step further by charging people for better placement of their widgets on its personalized home page in a manner similar to Google's AdSense program.

If you buy into the idea of widgets as a billboard, or that some type of advertising could eventually be shown on widgets, then the idea of knowing how many people are snagging or looking at your widget -- and how often -- becomes interesting. Services such as ClearSpring, MuseStorm and Triggit provide these sorts of tracking and analytics services and already charge -- or plan to charge -- the widget makers a fee. Those that charge widget makers serving advertisers such as major publishers and sports leagues are in luck. Those that charge consumer widget makers without a clear revenue model might find themselves wondering what to do if their customers don't make money.

But running analytics and platforms can be a challenge when there are no set standards for widget monetization. Much like the early days of banner advertising, when people just sold whatever unused space they had, the world of widget ads is a Wild West with no set sizes, rules about placements, or even defined success metrics.

Many company executives and their venture backers in the space believe that the Interactive Advertising Bureau, widget makers, social networks and publishers will get together in the near future to hammer out standards, from something as simple as how to determine the appropriate pixel height and width of an in-widget ad to how to figure out when a widget ad is successful.

Some of the metrics currently being considered include charging advertisers based on: the number of people who see the widget (cost per thousand); the number of people who actually interact with the widget (cost per click); and the cost per install, which measures how many people snag the widget for their own page. As much as analytics can tell people about what happens with a widget and where it goes, it's still hard to say how successful it has been unless it's tied directly to a purchase. And frankly, even those numbers can be tweaked.

This standardization will likely emerge once a successful model does. So far, Beacon isn't winning rave reviews and it's worth waiting a bit to see what some of the more consumer focused widget-creation platforms like RockYou and Slide can contribute with their revenue models, but my bet is this will happen sooner rather than later (like 2009).

Much like Google monetizes their users by giving them something that enough people want (search results, free directory services via GOOG411) and then painlessly taking something Google can use (money from advertisers, a sampling of accents for its voice recognition efforts), a widget monetization strategy needs to keep users happy while also giving something of value to someone.

The challenge facing most widget makers that target consumers is figuring out what it is their widget-watchers have that's valuable -- and who might want it. Those focused on a more ad-centric model are going ahead with their plans to use the widget as a more interactive billboard, but companies like Slide and RockYou may find that strategy more difficult.

Even with the uncertainly, I agree with Satya Patel of Battery Ventures (and a former Google executive) who says, "While widgets have generated a lot of hype, they are certainly an important vehicle for content, commerce, communications and advertising and they are here to stay. There will be several large businesses built in and around the widget market." But I think we'll also see a lot of them fail.

But I have the feeling that the physical newspaper isn't long for this world.  (I think my home town newspaper is getting small enough that it will qualify as a pamphlet.)

People are turning to the Web for their information.  Web applications like personalized home pages are becoming the view port into the world.  The Web can give me what I want... where I want it

If the comic strip wants to succeed, it needs to be modular so that its content  can be syndicated in whatever environment a user desires.

Well... Dilbert has done just that. There is now the Official Dilbert Widget.

You can post the Dilbert widget to your personalized home page, your social network, or your blog side bar easily. From within the widget, you can search view today's comic strip (pane by pane) or you can view past comic strips.

I think it's wonderful. It's on my iGoogle page.

And... Yes, the Official Dilbert Widget is powered by Clearspring Technologies. (Disclosure: I'm joining the staff at Clearspring.)

What do you think of the Dilbert Widget?  Have you installed it somewhere yet?  Could you make it better?  How could you take the future of publishing comic strips to an even better level?

Marketing media gurus like Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research and Ivan Pope (the "father" of the modern widget) also spoke about other topics, such as long term strategy and setting realistic campaign goals. Key topics included widget standards, cross domain functionality and the value of open social to name just a few.

Jodi McDermott of Clearspring addressed a crowd of expert online marketing professionals about web analytics and how Clearspring is forging new ground, making it easier than ever before to deploy a thoughtful, measurable widget strategy. Jodi also pointed out a simple but effective point. "Keep the end in mind" she says. Don't ever start a campaign without having a clearly defined set of achievable goals.

Linda Boland of ComScore gave her audience her professional insight on tracking widgets in the wild and effectively portrayed a deep insight into the life of a widget once it is released correctly. Linda gave us a high level view of widget migratory pasterns that go "viral" and shared her insight of the viral loop.

