Snipperoo

Car promotion widgets

Scion Uses Widgets to Promote Three Models

Never one to shy away from an experimental marketing technique, Scion has created shareable widgets to promote three of its makes. The Toyota division partnered with rich media firm Interpolls to create and distribute the widget to sites including Gamespot.

The widget allows viewers to click images of the Scion XD, XB and TC to view previously used video creative from Scion agency Attik, or engage with polls or trivia content. True to widget form, the ad can be reposted to users' Web pages or social networking profiles.

mashup* Widgets event

I Chaired this mashup* widgets event in London last night. The event was sold out with a great panel and audience. You can see a great slide show here.

mashup* Event - Widgets

We will look at one of the key emerging online trends: widgets and gadgets of content/functionality for social networks and other sites. Widgets offer huge potential as carriers of marketing, brand and advertising messages into social networks and other destinations. Successful widgets are viral in nature can distribute your content or marketing message across the Internet. This event will inform and inspire you, giving you a thorough understanding of the opportunities in the widgetsphere and how to leverage them.

One of the most interesting aspects was the questions from the floor, many sent in via SMS during the event. Apart from the obvious and repetitive (and somewhat desperate 'Where's the money?'), it was really the first time I'd seen some widget issues raised, such as widgets and SEO, issues around security, can widgets talk to eachother, are there any widgets standards bodies. A great evening all round, widgets are alive and well out there!

Widget blogging round up

Jeremiah Owyang points out the many pitfalls and difficulties around widgets,
The Many Challenges of Widgets, but also points out that all his points are fixable: he just doesn't point out the fixes!

Stacey at GigaOm says Companies Can Make Money With Widget Ads

Listening
to these two companies I realized that widgets aren’t a new business,
but rather a new form of advertising and entertainment. Those focused
on advertising are making money; the question is, will the ones focused
on entertainment do so, too?

And I'm Not Actually A Geek talks about the need for widget companies to keep rolling out the hits, and the creative challenges this will entail in Live By The Hit, Die By The Hit

And just as important, both Slide and RockYou need to set up their creative shops and processes such that a regular stream of potential hits are rolled out. They’ll make their lives easier by partnering with other companies that have “widget-izable” content. Touring through the Slide site, I see TechCrunch, Engadget and HotOrNot with widgets there.

There’s a real opportunity in widgets, but it takes more than throwing sheep at people.

Widget Standards wiki started

Chad Catacchio, formerly of metrics company AuriQ, has set up Widget Standards wiki to gather information in one place.

The idea for this wiki came while I was attending the Widget Summit in San Francisco in October 2007. As I listened to all of the speakers, heard the audience questions and talked with "widget people" at the conference, I detected an overriding need - someone, anyone, all of us need to agree on standards for widgets. Not just code standards, but design, serving, metrics, distribution, advertising and maybe even ethics - to name a few. Although there are billions of widgets out there on the web today, there are still too many unanswered questions that have led to an under-appreciation of the worth of widgets and a chaotic and non-standardized way of creating, distributing, tracking and monetizing snippets of code/widgets/apps/gadgets - whatever you wish to call them. I realize that there are other sites and organizations that are proposing or have proposed widget standards (including the w3c) and I encourage you to visit these sites and reference them in this wiki. However, with all of the issues that we face, we need a place to draw all of our widget knowledge into one place, and hopefully with your help this wiki can accomplish this.

Maximising campaign impact using widgets

Nikole Brake at iMedia Connection looks at maximising campaign impact when using widgets:

4 widget best practices

If you're launching a widget campaign, consider these strategic and technical factors to maximize your campaign's impact. The intense popularity of widgets, gadgets, Facebook applications and their kin has advertisers and publishers eager to get on board. But before you invest in a widgetized advertising campaign, there are a number of strategic and technical factors to consider.

Are you ready to let go?

That's the first question to ask yourself, because consumers interact with widgets (and thus your content) outside the confines of your website. That off-site engagement may run counter to your online marketing instincts.

Serve a purpose, and serve it fresh

Widgets shouldn't simply be advertisements for your content or service. Think of them instead as a service or tool unto themselves - something that keeps users engaged with your message because it delivers value in some way. Especially when it provides real-time, practical information, consumers will refer to your widget again and again.

Stick with standards and partners you know

On the development side, adhering to IAB standards maximizes the number of potential placements for your widget. It's also wise to stay within "general" publisher restrictions for file sizes.

The distribution question

Once you've created your widget, how do you get it to fly? The first step is to find a syndication partner. Syndicators provide the "wrapper" or components necessary for your widget to be picked up on blogs, social networks, and personal pages.

