Sprout gets funded

VCMike writes about the widget space and why they are backing Sprout

Why Polaris is Backing Sprout

Back in 2006 I met Hooman Radfar and the Clearspring team, and posted that they were the most interesting company at Web 2.0 that year.

Since then, “widget” has gone from a hot buzzword to the term commonly used to describe a fundamental shift in the architecture of the World Wide Web: The web’s basic building block is shifting from a “website” with a fixed location to embeddable, portable chunks of content – widgets, gadgets, whatever you want to call them.

We’ve been on the widget bandwagon for some time now, and are thrilled to have found a team in the space to back: Sproutbuilder, who today is announcing a $5M Series B that we led. Sprout has quickly established itself as the early leader for creating, launching and managing this fast-emerging content format, much like our portfolio company Allaire did with website creation a decade ago, and we think Sprout has a similar opportunity to build tremendous value.

An Open Format for Embedding Media

oEmbed: An Open Format for Embedding Media - ReadWriteWeb

oEmbed is a newly released spec from Cal Henderson (of Flickr), Mike Malone and Leah Culver (of Pownce), and Richard Crowley (of OpenDNS) that allows web sites to quickly and easily embed media when a user posts a link directly to that resource. oEmbed is an open format which standardizes the process of embedding photos, videos, links, or other media and circumvents the media provider's API (or the need for screen scraping if they don't offer one). It works by turning a link to, say, a photo or video into XML or JSON that tells the user how to embed that media.

"oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource, without having to parse the resource directly," says the authors on the oEmbed web page.

Hooman Radfar to keynote

I thought I'd let the great (widget)man say it himself:

Widgify » Blog Archive » Hoo be Speaking @ WidgetWebExpo

Conference season, conference season. How we love the conferences. I will be a keynote speaker at the WidgetWebExpo in NYC this year. The conference is being held June 16-17.

Here is the scoop:

Extend and optimize your marketing through web, mobile and desktop Widgets

* Learn from major agencies, widget tool vendors, developers and media groups who are using widgets on the web and on mobile, desktop and other platforms.
* Map out your widget strategy from a commercial and technical perspective
* Whether you are a widget maker or a widget user, this is the place to learn, to share and to become inspired.

Give me a shout if you are around NYC and want to talk geek. Should be a great show!

Where art thou iGoogle?

Official Google Blog: Where art thou?

If you use iGoogle you sort of have to take your hat off to them for getting so many artists involved - even if Rolf Harris is in there somewhere.

Did you notice the chrome tulips on Google's homepage today? They are part of a special Google doodle done by renowned artist Jeff Koons. And that isn't the only art appearing anew on Google today. As part of our iGoogle Artists project, we have collaborated with almost 70 artists in 17 countries on 6 continents to create special iGoogle themes -- works of art that appeal to all ages and interests. Artists, designers and other notables involved include Jeff Koons, Dale Chihuly, Coldplay, Diane von Furstenberg, Dolce & Gabbana, Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Michael Graves, Philippe Starck, Robert Mankoff, Mark Morris, Oscar de la Renta, Anne Geddes and Tory Burch. While the list of those who have contributed themes is impressive (I've only listed 1/5th(!) of the artists here), even more impressive is the art itself -- it's spectacularly beautiful! Until now, iGoogle has been about getting the content you want on your homepage. The iGoogle artist themes take personalization to the next level -- allowing you to select world-class art that really reflects your personality for your pages. It's what happens when great art meets technology.

As part of our launch, we will be holding an outdoor art gallery this weekend in New York's Meatpacking District, where on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights the art from the iGoogle artists project will be projected on the buildings, sidewalks, and streets. This is a map of where you can find the display. We will post video of the event on YouTube.

Fifteen years on, I was there on day one

The 15th anniversary of the placing of http/html into the public domain has arrived in the twinkling of an eye. Bill Thompson has the actual document that did the deed.

BBC NEWS | Web in infancy, says Berners-Lee.

The world wide web is "still in its infancy", the web's inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has told BBC News.

He was speaking ahead of the 15th anniversary of the day the web's code was put into the public domain by Cern, the lab where the web was developed.

I remember this time well. I reported it for my new magazine, The World Wide Web Newsletter. The first issue of 3W (as it came to be known) was published in the autumn of that year. It wasn't the key story (that was some eurowaffle), but it was the second news story.