Notable companies like Clearspring, MuseStorm, Sproutbuilder, MindCandy, Nokia, Motorola, Plusmo, Newsgator, Platform-A, Mixercast, Splashcast and Perfspot spoke in open forum discussions and private meetings about the future of online and mobile marketing.

A concentrated group of companies that are leading the charge against static banners and stale advertising tactics gathered to talk about the widget; a small thing that is changing the advertising world as we know it. Outside the box engineers and creative thinkers like Khris Loux and Chris Saad enlightened us to the tomorrow of data portability and Open Standards. Patrick Sexton of SEOish who came to the second day admittedly hung over and still delivered a presentation that rocked the foundations of what we thought the rules were. Patrick taught us new ways to enhance our SEO strategy. He also reminded us of an important point that I feel should be mentioned here. Brands: take controll of the conversation or you will have others doing it for you. Take a stance with your brand and continue the conversation in social media on your own terms with atainable goals and the appropriate degree of prudence. Don't let your affiliate marketers define your brand for you.

Who knows what the future of online marketing will be or the eventual outcome of the social media frenzy? The pioneers and engineers of rich and engaging advertising online and the early widget brand adopters have an idea. The widget will inextricably change every experience we have online.

PerfSpot is happy to embrace the future of the web and it was a pleasure to meet the best and brightest artists of the code and widget. Thanks to all that participated. We look forward to continuing to socialize, discover and create with you!

Yep, these are my co-workers.  I know you're jealous.

Yesterday at Clearspring, we launched a redesign of the Web site.  It's AWESOME.

Lots of hugs to our amazing Web and User Experience teams.

BTW - Check out the Developers Page and scroll down to the bottom.  There is a photo of this really good looking guy.  You may recognize him. ;-) :-p

I am personally excited because our team is continuously working to improve and build upon our widget analytics capabilities. There is so much cool stuff we have in the pipeline and I can't wait for us to deliver it all to our customers.

Thank you to everyone who reads my blog and sends me emails on what you are doing in the space. Our team is on the warpath to deliver you more - better insights and data so that you can make better business strategy decisions on how you deploy your widgets. Keep the communication coming!

You can read the press release here in its entirety:

McLean, Va., May 21, 2008 — Clearspring Technologies Inc., the world's largest widget syndication and tracking service, has secured $18 million in a series C funding round that includes leading venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Novak Biddle Venture Partners and other current investors. The new round will fund expansion of Clearspring's viral marketing network, which currently serves and tracks almost four billion widgets monthly. It will also be used to extend Clearspring's reach into international markets and further develop its rapidly growing advertising network and vast data infrastructure and optimization services. Clearspring's category leadership is well-established — according to comScore's Widget Metrix report, Clearspring tallied 126 million unique widget viewers in March 2008, making it the No. 1 widget platform in the world.

"No other widget company has the breadth of relationships with content publishers, advertisers, developers and social media, as well as the full suite of widget services including syndication, in-depth analytics and easy-to-use monetization tools," said Harry Weller, partner at NEA. "Clearspring is the leader in this space, and we look forward to working with the company as it expands its platform and extends its reach into global markets."

Weller will join the Clearspring Board of Directors, joining, among others, Internet pioneers Steve Case, Ted Leonsis and Miles Gilburne. Case, the co-founder of America Online, Leonsis, AOL's Vice Chairman Emeritus, who recently became Clearspring's Chairman, and Gilburne are all credited with driving worldwide adoption of the Internet by providing tens of millions of people with their first Internet connection. Also new to the Clearspring board is Nigel Morris, co-founder of Capital One.

"We are excited about partnering with NEA. This partnership will enable us to enter the next phase of our growth and pioneer the next generation of the Social Web," said Hooman Radfar, Clearspring co-founder and chief executive officer. "Advertisers and publishers rely on us as a channel to reach audiences on the Social Web, and this funding will enable us to extend our platform and services to continue delivering on that promise."

Clearspring provides the platform and services connecting widget advertisers and publishers to the evolving Social Web. The company has served more than 33 billion widget views since launching its platform in 2007. Clearspring's platform enables publishers, developers and advertisers to distribute, track and monetize content as widgets to more than 80 social networks, blogs, start pages, and bookmarking sites — including Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Blogger, iGoogle, and Windows Vista.

"Clearspring is definitely hitting on all cylinders. A growing list of world-class customers, incredible growth in the usage of its syndication services, and a significant investment from a firm with NEA's reputation provide validation that we're leading the charge into the next evolution of the Web," said Leonsis. "We're thrilled that Harry Weller and Nigel Morris have joined the board. Harry brings a proven history of guiding early stage companies to success, and Nigel, who while at Capital One unlocked the market value of their data, brings experience that will help us leverage our vast amount of data to deliver the best end-user experience and the most efficient advertising network on the Social Web."