Widgetized forums

Tangler With Embeddable Discussions

The forum site Tangler now allows you to distribute your forum as a widget. The widgets all connect back to the forum, but are live so that the discussion can take place all over the web. Great distribution.

iPaper widgfrom Scribd

Scribd launches a new version of their iPaper - makes good widgets.

Succour: New Fiction and Poetry - Issue #4 - The Obscene (Excerpt)

Big Damn Zine Aug Issue

BlogJuice

Some things are just too cool for school. BlogJuice is lovely - a widgety thing that leeches data out of MyBlogLog about your visitors and then links that up with a lot of other information. It gives you a way to stalk your visitors in the nicest possible way and to follow them back to their lair. Currently in early development, seems to work fine. Drag it to the toolbar and you can use it all over the web.



Blog Juice - kentbrewster.com

Things to Do and Notice

* Although it ought to come up inside the visible viewport wherever you are on the page, the widget is draggable; click anywhere inside the main header. Oh, and click the little yellow X to close it.
* Each reader comes up in a toggle-able list item. You'll see a MyBlogLog avatar, a name, and possibly some tags. Click the name to visit the MyBlogLog profile; click the tag to see a list of other users with that tag.
* Click anywhere else in the reader record to open it up and see details from ten different social networks. At the moment, they are: MyBlogLog, Twitter, Upcoming, Digg, LinkedIn, Delicious, Flickr, Last.fm, StumbleUpon, and YouTube.
* Inside the detail you'll be able to click the item to go over to the other site and view it.
* Up top are a series of icons that match the detail icons for each service. Mouse over them to only show reader roll items.
* The MyBlogLog icon (first on the left at the top) will show the user's authored blogs. Click on one of those blogs to open its reader roll up, right there in the badge without leaving the page you're on.
* Each user has a checkbox on the right side. If you check it, this user to your Stalk List, and a small icon resembling a guy cradling a loaf of French bread will show up at the bottom of the badge. Click this guy to see all your buddies.

Opera Mobile 9.5 to support mobile Widgets

On the heels of Nokia's 'almost native' widget platform comes Opera's announcement that their 9.5 mobile browser will support Flash, Ajax and Opera widgets. Crossover mobile widgets are getting closer [with thanks to Widgetslab]

Opera Moblie 9.5 to support Flash, Ajax and Widgets–Widgets Lab

While Opera Browser has failed to make any inroads in the desktop because of lack of support to many proprietary technologies and not working closely enough with the provider of such technologies (Adobe and Microsoft more than anything) , this has not passed in the Mobile and devices world were they dominate and always push to support the top technologies along innovating too.

So, they now have confirmed that their next Opera Mobile offering for both Symbian and Windows Mobile is going to support Flash, Ajax and a mobile version of the Opera Widgets engine.

This will allow to render 90% of all the existing widgets in the web right now, so your browsing will be completely changed by it and will result in a mirrored mobile web where almost everything will be the same compared to the desktop one.

Apple TV with iChat widget interface

Apple filing depicts Apple TV with iChat widget interface

A new and discrete patent filing on the part of Apple Inc. portrays previously undisclosed versions of the company's Apple TV set-top-box software and remote control that make extensive use of widgets to facilitate everything from online chat to ordering concert tickets during a concert broadcast.

The August 2006 filing with the United States Patent and Trademark Office spans some 39 pages, but bears some of its most enticing revelations as part of a discussion involving ways of associating Dashboard-like widgets with various kinds of video content.

Apple says such widgets could be displayed or become available based on the content currently displayed in the Apple TV user interface. If the content is broadcasted, such as live television, then a widget could potentially be downloaded as part of the broadcast signal from a cable head-end, or provided through a separate communication such as an Internet connection, and then displayed over the content.

The widget can also be downloaded at a different time than the broadcast signal and invoked by information contained in the broadcast signal, the company explained. Similarly, it could be triggered by some event , such as user interaction with a user interface element, or come included with the content

How the Web Strategist should approach Widgets

Social media analyst Jeremiah Owyang, interviews Ro Choy of RockYou on widget strategy.

How the Web Strategist should approach Widgets, with Ro Choy of RockYou

If you’re not familiar, RockYou is one of the leaders in what I call the widget network category. They create hundreds of widgets that were initially launched on blogs, then moved to Facebook, and will now be deployed on other social networks that allow development (Bebo, MySpace, etc). Between RockYou and their competitor Slide, they account for 8/10 top applications on Facebook (as I learned from Ren last night)

In this video, you’ll learn about his methodology (which I even discussed last night at the panel as a best practice). He discusses how web strategists should approach widget creation.

