Sprout is a way to take content from any website and make it portable; it appears to be like Apple’s Dashboard creation stuff and made generic across platform.

Sprout Builder, compositing a Quicktime movie with web elements

You’ve got a Flex-based Sprout Builder app that appears to be a content manager; you snip content, store it in their builder, and then use it. Actually, as they demo more features, it’s more than that–it’s more like a way to take web content, componetize it, and create mash-ups renderered with Flash. The resulting mashed-up widget is called a “Sprout.”

You can built small widgets and full-size websites with Sprout.

A Facebook widget created with Sprout

But that’s not all! In addition, they have analytics built-in. They aren’t focused on distribution–they pawn that out to partners–but you can see reports on your content’s usage right in the builder environment.

As I watch them do the demo, Sprout seems like an intriguing combination of content scraper, content manager, website publisher, widget creator, and analytical engine–all rolled into one.