Sprout is an online-based company offering free Flash widget/object creation services. Basically, they let moderately-savvy internet users create Flash widgets without the nagging problem of having to know Flash. Pretty neat. (Note: you will need to sign up for an account, but it doesn’t cost anything).

To test the service, we created a Flash widget about our Keystone University technology classes, which you can see below (it’s also been placed on our sidebar to the right):

There are some really slick features you can add to your widget, and our sample only scratches the surface of what’s possible–though I do love the countdown feature.

Obviously, you can’t do everything with Sprout that you could do with Flash, but that’s sort of the point. Making Flash element creation accessible to the masses is a pretty good niche. I really found it easy to use and actually quite fun. Don’t be surprised to start seeing these Sprout widgets pop up more and more on our blog and our official site in the very near future.