Marketers who have used Clearspring's widget network include mass market consumer brands such as Aquafina, Honda, Snapple, Snickers, Sprint and Virgin Mobile. Other customers include movie and entertainment companies like Blockbuster, Disney, Fox Broadcasting, Lionsgate and Sony Pictures, major sports leagues like the NBA, NFL and NHL, major advertising agencies including 360i, Digitas, JWT, Mediacom, MindShare and Universal McCann, and world renowned media firms such as ESPN, National Geographic, NBC Universal, Newsweek, Time-Warner and Washingtonpost.com. Also, top international recording artists including Linkin Park, Madonna, Radiohead and U2 have successfully launched promotions using Clearspring widgets.

Other news links you should also check out are:

CNET

Mashable

DMWMedia

VentureBeat

Clearspring, the widget company that has broken into the advertising and distributed media realm, has raised $18 million in a Series C round of funding, led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Novak Biddle Venture Partners, with existing investors also participating in the round.

Harry Weller, a partner at NEA, will be joining the Clearspring Board of Directors, as will Steve Case, co-founder of AOL, Ted Leonsis, AOLs Vice Chairman Emeritus (who is now Clearspring’s Chairman), Miles Gilburne, and Nigel Morris, co-founder of Capital One, who also has a great deal of experience in helping companies go public. That’s a lot of new board members to go along with the hefty round of funding, and a pretty powerful set of newcomers.

Check out the entire article at Mashable, "Clearspring Gets $18M to Make Smarter Widget Ads."

Radio giant Clear Channel is taking it to the web. Monday and Tuesday of this week saw back-to-back announcements about the company's new Internet-based initiatives, both of which show an emphatic embrace of the online world and its place in the evolution of radio.

Let's take the Tuesday announcement first, as reported by the San Antonio Business Journal:

Clear Channel Radio has launched a new Web site to help advertisers choose between all the diverse promotional tools that radio has to offer these days.

The business-to-business site, www.totalradius.com, gives advertisers a glimpse of all the different promotional tools they can use for their campaigns, including on-air, on-demand, mobile text and digital broadcasts.

"Totalradius.com is a first stop for advertisers exploring the multi-faceted landscape of radio," says John Hogan, president and CEO of Clear Channel Radio. "At the push of a button, advertisers can hear successful audio branding, get examples of integrated marketing best practices and get in contact with stations in their markets."

There are sections on the Totalradius site that that include testimonials, breakdowns on how to write a commercial, and several other topics. Online audio and video enhance the effort to engage possible advertisers, displaying the power of radio. All-in-all, a nice step forward bridging the gap between terrestrial radio and the Internet at the industry level.

Then comes the other interesting bit of news (via Mark Hefflinger of DigitalMediaWire). Clear Channel is looking into developing a personalized web radio player for its stations' websites. That in and of itself is no news, simply good planning. What does make it interesting is that they have opened talks with Pandora.com about collaborating on development. (If you're unfamiliar with Pandora it is an outgrowth of the Music Genome Project and bill themselves as a learning online radio station that adjusts to your tastes. Tim Westergrin, the founder, is also one of the movers behind Save Net Radio. I had the pleasure of meeting him at the New Orleans Jazz Fest in 2007, and he is an amazingly nice guy.)

Clear Channel seems to be evolving their efforts to be more in tune with the Web 2.0 world, as can be seen in strategic alliances such as the one with Clearspring (developing widgets to stream stations through social networking profiles), or their new lyric search feature powered by Sony owned Gracenote.

Image courtesy of Bull3t, used under its Creative Commons license

I'm excited.  For one, I heart BarCamps.  They're always just a wild ride.  You never know completely who you're going to meet and get to know but you know they'll be crazy smart and crazy passionate about tech/web-related things, which is AWESOME!

Plus I'm really excited to make this initial foray into the Northwest.  It's not a place i've been yet.  I hear there is a lot of really cool tech going on up there.

It will also be an opportunity to tell a new audience about all the awesome things that we've been doing at Clearspring Central Command.  Can't wait for this!

So... Portland look out!  I'm coming your way.

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has a brought back a popular exhibit entitled, "Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936."  It chronicles the history around  the time when Adolf Hitler was able to get the Summer Olympics to be hosted in Berlin, Germany.