I'd spent the spring and summer working on what started as a newsletter and turned into a printed magazine that sold on newsstands. I was working at Goldsmiths' College, University of London and had recently acquired a Demon IP dialup account. I had been online for five years and was only working at Goldsmiths' (in the Computer Department) to get access to the IP internet (though actually Goldsmiths' had no such access). Strange days.
I was a fine art graduate of Goldsmiths' who had been struck with a vision and a revelation in1988 when first encountering the networks. By 1993 I was fully aware of everything going on online. I took the name 'World Wide Web' for my little mag because I thought it was a great phrase. The web itself was so much in its infancy that the magazine was not a web magazine. It was an evangelising internet magazine that covered this new thing called the Web in passing.

I put the mag together in the basement of my flat in Hackney, east London, using a Mac and some desk top publishing software. I was as much in love with desk top publishing as with the internet.

The editorial for the first issue stated: "This Word Wide Web demands constant attention. It is the mission of the World Wide Web Newsletter to pay that attention, to keep tabs on the fast changing inter and outer net that comprises this new continent. This newsletter is aimed as much at those on the outside looking in as those on the inside looking, well, looking.

The Internet is in flux - we have little idea what tools and resources next year will bring, let alone the next five or ten. This is indeed a new continent, and I hope you will come along and explore."

I had just quit my rather decent job at Goldsmiths' (more or less the only real job I've ever had) and cashed in my tiny pension to fund the mag. I knew it couldn't really make any money, but I was determined to shout this stuff from the rooftops. Everybody I knew thought I was mad, but I knew. It wasn't until the following year that I started to earn money from this space, becoming Time Out's internet advisor. I exhibited at the first UK Internet World exhibition in 1994. I was hired as the launch editor of .net magazine - and that's where The World Wide Web Newsletter ended up. Then I went on to do real web startups. I invented the cybercafe (word and deed) and the domain name industry (NetNames, 1996).  But in the summer of 1993 all that was unknowable. Very few people knew what was brewing (Alan Meckler, I take my hat off to you), and most of them were highly technical. So I played my part in this incredible story. I introduced a lot of people to the web one way or another. A generation of journalists passed through my Hackney basement and went away converted. I've written and startupped and evangelised about it ever since. I still have the exact same love for it that I had in '93 (and in '88 for that matter).

Myself, for one reason or another I never yet made my fortune from this game. But I'm still working on it. Hope to see you at WidgetWebExpo. Widgets are the future. Take it from someone who knows.

Josh Bernoff speaking at WidgetWebExpo

I'm really pleased to announce that Josh Bernoff is speaking at WidgetWebExpo. Josh is one of the most experienced and long serving analysts and co-author (with Charlene Li) of the book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. His session is entitled "Using Widgets to accomplish business goals".

Josh has been at Forrester since 1995. Josh's research, analysis, and opinions appear frequently in publications like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Broadcasting & Cable, and on national television news programs. He writes a column for Marketing News, a publication of the American Marketing Association. Josh has keynoted major conferences on television, music, marketing, and technology in Barcelona, Cannes, Chicago, London, New York, Rome, and São Paulo.

Groundswell

Right now, your customers are writing about your products on blogs and recutting your commercials on YouTube. They’re defining you on Wikipedia and ganging up on you in social networking sites like Facebook. These are all elements of a social phenomenon — the groundswell — that has created a permanent, long-lasting shift in the way the world works. Most companies see it as a threat. You can see it as an opportunity. In Groundswell, two of Forrester Research's top analysts show you how to turn the force of customers connecting to your own advantage. Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff show how leading companies are gaining insights, generating revenues, saving money, and energizing their own customers. Whether you’re in marketing, research, support, sales, development, or even running the whole enterprise, there’s targeted advice here for you, backed up with real-world ROI to prove it works. Groundswell is based on hard consumer data and experience with dozens of companies, large and small, from Procter & Gamble to Ernst & Young to a tiny but wildly successful winery in South Africa. Hoping to learn how to take advantage of communities, blogs, wikis, Facebook, or YouTube? We've got lots of examples with proof they work.