How the Web Strategist should approach Widgets

Level 1: Branding: Applications, like Microsites

Level 2: Interaction: Include the brand as part of the experience

Level 3: Custom: Build your own application
Pitfalls to watch out for

Wanna be CEO of Widgetbox?

Don't know what's going on at Widgetbox - it seems strange that Ed has left.

Widgetbox Lands Funding, Looking for CEO

Widget company Widgetbox announced its Series B round of funding, raising $8 million from investors like Sequoia Capital, Hummer Winblad Partners and investor Michael Dearing. The company also appears to have jettisoned its founding CEO.

Widgetbox is one of several companies competing in the growing "widget" marketplace. The company provides a platform for developers to create widgets -- small programs that can be embedded in web pages, MySpace profiles and Facebook pages -- and to distribute them throughout the internet, primarily via social networks. According to the press release, Widgetbox currently hosts 26,000 developers and reaches 28 million users every month.

Widgetbox was founded by web entrepreneur Ed Anuff, a serial entrepreneur whom web oldtimers might remember as the founder of Epicentric and a leader in the early days of Wired Digital, where he was a project manager and launched such properties as HotBot. However, Anuff seems to be no longer affiliated with the Widgetbox. The executive bio section of the company's website lists investor Dearing as "Interim CEO, Independent Board Member" -- which would imply that Widgetbox is looking for a permanent CEO -- and there's no sign of Ed Anuff on that page.

Launch of MySpace platform

The MySpace platform is now available. This is the coverage from Inside Facebook (which no doubt now should be called Inside FaceSpace). Lots of interesting widgety stuff here that we will tease out over the next few weeks.

Inside Facebook » Notes from tonight's MySpace Developer Platform launch

MySpace officially announced the MySpace Developer Platform to the developer community tonight at the MDP Launch Party in San Francisco. Many of the top Facebook developers were in attendance to meet the MySpace Development Platform team.

MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe led off the evening and introduced MySpace CTO Aber Whitcomb and COO Amit Kapur to introduce the highlights of the Platform.

Aber:

* We’re going to fully support OpenSocial standards, the documentation of our exact specs is live on the developer site.

* We’re going to democratize the platform launch by giving everyone one month to test drive the platform and build apps before releasing them to our users.

* Think of the profile page as friend facing, and the home page as self facing.

* We’re going to iterate on the platform over the next month.

* You’re going to have to use Caja for security.

Amit:

* We’re going to let you monetize your apps however you want and keep 100% of the revenue, “like you may be used to.”

* We’re going to try to apply some of our hypertargeting expertise to help developers make money.

* We really want to make this work for developers.

* Several top Facebook developers have created demo apps quickly for tonight, including iLike, Flixster, Slide, and RockYou.

Why doesn't the affiliate industry widgitize?

Hot on the heels of acquiring Yourminis, AOL have bought a UK affiliate company, buy.at. I know buy.at for various reasons, including talking to their VC about widgets, meeting their founder at last year's LIFT conference and signing up for an account. I've long been convinced that affiliate companies by their very nature are essentially widget companies. That is, their distribution mechanism is the provision of chunks of code that their affiliates embed in their web sites. So it seemed to go without saying that they would look at automating and simplifying what is in fact a very complicated and tedious method of identifying, selecting and embedding code. buy.at's VC knew this and we had a long conversation about it. I met their founder and got on very well with him. So I signed up for an account to check out what they were doing well. And what I found was one of the most horrible interfaces and systems I've come across. Now, there are quite a few affiliate companies doing very interesting things with widget interfaces. And buy.at seemed to do well, so they must do something right. But there still seems to be space in the market for what we've been theorizing as Affiliate 2.0 companies.

AOL Acquires Affiliate Marketing Network Buy.at

Regardless of what Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) has planned for it down the road, AOL continues to make acquisitions… the latest is UK-based affiliate marketing network Buy.at. The acquisition will be used to bring a performance-based component to AOL’s Platform-A advertising offering. Basically, Buy.at, which is backed by DFJ Esprit, offers a pay-per-action alternative to traditional impression or click-based ad campaigns. Ticketmaster and Swarovski are among the advertisers in its network. Recently, the company has introduced new offerings specifically aimed at marketing content and marketing on social networks.

Spotted!

by Jim  Sterne of Target Marketing and eMetrics fame, with thanks.

comScrore getting it all wrong?

enterprise RSS, the blog from newsgator, picks up on a story that comScore's widget metrix product is inaccurate. Others have written about this recently, but enterprise RSS did some digging of their own and found what they believe are wild inconsistencies. Read the whole post for the details.

Enterprise RSS: comScore widget matrix numbers are innacurate

Techcrunch recently published a post about “The Widget Kings” which promoted the comScore widget matrix as a symbol of rank among widget manufacturers. We did a little research on the accuracy of these numbers – to make a long story short; we found the numbers entirely inaccurate and incomplete as ranking of widget vendors.

