Snipperoo

Chumby Picks Up $12.5 Million for more Chumby widgets

Chumby Picks Up $12.5 Million Series B Funding

Chumby Industries (love the name), makers of the Chumby Internet connected device, have picked up $12.5 million in Series B funding today. The lead investor was JK&B Capital, and other participants included existing venture investors, Avalon Ventures, Masthead Venture Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. The company notes that the financing will be used to accelerate growth of the company, and expand and broaden the Chumby Network to other screen-based Internet connected devices. The device ain't cheap; it will run you about $200.

Chumby is a touch screen device that offers a widget buffet to let you customize it to your liking. Widgets include: news, sports, Facebook, Digg, horoscopes, weather, and a huge gallery of others. There are also corporate-sponsored widgets including those from CBS, MTV Networks, MySpace and The Weather Channel Interactive.

WidgetWebExpo sponsorship options

If you are in the industry you should be getting involved with WidgetWebExpo. All our sponsors are part of the conversation. And here is full information in widget form ...

Read this doc on Scribd: WWE NY08 SponsorInfo

URL's Are Totally Out

To continue my meme that nobody noticed (Death of the destination site) when I launched it, Cabel notices in Japan that advertisers aren't using URLs, they are using suggested search terms. It's well known in search circles that people use search engines as much for 'navigation' as they do for 'search', i.e. they type in the company they want to go to, even if they know the URL. Cabel is not the first by a long chalk to point out that things are different in Japan - Simon Cozens blogged something very similar in the middle of last year. My take on it is the 'everything everywhere' version - i.e. if people are using search to find you, you need to be where they end up. And while this might seem to mean simply 'hold the No. 1 slot in Google', what it actually means is that you need to distribute your presence rather than consolidate it in one place. The, wherever they seek, you are there. Whatever they search, you are there. This gives control to the 'user' (as in UGC) to construct their own view of online, rather than expecting them to come and find you where you chooose to hang out. Of course, there are several huge industries dedicated to building and promoting the destination websites, so don't expect this to change overnight. But change it will. The web is restructuring itself into a web of fragments.



cabel.name: Japan: URL's Are Totally Out

All the good domain names are gone. Getting people to a specific page in a big site is difficult (who's going to write down anything after the first slash?). And, most tellingly, I see increasingly more users already inadvertently put complete domain names like "gmail" and "netflix" into the Search box of their browsers out of habit — and it doesn't even register that Google pops up and they have to click to get to their destination.

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.

Viewdle - Name Widget

Just giving this name recognition widget from Viewdle a test ... hover over the dotted underline names.


George Bush

Viewdle - Name Widget (beta)

Name Widget (beta) Name Widget enables you to enhance your blog or website by adding a visual representation of the people that you reference in your text. Don’t just make a text reference about the US election (e.g. Michael Huckabee; Barack Obama), celebrities (e.g. Jessica Alba) or other names making news (e.g. George Bush; Nicolas Sarkozy) – bring them to life on your page. We automatically showcase the visually-appealing depiction (currently taken from the latest news) of the person whom you decide to highlight.

Content Rights, Pocasting, Widgets

Not strictly widgets, but it could be. I'm interested in how we licence content in widgets and how the relationship between Rights holders and distributed content can work in the long term. This event looks at Podcasting and Rights and discusses the EU AVMS Directive. Go along - get educated - report back.

UK Podcasters Association » Podcasting, Rights and Music - UKPA Event at Guardian Audio, London, March 29th 2008

Podcasting, Rights and Music - UKPA Event at Guardian Audio, London, March 29th 2008
February 29, 2008 on 5:45 pm | In AIM, MCPS-PRS, ORG, Press, UKPA, blog, event, radio |

UKPA is hosting a seminar on rights with the Open Rights Group at the Guardian, Farringdon, London, Saturday March 29th 2pm - 5pm and it would be great if you would come and take part.

Becky Hogge and Matt Wells (heads of ORG and Guardian Audio respectively) will be there, as well as representatives from MCPS-PRS and AIM (Association of Independent Music).

