Fortune casts a slide rule over Slide

Fortune: by his widgets shall ye know him

Are his widgets worth half a billion? - Mar. 24, 2008

A lot of eyebrows were raised on Wall Street in January when two giant investment firms, Fidelity and T. Rowe Price, paid $50 million for a 9.1% stake in Slide, a San Francisco- based company best known as the purveyor of entertainments like SuperPoke, which lets Facebook users "ninja kick" or "bodyslam" or "throw a pillow at" their friends.

What did these bigtime investors see in SuperPoke - and Slide CEO Max Levchin - that could possibly justify giving the company a valuation of more than half-a-billion dollars?

Implausible as it sounds, some very serious people believe that Slide and its "widgets" could be the answer to a problem that everybody in the business of selling ads on the Internet, including mighty Google (GOOG, Fortune 500), has been experiencing of late.

Levchin claims he's in a unique position to measure engagement. He can mine that database of 50 million active widget users for all kinds of behavioral data. Who are these people? Whom do they poke when they SuperPoke? How else do they interact? To advertisers trying to target their messages, this kind of marketing data is gold.