Native XHTML/CSS widgets for Mobiles?

I've just updated my mobile phone firmware and I find that Nokia's widget platform is available - though it's early days. The exciting thing here is that their Web Run-Time (WRT) allows widgets based on XHTML, CSS, Javascript and Ajax. They claim you can port existing Widgets to Web Run-Time. This should allow the addition of mobile widgets to the universal widget platform. Developers should be able to offer their widgets for the mobile platform without rebuilding them. Interesting times indeed.

Forum Nokia - Widgets

One of the most exciting things about Web Run-Time is that it allows web developers, designers, and anyone else for that matter to create exciting Internet experiences for mobile users in a matter of hours or days. Whether you simply need to provide a one-click interface to your web service or you want to mash-up information from varies source to create new value-add you can.

Technically, Web Run-Time adds a Web application runtime environment to the popular Web Browser for S60 that allows S60 devices to run widgets. Web Run-Time widgets, just as on desktops widgets, are small applications developed using standards-based Web technologies, such as XHTML, CSS, JavaScript™, and Ajax. In fact, you can port existing desktop widgets to Web Run-Time with very little effort – and you can use your existing tools.

S60 Platform SDKs for Symbian OS, for C++

S60 Platform SDKs for Symbian OS, for C++

A beta version of the S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 2 SDK is now available to download. Among the new features in this SDK is a fully working Web Run-Time environment. Port your cool widgets from desktop environments such as Yahoo! and Apple Dashboard to the S60 platform or reach out to users on the go with a cool widget to front-end of your web site.

Remote Device Access

Remote Device Access (RDA) is a service that allows developers to test their mobile applications and services remotely on various Nokia devices based on Symbian OS. The main features of the service are remote controlling a device, installing and running applications, transfering files, and analyzing log files in real-time. RDA is an Internet-based solution and the basic requirements for using the service are a Forum Nokia user account, a standard Web browser, and Java Web Start (comes typically with JRE; version 5.0 or newer is required). Usage is free of charge for all Forum Nokia members.

Resource information: Web Run-Time API Reference

This is the API reference for writing Web Run-Time (WRT) widgets for S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 2. In this document you will find a description of all the functionality available to WRT widgets. WRT widgets are small Web applications developed using familiar industry standards such as HTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and Asynchronous JavaScript™ and XML (AJAX).

Resource information: Porting Apple Dashboard Widgets to S60

Learn how to port widgets built for Apple’s Dashboard to the S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 2 Web Run-Time (WRT) platform. Step-by-step examples take you through the process of converting Dashboard-specific features to the WRT mobile domain. Complete examples with full source code are provided in a separate ZIP file delivered within this documentation package.

AOL acquires Yourminis

[David Liu from AOL explains their position on the acquistion here]

Looks like our first widget acquisition. Alex Bard's Yourminis is being bought by AOL. Yourminis has been providing a widget platform for AOL for a while - now they go the whole hog and become an AOL company. Alex was a great speaker at Widgety Goodness last year and I wish him all the best with this new stage for Yourminis.

Visual Market Intelligence

AOL is acquiring widget technology startup, Goowy, for an undisclosed fee, building on a past partnership between the two firms. Goowy offers widget-based ad solutions, as well as a platform called Yourminis.com, which is a widget creation platform for developers. AOL had previously used the small startup to provide widgets for MyAOL.

"We are excited about joining the AOL family. The platform and services we've built are an obvious fit with AOL's ad-supported web strategy, and we look forward to expanding our widget offerings across the AOL network," claims Goowy CEO Alex Bard.

San Diego-based Goowy was founded in 2004. According to reports on Techcrunch, the company has just six employees and, to date, has raised just one round of funding in Apr 2006. This was rumoured to be less than USD1m. Goowy competes in the widget space with the likes of startups such as Widgetbox and Clearspring.

What Growth In Widget Networks Means To The Web Strategist

Great post from Jeremiah:

What Growth In Widget Networks Means To The Web Strategist

New players as widget networks emerge
I’m closely watching the widget industry with colleague Charlene Li. This time last year, there were no widgets in Facebook, and now there are over 13,000. I recognize that this is a growth market Widget ad revenue was estimated at about $20 million in 2007, or about one-thousandth of Internet advertising as a whole. According to the new comScore data for November, Slide claimed almost 144 million unique viewers, for a 16% market share, and RockYou claimed a 11.7% share, with 104 million individual viewers. In July, Slide had 130 million individual users, or a 15% share, while RockYou boasted 96 million users, or 11.1% of the total.

Powered by ScribeFire.