ORG will discuss how the EU AVMS Directive could impact negatively upon podcasting (if we let it) and generally explain the current issues facing podcasters as they see them. In the second session, we’ll cover new developments in music and podcasting.

Seesmic - call this a 'widget builder'?

Seesmic Updates

(Loading ...)

I love Seesmic, the video chat conversation application. I just discovered they have widgets (which they have the temerity to call a 'widget builder') which is always good to discover. That said, this is about the thinnest widget implementation I've come across - the only thing you can select is how many videos you get in the widget. As for distribution - code! That's so 2006, guys.

Art Widgets

I always thought artists would really get widgets - and invent the next phase. rhizome is an arts organisation. They got widgets - but it's not very exciting - yet! They have implemented portfolio widgets for their members, so maybe we'll see some creation spun out from that.

Rhizome | Widgets

Rhizome widgets can be used to dynamically integrating Rhizome content on external sites and blogs. Our widgets are a great way to stay informed with the latest news, opportunities, events, and ideas in the world of art and technology. What's more, Rhizome members can use the portfolio widget to display their work, including pieces archived in the ArtBase, on their own website.

Date for your diary - WidgetWebExpo New York

My conference, which last year was Widgety Goodness in the UK, has transformed into WidgetWebExpo and will take place in New York on June 16th and 17th this year.

Widgets for beginners: Widget tools: Widget marketing: Widget destinations: Big Media: APIs: Mashups: Programmable web: Large companys using widgets: Where’s the money in widgets: Enterprise widgets: Non-profit widgets: widgetized Intranet: Widgetising established content: Blog platforms: Social networks relating to widgets: All Google’s widgets: The power of Affiliate widgets: is SEO the hidden value in widgets: widget Metrics: Case studies: choosing widget technologies: Tools and platforms compared: Making widgets go viral: managing Widget content: Widget publishing: Licencing widget content: Open standards for widgets: Opensocial: Dataportability

I'm deep in planning the agenda - we've got some ace widgety speakers lined up already with a lot more to come. We have two days and two streams with some extra events thrown in around the edges. We're working on making it a unique widget industry event where all sides of this increasingly important space come together to understand developments and where we go from here. Feel the need to join the conversation? Sponsors welcomed.

More Stuff
In addition to the two days of speakers and panels, we'll have workshops, a Widget Standards BoF meet, WidgetWeb TV providing social networking via everyone's video input and the widgety goodness awards.  Yes, I'm launching our very own industry awards, The Widgeties.

Speaker Search
I'm currently assembling the speakers and panels and am looking to shed light on all the corners of the industry. Take a look at the list of subjects above and fill out this form if you want to suggest yourself or someone you think should be speaking.

Lots more on all of this coming in the next few weeks. For the moment, the main thing is to clear the decks so you can be in New York on June 16th and 17th. Don't accept any other invitations, this is going to be a biggie. And if you can't make New York, we're also going to be in London in October.

CBS profit share widgets

CBS to bloggers: Install our widgets, and we'll split the profits

CBS Television Stations has launched a new program to get its local news headlines onto blogs and social-media sites, the CBS division said Monday.

Called the CBS Local Ad Network, it's a way for participating region-focused blogs to pull in extra cash by embedding CBS news widgets on their sites and splitting the revenue of accompanying ads with CBS.

On Monday, the program was launched in a selection of the TV network's regional markets: Boston, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Francisco, Denver, and Chicago. Within the next few weeks, CBS has said, the CBS Local Ad Network will come to New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Miami, Sacramento, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore.

Some of the blogs currently participating in the new program are San Francisco's SFBayStyle and Boston's Red Sox Nation. Approved sites will be able to choose the content of the CBS headlines displayed (breaking news, sports, politics), as well as select from a number of options to determine, for example, whether they want video content in the widget.

Bloggers can't just embed a widget and hope for profits, CBS Television Stations Digital Media Group president Jonathan Leess told CNET News.com. "There's a screening process, obviously," he said. "We have to figure out or get some visibility into what the content is on that site, and then we screen, but we have a third party (Syndigo Networks) that administers all this for us."

