Spark Client Roster

November 15, 2007 | PR Trends | Spark Clients | 2 Comments

In case you’ve been wondering what Spark is working on or rather, who we’re working with, to put it simply, we’re lucky enough to represent the most innovative organizations in fast-growing market segments including consumer technology, venture capital, wireless, enterprise, and clean technology. To break it down even further, here’s our current client roster.

- Marni

Sparkpr Client List: November 2007

Consumer Technology

Online Movies/Social Networks:
• Jaman — Jaman is the leading online entertainment service that delivers over 2,000 feature-length, international and independent award winning festival films in high-def for rental or purchase. Almost like having the independent film channel (IFC) online, Jaman is a fast and fun way to discover new films that are not available from Blockbuster or Netflix and can easily be downloaded to any PC and also played on a television in high definition.

• A Small World — ASmallWorld is the world’s leading private online community for successful, lifestyle-minded trendsetters and takes a contrarian, by-invitation-only approach to Facebook and MySpace. Founded in Europe in 2004, the company is gaining steam with U.S. users and advertisers. They are bucking social networking trends by remaining small and creating a intimate corner of the Web for CEO’s, entrepreneurs, athletes, artists, actors, philanthropists and models.

Online Printing/Personalized Greetings with Photos and Designs:
• Moo — Moo is a unique printing company, offering different ways for people to bring their digital photos to life with unique, personalized print products perfect for gifting family and friends and adding flair to entertaining, decorating, wrapping and greetings. MOO cards are becoming a global cult phenomenon in 120 countries as people have bastardized the traditional business card as non-representative of all their online and offline identities.

Predictive Technologies:
• Farecast — Farecast is the first and only airfare prediction website. Farecast.com helps airfare shoppers across the country save money by answering the question: should you buy now or wait? Each month, Farecast creates more than 37.8 million predictions, by analyzing 250 indicators. Cool story.

Gaming:
• EA Mobile — EA Mobile is the most ubiquitous gaming platform in the world with more than one billion units sold, far surpassing console deployments. It allows gamers to play popular franchises like The Sims, Madden NFL, Need for Speed and Harry Potter for less that $10. EA Mobile has ~30% market share, selling the most-popular mobile games like Tetris and Bejeweled.

• EA Sports — EA Sports is the leading interactive sports software brand in the world, with top-selling titles and franchises including Madden NFL Football, FIFA Soccer, NHL® hockey, NBA LIVE basketball, NCAA® Football, Tiger Woods PGA TOUR® and NASCAR® racing. Its immersion in the sports world extends beyond games into a rich sponsorship portfolio, including NBA Europe Live presented by EA SPORTS, the EA SPORTS Maui Invitational college basketball tournament and the EA SPORTS All-American program.

Devices:
• Dash Navigation — Dash navigation is the first Internet-connected automotive GPS device. The highly anticipated product will ship in Q1. With its unique set of connected features, the Dash Express goes well beyond existing, standalone GPS devices. Here’s why:
• The Dash Driver Network — Know the best ways around traffic using information generated from other devices in the Dash community.
• Yahoo! Local search — Find virtually anything — people, places, products and services — right from the driver’s seat. Simply select your result and drive right to it.
• Send to Car — Send addresses from any computer straight to the dashboard, eliminating the need for paper maps and directions.
• Dynamic Destination Information — Get the latest gas prices, movie times and community-based ratings for destinations — right from the driver’s seat.
• Automatic Updates — Automatically receive updated features, maps and software.
• Dash is a Platform: At Web 2.0 last month, Dash unveiled a platform and applications that bring the open web with all of its great geo-coded content into the car, where you need it most. Dash demonstrated how it has taken search in the car, an industry first, to a whole new level giving consumers the power to personalize their devices with applications from sites like Zillow, Craigslist, Upcoming and Platial.

Services:
• Education.com — Education.com is a one-stop online destination for educational information and services for parents of children in preschool through grade 12. While parents today are turning to the Internet for their most pressing questions regarding their children’s education, the number of resources available online are daunting and fragmented. Education.com aims to solve this problem by offering parents the ability to easily find over 4,000 reference articles from the most respected non-profits, government agencies, and universities in the country, plus cutting edge editorial content, communities, and tools to answer education related questions and inspire them with ideas that make learning a part of their family’s everyday lives.

• Terabitz — Terabitz is the most complete resource online in the real estate industry for consumers evaluating a real estate transaction and a definitive “home page” that provides everything in one place. Terabitz is a destination that is comprehensive, objective and easy to use. Property listings, neighborhood highlights, local market data, and local service providers can be accessed, stored, and shared with friends and family, as well as real estate agents and other providers. The platform is flexible, fun, and helps every consumer make smart decisions before, during, and after the property transaction.

• Viagogo - Viagogo is the world’s only global secondary ticketing website and helps consumers find tickets to their favorite events from San Diego to Santorini. Founded by StubHub cofounder Eric Baker, the company has landed major secondary ticketing partnerships with many of the highest profile European Premier League teams including Manchester United and Chelsea FC, the NFL’s Cleveland Browns, global concert promoter Live Nation and music label Warner Music Group. Viagogo provides a safe, secure, and guaranteed method of obtaining tickets to any event around the world.

Open Source Software

• Zend — Zend is the commercial company behind PHP, providing products and services that make PHP applications a great choice for mission-critical, high-traffic websites. With 4.7 million developers and 20 million domains, the open source scripting language PHP is under the hood of almost every fizzy new application that hits the web. It’s also the language of choice for Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and others as they work with customers to webify their legacy applications.