In addition to have an exhibit at the physical museum building (which I haven't checked out yet), they have a Web site which carry's a lot of the same content.

One of the REALLY powerful portions of the online content is audio interviews with athletes of that era and the decisions they made or were made for them around their participation in the games.

If like me, you found the content to be powerful, you can easily share the audio content with your friends because it is in a widget.  They use our Clearspring widget platform for distribution of the widget. :-) (Full Disclosure: I work for Clearspring and used to work with a team member at the USHMM.)

Above is a screenshot of the widget.  I would have embedded it right in here but Wordpress.com doesn't allow the embedding of content from third-party sites, unless you're a few special sites.  *sigh*

Regardless, this is a GREAT example of breaking your Web site a part into pieces and allowing people to spread amongst their communities.  I'm anxious to hear what kind of results the Holocaust Museum gets.

ABC and the Arbor Day Foundation are doing this REALLY cool campaign.  ABC picked 9 of their widgets and every 10 times someone watches a video on one of the widgets a tree sapling will be planted.

Use widgets, watch videos, and get trees planted.  That ROCKS!  Check out the post I did on the Clearspring blog and go use the widgets.  It's for the environment man!

I'll be at BarCampMiami and Future of Web Apps (FOWA).  At FOWA, they have a killer speaker lineup like Kathy Sierra, Kevin Rose, Gary Vaynerchuk, and others.

If you're going to either of those events or live in the Miami area, drop me a line.  I'd love to meetup.

Over at the GigaOm blog, they boiled down the four biggest themes that came from this year's DEMO conference. One struck my eye:

Componentization of the web

The web’s full of pieces: static images, YouTube clips, Facebook widgets and Flash plugins. Startups want to let users rework these pieces their own way.

This is exactly what i've been saying.  When people find a Web site or piece of content they like, they want to be able to take it with them and do stuff with it.

This theme is also why I joined the widget platform company Clearspring.

So if you create online content, how are you allowing your users to grab a hold of and do stuff with the useful components?

On Thursday, I made my first post.  Here's a snippet:

Upon entering our office complex in the morning, I was greeted by our local fire fighters.  Our office was without power because apparently a tree  fell on a nearby power substation.

When you’re a Web-based startup like Clearspring, it’s pretty hard to get any work done when there’s no power.  So what do you do?  You setup a mini-golf course around the cubicles and offices.   It was fun and a great way to get to know some of my co-workers.

There will be many more posts so stop by, drop me a comment, and say hello.

BTW, Here's a fun sticker I found on our office Red Bull container.

Here's to a new year and new opportunities.

It was a gathering of local geeks to talk about the issues relating to widgets and other modular social applications ( like Facebook apps.)  There was also a lot of widget and social application hacking.

On Friday night we gathered to talk about the overall goal of the event, we discussed high level issues and uses related to widgets, and also brainstormed widgets we wanted to build. Before and after there was also lots of time to hang out and relax.  It was a good opportunity to get to know others who were interested in the space.  I think there were 50-60 people who were there on Friday night.

On Saturday while only 30-40 people there, we had folks leading GREAT discussions.  There was everything from how to use widgets with the social graph, an overview of the Clearspring platform, widget best practices, desktop versus Web widgets, JavaScript vs. Flash vs. Flex for widgets, Facebook app development 101, and much more.  It was great!

Also we had a number of folks who spent a lot of time Saturday doing some coding.  We had guys writing widgets, Facebook apps, and some even playing with Google's Android mobile platform.  At the end of the day on Saturday, we gave the different developers time to demo what they'd been hacking up and the demo's caused some really great discussion too.

One conclusion that I walked away from the event with is that all too often people work on their various projects and home by themselves but they'll have a TON more fun if they can do it with or around other people with like interests.  We need more co-working in Washington DC.  I'll write more about this later.

If you'd like to have a WidgetDevCamp in your city, please e-mail me at justin AT clearspring DOT com.  I'd be happy to help however I can.

Note: First photo was taken by Jason Garber.  The second photo was taken by me.

My good friend and recruiter extraordinaire Robert Neelbauer  along with one of his compadres is holding an event next Tuesday Monday called Social Matchbox DC.   It's a job fair/meet and greet for local DC tech startups and local geeks.

I'm confident it will be a great event.  Unfortunately, I can't be there but you should go, especially if you're looking for a job.  A lot of local startups will be there... Razoo, Mixx, Webs (formerly Freewebs), Hotpads, Clearspring, Intridea Inc, CustomInk and others.