Cincinnati Impresses: ShareThis.com

At a recent OINK-PUG meeting, the accessible folks from ShareThis.com talked about their ubiquitous Javascript button and their server infrastructure.

If you aren't familiar with ShareThis, they provide the sharing button that appears at the bottom of this very blog post. Every page I go to these days seems to have the little green button. Occasionally I find myself wanting to share a page that uses not ShareThis but one of the alternatives, and I find myself cursing because I do not have immediate access to my contacts. (Thank goodness I have the ShareThis Firefox add-on to fall back on.) I bet that there are a lot of people in Cincinnati using the button on their web properties, and don't even know that the company is based right here in the Queen City.

ShareThis started in Columbus, moved to Cincinnati, and now has an office in Mountain View, California. They boast a number of accomplishments to be envied by any company in any city, the least of which being $21 million in venture funding. A $21 million dollar funded consumer internet company, in Cincinnati?

But equally impressive to those in the industry is the raw technology that powers their infrastructure. ShareThis was one of earliest case studies on Amazon Web Services, and the Rightscale demo given that night was memorable (maybe that says more about Rightscale).

They've got that hockey stick growth according to relevant traffic measures, so I'm excited to see what happens from here onward. Let's downplay that Mountain View office, and keep the PR coming from Ohio.

Cincinnati Impresses

This is the intro to a series of blogs coming up that all submit the same theme. Perhaps it will become a longer series.

I have observed or have been sent a few things lately that keep sticking in my mind. Each of these sticks in my mind because they are or imply, well, super awesome things about Cincinnati. When I think about them, I think, "Wow. That's incredible. Is this happening in other cities?" And I am left to wonder. (The answer is probably yes, but still it feels good to wonder.)

And these aren't impressive in an obvious way, the way that maybe we have sports teams that dominate, or the way that our modern art museum is architecturally significant. These impress in a more subtle way (at least they're subtle to me). Or perhaps they impress only to the niche that I find myself playing in these days.