Venture Capital & Financial Services

• Azure Capital Partners — Azure Capital Partners is a venture capital (VC) firm with over $650 million under management, headquartered in San Francisco, California. The firm’s goal is to identify, invest in and help build early stage information technology companies that are at the forefront of a transformative opportunity for growth. Azure’s partners have a long track record of identifying and helping to build some of the most successful companies in communications, consumer, enterprise and Internet technology segments. The Azure team is recognized for industry thought leadership and a unique professional investment approach to venture investing. A proven methodology and primary research enable Azure to identify young companies in attractive markets whose business models provide sustainable competitive advantage. Portfolio companies include Bill Me Later, Calix, Education.com, Fonality and Zend.

• Index — Index is one of the top global venture capital (VC) firms, investing in a range of tech and biotech sectors. The firm is known for its recent exits such as Skype (eBay), Tellme (Microsoft), Last.fm (CBS) and other hot portfolio companies such as MySQL, Trolltech, NetVibes, FON, Zend, Rebtel, Viagogo, OpenAds and more. For a complete list, visit www.indexventures.com

• Crosslink — Since 1989, Crosslink Capital has invested in emerging technology companies focusing on communications, core technology/semiconductors, software & services. Crosslink was the first investment firm in the U.S. to integrate public and private technology investing. Crosslink invests in very early, seed stage financings all the way through later-stage private opportunities and into the public market. This strategy allows Crosslink to partner with its portfolio companies on a long-term basis and offer insights on the market not readily available to other investors. Today the firm has over $1.1 billion in assets under management.

• Barclays — Barclays is one of the world’s largest financial institutions, with $2.2 Trillion in assets. Sparkpr works with Barclays US credit card division, which issues co-branded cards for partners such as US Air, Carnival Cruiselines, Travelocity, Best Western, DirecTV and more than 50 others.

• Virgin Green Fund (VGF) — VGF is one of the world’s leading investors in the fight against global warming. Through its investments, the firm aims to help the world achieve energy independence in an environmentally conscious manner; replace depleting reserves of conventional energy with renewable sources; and aid efficient management of finite natural resources.

• New Progressive Coalition (NPC) — NPC acts as an online political giving advisor by providing people with products and services to target their political time and money more effectively. These products utilize NPC’s proprietary methodology, Political Return on Investment (PROI)™, which helps individuals understand the impact of their investments while also promoting accountability among organizations. In the same way that Schwab brings investment expertise to consumers, NPC brings expertise and professionalism to the world of political contributions.

Wireless and Communications:

• Fonality — Fonality is a leader in unified communications and contact center solutions for small and medium-sized businesses. Used by over 6,500 companies and 60,000 end users in 97 countries, Fonality’s award winning IP-PBX VoIP phone systems have connected more than 155,000,000 mission critical phone calls. The PBXtra and trixbox Pro product lines are based on Fonality’s patent-pending hybrid-hosted architecture, plus an improved version of the popular open source Asterisk code base that has been modified to add reliability, stability and enterprise-class features. Fonality’s fully free and open source telephony platform, trixbox CE (www.trixbox.org) is home to one of the world’s largest and fastest growing communities of users of Asterisk-based software, and FonalityCRM www.fonalitycrm.com provides contact center communications and sales force automation solutions to small and medium-sized businesses.

• FON — FON is the largest WiFi community in the world with over 300,000 registered members. Its members either share their wireless Internet access at home in exchange for free WiFi wherever they find another Fonero’s Access Point (called Linuses after Linus Torvalds) or earn money by charging a small fee (called Bills after Bill Gates). FON does not believe people should pay for Internet access on the go when they have already paid for it at home. By purchasing a very low-cost WiFi router from FON, membership to the community is granted. FON has an interactive map on its site that displays all the FON hotspot locations around the world to make it easy to determine where Foneros can get free access.

• Rebtel — Short for Rebel Telephony, Rebtel was founded in 2006 with the aim of bringing disruption to the mobile communications industry. The service frees consumers from the exorbitant international calling rates charged by mobile carriers, allowing them to make free or very inexpensive mobile-mobile and mobile-landline international calls. By creating local landline numbers in both the country of origin and destination and routing the international part of the call over IP, Rebtel users can make international calls at local rates. Rebtel has its head offices in Sweden and Luxembourg with an office in London for Marketing and Commercial Operations.

• Trolltech — Trolltech is leading the charge to unlock mobile phones and give consumers a choice of operators, applications and overall look and feel of their device. The company works with the entire world’s leading wireless carriers and handset manufacturers.

Enterprise:

• NEC Corporation of America — NEC Corporation of America is a premier provider of IT, network, and enterprise business solutions, is a quiet giant in the US and has an ever growing presence with revenues of approximately $2 billion. NEC fosters entrepreneurial spirit and innovation by delivering technology and professional services ranging from server and storage solutions, thin clients and digital cinema to biometric identification solutions.

• Alien Technology — Alien is a leading technology and product provider of UHF Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, readers and professional services. Organizations use Alien’s RFID products/services to improve the effectiveness, efficiency and security of their supply chains, logistics and asset tracking operations. Broader adoption of RFID is underway as result of product standardization, lower-cost RFID devices, improved performance and more return of investment case studies.

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