User:Dansponge/Spongecell

Spongecell is an American software company that provides interactive media technology for display advertising. The company has an approach to transforming standard banner ads into dynamic flash ads with rich media-like functionality. Some features of their advertising platform include politely loaded rich media, enabling ad content to be shared and distributed across calendars, social profiles, mobile devices, home pages, and other permanent places directly from the ad unit, and run on standard flash impressions. Spongecell's platform also includes advanced, fully transparent reporting on consumer engagement, and features flexible billing option based on the different reporting metrics.

Spongecell is funded by Halo Venture Partners, including The Interpublic Group of Companies (IPG) and the Pilot Group. They have offices in San Francisco, CA and New York, NY.

Launched in September 2005, Spongecell released their first public product, Spongecell Calendar. The product was an Ajax-based calendar solution, which was received favorably but was ultimately shelved after Yahoo and Google entered the already crowded space. A key notable feature that would highlight subsequent products from Spongecell was the innovative use of artificial intelligence aspects to turn natural language into structured data entries, as noted by TechCrunch.

In 2006, the company moved towards an event promotions platform, releasing Spongecell Promote. The project took chunks of the Spongecell Calendar product and morphed them to serve email and SMS marketing customers. Like Spongecell Calendar, the product was lauded by technical publications. Read Write Web called it a "very well made and versatile platform", and Mashable gave specific credits for its innovation in event customization. Despite the industry plaudits, it was refactored into the current display advertising platform to capitalize on a much wider market sector.