Video in Widgets

ScanScout Partners With Clearspring

Expanding the reach of its contextual in-video ad technology, ScanScout today is expected to announce a distribution deal with widget company Clearspring Technologies. The partnership gives advertisers within the ScanScout network access to broad viral distribution across some 25 social platforms, including MySpace, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo. "Our partnership enables ScanScout to provide advertisers an automated way to essentially 'widgetize' their video ads bringing broader reach and interest to their message," said Hooman Radfar, co-founder and chief executive officer of Clearspring. Over the last two years, widgets have surged in popularity because their presence is controlled entirely by the users themselves--unlike pop-ups--and are generally used to complement social networking and blogging experiences. Indeed, according to comScore, nearly 148 million U.S. consumers--or 81% of Web users--viewed widgets in November of last year. Widget ads, meanwhile, are expected to boost social network advertising by 70% to $1.6 billion in 2008, according to a recent projection by eMarketer.

Hooman Radfar will be making a keynote address at the WidgetWebExpo in June

Widgets: The Marketer’s Recession Survival Tool

Michael Jones, CEO of AOL owned Userplane, writes a guest post for TechCrunch:

Widgets: The Marketer’s Recession Survival Tool

Widgets: The Macro Promise of Micro-markets

The top widget providers are proving that widgets can be big business. Slide and Userplane, of which I’m CEO, are two successful providers of distributed applications. Slide’s recent $500M valuation gives credence to the huge potential of these small attention grabbers. The success of today’s widgets is largely a function of the hundreds of millions of ad views they garner each day.

In April 2007, comScore estimated that widgets reach 177M people every month, or 21% of the worldwide online audience. Currently, only a fraction of widget traffic – perhaps as little as 0.5% - is being monetized. And that 0.5% is being monetized most frequently through traditional CPM models. In order for widgets to pay off in the long term, however, new models are required that will drive revenue beyond the top few widget providers and generate significant returns for all customers investing ad dollars.

Brands are changing the way they view online advertising and are becoming more concerned about reaching audiences based on their interests and actions, through so-called behavioral targeting. Traditional brand affinity concerns are taking a back seat to a willingness to meet users on their own terms. And, it doesn’t stop there. Marketing will align with individual social graphs as well.

The idea of a brand’s squeaky-clean “image” appearing next to a porn star would have been cause for reprimand in the old school of media buying. Yet in online advertising, it seems to slide. The new model of advertising, which is focused on customer behavior, makes it not only okay but necessary to meet customers within their preferred areas of interest, or “micro-markets”.

Widget providers are gathering the kind of intelligence that allows for this sophisticated behavioral targeting. They can assure brands before investing ad dollars that particular users are interested in their product or service. If behavioral intelligence demonstrates that a particular consumer is effectively engaged by the brand in proximity to MySpace vampires with blood-coated fangs, the new breed of media buyers will be more willing to put their old placement fears aside.

David Cushman makes a widget

David Cushman, my favourite media employee, writes about the how and the why of building his own widget:

Publishing possibilities now and beyond: Build a widget! Experience the disruption of distribution

Its worth noting that this works because we live digitally in a community context. It's what the network is all about. There would be little point in me sharing what I think is cool unless I expect you might, too. We do this sharing within our networks of trust. Just as we share links in twitter or thoughts on blogposts. If you've found this it is because we share some interests.

There is residual mass media thinking in the notion that you should create a place on the web for people to show off what they have done (all those personal outcomes) as if just anyone, any old set of eyeballs, might be interested.

The real value is in the sharing of results with friends, who will be interested because that personal outcome involves a friend - in whom they are personally interested.

Then if they take the results and create their own personalised iteration, they'll have friends they may choose to share with, and so the iterations repeat, amplifying the original.

The outcome relies heavily on three things:
1. A willingness to relinquish control.
2. Toolkits users can play with.
3. Creative users.

Kind of different from mass marketing, huh?

2 and 3 are in place. Are you ready for No1?

Max Levchin of Slide opens the Web 2.0 Expo keynotes

Max Levchin of Slide opens the Web 2.0 Expo keynotes » VentureBeat

Li noted that Slide may become more successful in some ways than its host, Facebook.

“Successful social value builders are the ones that build real value,” he said. “If you wake up in the morning and wonder, will they take it away from me, you probably deserve to have it taken away.”

If you build a connection with the user, and they want to use your application, then the social networks can partner more aggressively on revenue opportunities. So long as the context you create is valuable to the advertiser, then it works, he said.