CBS declined to share exact breakdowns of the revenue-distribution process. "All of it's based on certain traffic estimates from each of the sites, and (ad) placement," Leess said.

another widget blog

Just come across widgetBeat - good widget coverage

AOL buying all things widgety?

Kara Swisher postulates that AOL is working on buying KickApps to add to its growing roster of widgety products - must make Bebo a widget breeding ground!

Is KickApps Next to Board AOL’s Gravy Train?

While a lot of focus yesterday has been on the gobs of cash that Time Warner shareholders now have to fork over to social networking site Bebo, which was bought by its AOL division for $850 million in spite of low revenues, sources close to the company tell me another big deal is in the hopper and at another lofty price.

Sources say that AOL has been seriously mulling the acquisition of KickApps, which makes white-label social widgets, apps and communities for various companies and helps monetize them, for a reported price of $90 milion.

Testing Sproutbuilder

It's not perfect, but it's an easy win:

Making Widgets Viral Puzzles Developers

Mary A. C. Fallon at demo.com:

Making Widgets Viral Puzzles Developers

Latest online ad frontier pushes onto social networks

Simple to build and email or embed, Web site widgets and gadgets are confounding developers and popular and obscure businesses alike about what will attract big audiences and big ad dollars.

“Big brands don’t have any advantage over Joe Shmoe. Widgets are experiencing organic growth but we’re not sure what is driving it exactly,” said Pam Webber, vice president of marketing for Widgetbox of San Francisco (DEMO 06), a platform for making, displaying, and distributing widgets, snippets of code created to play video and audio, display photo slide shows, run animations, and display text. Widgets can embed ads or be standalone ads.

While the value of a lot of widgets for users is as diversion, their value to online advertisers is their (hoped for) viral life.

Widgets ride the tide of history

Will Price has left VC Hummer Winblad to head up Widgetbox. Techcrunch covers the story and gets a personal piece from Will on why he left VCland to join this widget startup:

Hummer Winblad Partner Will Price Resigns To Head WidgetBox

The best markets and the best companies ride the tide of history. Widgets are such a market.

The Web’s tide is open, distributed, standard, user-defined, and, in many ways, the most powerful force of the modern era. Widgets are not a fad, or web 2.0-hype, but fundamentally they are the unit by which users are assembling and defining their web experience.

Widgets are portable applications that are user-defined, user-assembled, and consumed independent of the source of the underlying content, commerce, and application functionality. The combination of user-control and decentralized interaction to important services represents an important paradigm shift in how users discover, select, and consume the best of the web.

In Nov 2007, Comscore reported that 650m global uniques, or 65% of the web universe, interacted with a widget. The growth in widget adoption and social media speaks to users’ unmet needs and frustrations with traditional web models. Today, brands, developers, media companies, and established Internet players are racing to understand the forces driving user behavior and the power of a more componentized and distributed web. While widget penetration is at 65% of Internet users and growing, spend in the widget category in 2007 was less than $20m, or 0.1% of the total online ad spend
market.

The 650x differential between spend and the record growth in user adoption is very powerful to consider. Users are always ahead of the market, as evidenced by the systemic under-allocation of ad dollars on-line; 21% of media consumption is on-line vs. 7% of ad spend. However, this 3:1 imbalance is steadily eroding and the widget market will prove to be no different and no less transformative. Traditional portal models that aggregate users and resell that aggregation are fundamentally at odds with the emerging paradigm of user and community defined experience and distributed consumption.

Marketers need to fish where the fish are, however, in an early market there are often more questions than answers. While widgets are enjoying end-user success, the commercial relevance of widgets remains unclear to many. Are widgets a new marketing channel? If so, are they effective? How do you build them, buy them, track them? What is the unit of value; an impression, an install, an engagement…? What type of ecosystem will form around the phenomena? In order to move beyond fad status, an economic model for the widget ecosystem needs to be better developed and measurable value delivered to both end-users and marketers.

