We won the Ning Appathon!

We’re really excited to be the winners of the first Ning Appathon today. We won for the best “ported application” category and received a cool $4,000!

Ning had a pretty prestigious group judging the contest…

Submissions for our weeklong competition were judged by Wired Editor-in-chief and DIY Drones Network Creator Chris Anderson, Ning Chairman and Co-founder Marc Andreessen, and blogger and Managing Director of building43 Robert Scoble. The competition began on Nov. 5 with all submissions due on Nov. 12. The entrants were judged on creativity, usability, how well they integrate with Ning Networks, viral features, and usefulness.

It’s more than just an app

One of things we’re most excited about is the transformation we went through as part of this project. This is much more than just a Ning app for us. After all, Ning users have long been able to post their Sharendipity creations inside Ning using the standard embed code.

When we decided to go after this prize, we set the bar very high. We wanted to syndicate the entire software development process. To provide a set of tools that let anyone run their own development site.

This will mean that a teacher can create a template that allows her students to develop their own interactive study guides. And a niche gaming network can run their own game creation contest. All from within their own website, blog, or Ning network.

We aimed to build one application that delivered the creation tools, community aggregation tools, and a means for individual users to interact with their own creations – all in a nice bundle and tightly integrated with the OpenSocial standard. We’re thrilled that Ning recognized us for this achievement!

There’s more to come!

The Ning community provides us with an awesome opportunity to explore niche, custom software development. We’re excited to see what kinds of applications they can create now that the barrier for software creation has been significantly lowered.

Over the next several weeks we’ll talk more about how our tools can be syndicated outside of sharendipity.com. And we’ll help the Ning users leverage our platform to do even more. We’d like to give them the tools to submit their own software to the Ning application directory.

Here’s the official Ning press release.

Announcing a new partnership with HarQen

This week we announced a partnership with HarQen, a leading web telephony company, where HarQen will leverage the Sharendipity collaboration tools to enable its customers to build custom web applications that interface with the HarQen platform. In addition, HarQen will provide premium telephony components to Sharendipity customers through our component sharing architecture.

“Our vision is that HarQen will bring voice to the web across a wide range of diverse applications, and we know our customers will require tools to easily build custom web-based interfaces. Sharendipity helps us towards our goal of creating an ideal solution for businesses in the web-telephony space.”

- Kelly Fitzsimmons, co-founder and CEO of HarQen.

We’re really excited about this! Not only does it provide our customers with the ability to leverage an innovative technology inside their Sharendipity applications, but it gives us another opportunity to show off the depth of our tool set in a new niche. We’re looking forward to seeing what the HarQen customers are able to build.

Check out the full press release!