Providence-based Creative Circle Advertising Solutions headed to D.C. last week for the newspaper industry's largest tradeshow.

Creative Circle returned having put on about 100 demonstrations and having made two sales – one to a group of seven smaller papers and another to a single paper that is part of a much larger chain. The company expects to have its first beta-site, for a paper in Rhode Island, up and running in July.

It was barely a year ago that [co-founder Bill] Ostendorf [and founder/president of Creative Circle Media Consulting which specializes in newspaper redesign] sat in on a presentation by Web expert Jay Higgins, president of Sprintout Internet Services, another fledgling company housed in downtown’s Center for Design & Business run by the Rhode Island School of Design and Bryant College. Listening to Higgins speak, Ostendorf thought that Sprintout’s technology, which specializes in solving archiving and production challenges for major corporations, would be a natural fit for creating a better system for placing newspaper classifieds online. The two men co-founded the advertising spinoff soon thereafter.

Although there are at least 20 other vendors of online classified software, Ostendorf says they are hard to use and lack key features. Creative Circle Advertising Solutions' product, AdQ, has writing tips, customized pull down options, photo uploading, credit card payment, and other features.

“There were some people there who said they’d been waiting for someone to figure this out for three years,” Ostendorf said...