Flash app platform Sprout reinvents itself as AdVine ad platform

Sprout, a San Francisco startup that first launched as a platform for building Flash applications, has been refocusing its technology on ad-creation. In case the shift wasn’t clear, Sprout signaled the new focus today by relaunching its flagship product under the name AdVine.

One of AdVine’s big attractions is the fact that it creates ads that can display both the Flash or HTML5 formats. Those ads will use Flash on Web browsers, then they’ll play in HTML5 on smartphones that don’t support Flash. Sprout’s interface has been compared to Adobe’s design program Photoshop, and it’s supposed to make the ad creation process quick and easy for designers. The integration with Google’s DoubleClick ad server should help with this too.

Adam Taisch, the company’s vice president of business development, said Sprout is on a two-week development cycle, leading to a constant flow of new features. Just in the last few weeks, Sprout has added click-to-call and click-to-text options in the ads, he said.

Designers can use AdVine to create mobile ads that are compatible with Apple’s iAd format. In the demo video below, a demonstrator uses AdVine to assemble an iAd for the movie Tron: Legacy and also shows what it’s like to interact with the ad.

Sprout launched at the DEMO conference now co-produced by VentureBeat.

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