AOL Buying Bebo

Susan Mernit has a good view of AOL buying Bebo. From a widget perspective, Bebo has always been a bit of a closed book. Hopefully that will change now. What really caught my eye is this repeated meme that the Internet is 'less about destination and more about ...' Fill in the dots, it will all become clear over time. But for sure, it's no longer about destination - hence my end of the URL meme.

Susan Mernit's Blog: AOL Buying Bebo

"Bebo’s dynamic management team recognizes that the Internet is less about destination and more about connecting people, culture and lifestyles. This acquisition supports our key objectives – accelerating the growth, engagement and monetization of one of the world’s most engaged online communities.”
--Ron Grant, AOL President and COO

Sproutbuilder adds functionality

Sprout Builder is a lovely templated widget building tool that gives you some wonderful widget building tools. They've just released a new version Sprout (V 1.1), with even more goodies and moved to Open Beta. They also have a cool job opening if you love widgets!

We are pleased to announce that Sprout is now moving to an open beta. What this means is that we are open for the world and anyone can now access the Sprout Builder immediately. A big thanks for your continued support and suggestions, some of which have been included into the recent V 1.1. product release and others you will notice will be included as we move forward.

Your enthusiasm has been amazing and infectious! In just five short weeks 5,000 of you in our closed private beta have created over 17,000 sprouts which generated over 11 million views. Cool and unique sprouts are being created from users all over the world. At last count people from over 30 countries have joined the party.

Jobs | Sprout Builder

Sprout Evangelist/Customer Support We are looking for someone to help us build the Sprout community by taking care of our users, answering questions, keeping them updated on new features, and generally making Sprout a better service for everyone. It is important for us to build a product and service that people want to use. This individual should have a good background in social media related technology, multimedia content creation, user support, and all things needed to anticipate what users need in terms of information and then deliver it. They will run our user forums, manage all help-related features (FAQs, how-to videos, etc) and of course answer questions sent to support. We are still very much a startup, so everyone does a little of everything. If you are a super motivated, I can get anything done, type please submit your resume and the URL where your sprout can be viewed. Location is either at our Honolulu or San Francisco office.

Everything Everywhere

Fred Wilson calls it as it is, as usual, talking about the YouTube API changes.
I've always thought that YouTube sort of invented embedding code - at
least they made it public on a big scale. I think I'm going to subtitle
this conference 'Everything Everywhere'

Everything Everywhere

Here's my headline. You cannot be a destination exclusively on the Internet anymore. If you are not an open web service, you won't get nearly as far these days.

So if you are building a new web service today, forget about being a destination. Maybe it will happen and maybe it won't. Don't fuss about that. Focus on making your service available everywhere. If you do that, you'll build a much larger user base.

WidgetTags

ads advertising apis blog brand building comments company content data developer distribution event feb funding gadgets gigya hit including issues mar marketing mashup mayfield monetizing money nbsp network oauth online people permalink platforms pm posted promote questions really scion sites social standards technology trackback users web widgets wiki work year

created at TagCrowd.com

Gigya score big funding

Gigya, one of my favourite widget distribution networks, have raised a fresh round of funding on the back of fast growth. Go Gigya, go!

GIGYA SECURES $9.5 MILLION IN SERIES B FUNDING LED BY MAYFIELD FUND
 
Investment Round to Support Continued Growth and Development of Tools for the Discovery and Monetization of the Social Web
 
PALO ALTO, CA - March 11, 2008 - Gigya, the largest performance-based widget distribution network and provider of tools and technologies for distributing, tracking and analyzing widgets, today announced the completion of a $9.5 million Series B round of financing led by Mayfield Fund, with additional investment from existing investors Benchmark Capital and First Round Capital.  Gigya's Wildfire technology currently installs hundreds of thousands of widgets per day, and tracks over three billion widget impressions per month for its clients, including Kimberly-Clark, MTV, Levis, Sprint and Toyota.
 
Gigya will use the funds to continue its rapid growth, including the enhancement of its core Wildfire technology, its pay-per-install widget distribution network, as well as the development of additional products that facilitate the discovery and monetization of the social web.
 
