Yesterday was Tech Talk Thursday and our stupid-talented Graphic Designer, Keegan Berry, brought some intense HTML5 knowledge. He covered a pretty wide-range of HTML5 topics, including some sweet background info about W3C and WHATWG that illuminated how HTML5 developed to it’s current point, but focused mostly on the current state of HTML5 and some fun new semantic developments.

Want a peek at Keegan’s baller-ass training? We’ve compiled a handy TL;DR list for your knowledge hungry brains.

• There is a new Doctype! Much like fetch, XHTML 2 will never happen and it’s time to move on from XHTML’s Doctype.

Congratulations to our friends over at Mashery: Scott Rafer, Kirsten Spoljaric, Oren Michels, and all the rest of the team. They’re the world’s best API management company, with clients like Coca Cola, Best Buy, and Intel. Their customers love them so much that this week, Intel actually decided to purchase the whole company! We’ve been friends with them ever since 2006 when they started operating, and this acquisition is even more confirmation of how great they are!

Both Mashery and Intel are understandably being quiet about the purchase price, but ReadWrite and TechCrunch are stating it’s in the range of $180 million! Regardless of the exact amount, our friends at Mashery are sure to be dancing in the streets.

You’re probably saying to yourself “But everyone has a QR Code these days, what makes this QR Code ‘Pretty Sweet’”? Well Mr. Doubty McDoubterson, this QR Code has an awesome freakin’ rocket in it. Check it out, tell yo friends.

For the past 6 years we have had the pleasure of working closely with both Justin Sayfie and Jon Flesichman. They are both kind, understanding and funny but above all else, they are hardworking. It’s because of that that we weren’t at all shocked yesterday when we saw that the Washington Post had put Sayfie Review and FlashReport on their list of Best State-Based Political Blogs for 2011. Although we would love to credit our work as the reason, we know that it’s all possible because of your tireless work (and maybe just a little bit of our tireless work). Congratulations you two! Make sure you take a moment to sit back, open some champagne, and toast to your success. I know we will.

Finally the world will see us as the woman we truly are!

Yesterday was Cloudspace’s 15th birthday! We closed the shop at 1:30 to celebrate in the only way we know how. With copious amounts of beer and laser tag.

Drinking lots of beer and eating lots of chicken before we played lots of laser tag was a questionable choice.

We’ve got a lot of tricks up our sleeve for year 15, so keep an eye out for something dumbfounding. It might be a music service that changes the way bands interact with fans, it might be a way to cut out hours of prep work before you launch your product, or maybe it’s a product that allows you to easily create and share understandable mockups so your Graphic Designer doesn’t pull out his hair trying to understand exactly where you want that blue, squiggly thing. Heck, it just might be all three of those things AND THEN SOME.

Anyone who has followed Cloudspace’s long and illustrious career knows that we love to sponsor a good event. This time we chose Startup Weekend: San Jose, sponsoring a total of 5 tickets. Although we can’t go ourselves, which is pretty heart-breaking, we hope those tickets will get some young entrepreneurs with great ideas started. The event itself starts tomorrow (the 15th) and will last the entire weekend finishing up at around 8:30pm on Sunday (the 17th). Very rarely do great minds gather en mass like this, and we expect nothing short of greatness to come out of it. To register, click here. Anyone not going is missing out on what could possibly be the worlds greatest 54 hour brainstorm, ever.

Our most recent art show on April 9th, Alchemy Unleashed: Jasmine Becket-Griffith & Friends, was a raging success! With over 170 people in attendance we have never seen the office that packed. I know several people traveled from out of state to attend and we even had people lined up outside before we opened! Congratulations to all the artists for a great night, especially Jasmine. As soon as the doors opened she had people waiting patiently to make purchases. They quickly grew to an enormous line that divided the entire space! The line was a fixture of the event until it finally petered out at around 11:30. Get that money girl! Special thanks to all of the artists who made this amazing event possible. Several of them have web stores so anyone who missed the show but wanted to buy some amazing art, follow the links below.

At Cloudspace we have always drawn inspiration from the great entrepreneurial spirits that came before us. When I say entrepreneurial spirits I don’t necessarily mean dead people or even entrepreneurs. I mean people who looked at the world around them and saw something that needed to be changed and then actually did something about it. Who better to learn from, right? Unfortunately we don’t really give them the props they deserve. In our defense it is kind of hard to say to a client “Well I examined the problem but then I stopped and thought to myself ‘What Would Richard Branson Do?’”. So we have decided to right our unintentional wrongs and shine some light on the people who shook the very foundations of our existence. It is with great pride that I present to you Vol. 1 of a series we have lovingly named “A Cloudspace Tribute to General Bad-Assery”.

December 4th marked our third and most recent art show which, to no surprise, was a raging success! John “hex” Carter, Theresa and myself were hanging art for 4 days beforehand and our friendly neighborhood ninja, Aaron Yarhouse, jumped in at the last minute with an extra hammer and superior hammering skills to finish the job! With 50 individual attendees and an estimated 200 art pieces shown, it was by far our largest art endeavor yet. Special thanks to everyone who came out, an even specialer thanks to everyone (and there were tons!) who purchased something, double specialer thanks to artist J.P. Perez who remembered to take photos when the rest of us forgot, and the ultimate special thanks to all the other artists who made this possible! Hopefully I’ve included everyone, if someone slipped through the cracks let us know and the list will be updated to reflect the full extent of the awesome!