Squad, one of our home sprouts, is hosting a contest! The 2013 Creative Codeversationalist Contest will recognize those who creatively cover the coding industry in great new ways. Squad is looking for people who understand and write about trends and news in the industry. Overall, Squad Codeversationalists should have a passion for all things coding.

The contest is running now through April 15th, and the Top 10 nominees will be chosen on April 17th. After that, the Top 3 Codeversationalists and Top Student Codeversationalist will be voted on from April 17th to May 1st.

How are nominees selected? That’s where you come in! Squad is welcoming nominations of bloggers, reporters, and student writers that are doing their best to bring coding into everyday conversation. If you know someone that fits the bill, or if you think you’d be a great nominee, enter today on the Code Together website!

Since SproutBox’s home base is a college town, we want to highlight the student opportunity that this contest offers as well. Students are often ahead of the game in terms of what’s trendy and new, and often work collaboratively on projects. Their knowledge and advice are just what Squad is looking for in a Coderversationalist. IU students and students from other schools should definitely nominate the talented bloggers and coders they know for this great opportunity!

You can keep up with the Coderversationalist conversation on twitter by following @weCodeTogether and the hashtag #codeversationalist.

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Our friends at Earbits made a huge splash recently! Earbits is an ad-free indie music streaming service. They’ve been around for a couple of years now and continue to launch features that keep pushing them above other music streaming services.

Earbits just released “the first social currency for steaming music” called Groovies. Groovies are a way for Earbits to pay artists in data and promotion from fans performing certain actions. Fan use Groovies to stream songs on-demand and can earn them many different ways: opening an Earbits account, sharing music from Earbits via Facebook or Twitter, and “Liking” the band’s official Facebook page or email list. The fans get instant access to great music and the artist establish a data connection to these fans to promote live shows, downloads, t-shirts, and many other things.

If you think about it, fans are already talking about the music they like whether it’s because they “liked” that band on Facebook or are tweeting about it. So the guys at Earbits thought why not encourage fans to do more of this and get something in return.

Check out the other press Earbits has received on this new release:

• Groovy, baby: Earbits’ social currency lets indie music fans unlock on-demand streaming features
• Earbits Launches Social Music Currency ‘Groovies’
• At Earbits radio you promote the music, earn “Groovies.” and listen on demand
• Earbits Launches ‘First Social Currency for Steaming Music’

We’re excited to have Earbits in the portfolio. Keep an eye out for more exciting announcements coming soon from this incredible team.

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One of our Home Sprouts, Squad, has developed an awesome new product that we’re excited to share with you. We’d like to introduce Treaty, Squad’s latest online collaboration tool. Treaty integrates with existing web apps and enables its users to edit and share while maintaining their desired branding experience. It’s pretty genius, because Treaty customers can accomplish more— without ever having to leave their own websites. This makes Treaty ideal for project management apps, enterprise environments, corporate intranets, and eLearning apps. The tool is still in beta, but will be released to the public in March.

An exciting thing about Squad’s latest product is that Treaty keeps visitors on web apps longer. They never know they’re using a 3rd party app because Treaty customers can customize the look and feel to match their current branding and website. Data is never compromised because Treaty uses an encrypted connection.

When it comes to multi-user collaboration, Treaty makes maximized cooperation possible. Treaty customers can share and edit text in real-time with automatch edit tracking and revision history. Conversion is also streamlined, as users can convert from .doc(x), OpenOffice, plain text, and many other forms. Text can be exported in HTML, PDF, OpenOffice, and .doc(x), among other formats. This feature means that Treaty users will never lose track of changes or be unable to send/open a file due to format incompatibility.

What it comes down to is that Treaty reduces document turnaround time and increases opportunity for collaboration. We love it because you spend less time waiting to get the latest version of a document and more time actually creating new content. And that’s what great collaboration is all about. So check it out, and follow Treaty on twitter!

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