"Marketers and content creators need solutions for effectively reaching and monetizing the vast but increasingly decentralized audience of social media users, and they are looking to us for results," said Eyal Magen, CEO of Gigya, "Our steady focus on delivering measurable results to our publishers and advertisers is the reason we have achieved such enormous scale and impact less than a year after the launch of Wildfire. Mayfield's investment validates our leadership position, and we are very excited to have them leading this round of funding. "
 
"As the widget economy grows, players like Gigya that are publisher friendly and with demonstrated momentum will become the infrastructure leaders of the social web," said Navin Chaddha, Managing Director, Mayfield Fund.  "Gigya is the number one widget distribution network, and we are excited about their team and their unique ability to monetize that network, using the pay per install model."
 
 "Since investing in Gigya 18 months ago, we have been astonished by the company's rapid growth.  Gigya provides the perfect set of solutions for accelerating atomization of the web, enabling content providers to take full advantage of the social web," said Michael Eisenberg, General Partner, Benchmark Capital.

The days of having a single Web site are gone

While making the case as to Why Widgets Don't Work for Business Week, Ben Kunz, of Mediaassociates, neatly makes the case as to why they do work and are in fact more central to this ongoing story than most people have yet understood. Go figure!

Widgets can be a useful extension of your brand, but only if included in a broader portfolio of Internet outreach. The days of having a single Web site are gone, because people are spending much of their time in "doing" mode. Widgets, blogs, online video, public relations, and microsites are all ways to extend your reach online.

OAuth

OAuth - this is right up the widget world's street!

OAuth — An open protocol to allow secure API authentication in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications.

If you're building...

* desktop applications
* dashboard widgets or gadgets
* Javascript or browser-based apps
* webpage widgets

OAuth is a simple way to publish and interact with protected data. It's also a safer and more secure way for people to give you access. We've kept it simple to save you time.

If you're supporting...

* web applications
* server-side APIs
* mashups

If you're storing protected data on your users' behalf, they shouldn't be spreading their passwords around the web to get access to it. Use OAuth to give your users access to their data while protecting their account credentials.

Interview

Intruders came along and interviewed me at my mashup* widget event

Mashup* Event - Widgets: Interview with Ivan Pope of Snipperoo

APIs and Developer Platforms

Marshalll Kirkpatrick from Read/Write Web does a great overview of APIs and Developer Platforms:

APIs and Developer Platforms: A Discussion on the Pros and Cons - ReadWriteWeb

Should your company offer an API for outside developers to build on? Should you engage in one of the fast growing developer platforms or with another company's API? There's a world of options opening up to leverage cross-site functionality and data exchange, but there are also some serious questions to ask about this emerging paradigm. [img: Flickr Mashups by David Wilkinson]

We discussed some of the common concerns about platforms and APIs with a circle of industry experts, executives and engineers last week and thought we'd share that discussion with you.

We asked questions regarding the efficacy and traction you can get from engaging with platforms and APIs, the investments required and whether the kinds of things being built in these environments are even serious technology.

You may find some answers to questions your company has in this conversation, you may find a useful articulation of thoughts you've already considered or you may feel inspired to take some things into consideration that you had not before.
Framing the Conversation

The technology press and enthusiastic geeks are thrilled whenever a new API is announced - and tech-savvy marketers circle anything that smells like it could be a big Platform. Offering an API is a great way to make developer friends and developing for a large Platform has the potential to bring your work to a huge audience.

Building a Brand with Widgets

Business Week has an ace special report on brand building with widgets:


Building a Brand with Widgets

Building a Brand with Widgets
The customizable bits of software on Facebook and other social networking sites are the latest trend in viral marketing. But are widgets here to stay?

# Building a Brand with Widgets

# Why Widgets Don't Work

# Widgets: The Future of Online Ads

# A Widget Mogul in Between Classes

# When Facebook Ads Flop

# The CEO Guide to Widgets

# Making Money from Widgets