A couple of days ago I blogged about BlidgetPro from Widgetbox. As I mentioned, WidgetBox has a self-service widget offering that allows folks to quickly build widgets. Today I got a kind email from Widgetbox’s VP Marketing & Business, Ryan Spoon, thanking me for the feedback. Its funny but I co-founded one of my previous startups (Epicentric which was acquired by Vignette) with Widgetbox’s founder (Ed Anuff) and I know WidgetBox’s current CEO William Price from my time at Tagworld (another company we helped launch, that was sold to MTV/Viacom) were I was a “customer reference” for WidgetBox (Will has then a partner at Hummer Winblad, WidgetBox’s early VC).

Ryan Spoon I know from Kijiji (an eBay company) which was a syndication partner of the last company I co-founded, vFlyer. Funny what a small world Silicon Valley can be (We also designed the logo for WidgetBox when it was called PostApp so there is long, interest history between the two companies – see logo).

Ryan shared some good BlidgetPro that I thought I would pass on:

• Crank 2 (Liongate)
• LA Lakers
• The Insider (CBS)
• Fabulous Savings
• Kijiji.com

I had a chance to play with WidgetBox’s Blidget Pro. I liked the concept (and wizard builder) but found results a bit constrained.  I quickly upgrade to Pro just to check it out. The Pro promised additional tabs (a not so impressive total of 7 tabs) and the ability to create custom themes. The tabs provided the ability to pull content from Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Vimeo, Hulu, Blog/Feed RSS and Custom (HTML text) with a decent handful of settings. Here is my creation:

The ability to brand the widget seemed limited and a couple of more tabs would have been nice. Given its price point and feature set, it is obvious that Blidget Pro competes with the Sprout Builder for the low-end of the market, which makes sense. Widgets are becoming a “mass market” phenomena and more and more small business/individuals/prosumers are looking for quick and easy DIY (Do it Yourself) solutions. I am guessing a couple more of the widget builders (iWidget, SpringWidgets, i.e.) will go this route.

On Monday, I did a post on the funding maddness surrounding Widget Platforms (Widget Platforms Get Funded to the Tune of $50M!) and today paidContent.org did a interesting widget related story (It’s Been A Year Since AOL’s Big Widget Play, But How Real Is The ‘Widget Economy’) that talks about many of the same things I mentioned (Tameka Kee have you been reading our blog?). The article asks the question how “real is the widget economy” and predicts as I did that a shakeout (not of widgets but of widget platoforms) is coming. Definately worth a read.

I recently blogged a post about recent widget new and trends and thought one of my point need further exploration!

Here are some widget developers and platforms that recently (last 6 months) raised money:

• iWidget, a widget tools developer, raised $4.1 million in Series A funding in February 2009 from Opus Capital and University Venture Fund.
• KickApps, a social media and widget platform, raised $14 million in Series C in December 2008 from North Atlantic Capital, and existing investors Softbank, Spark Capital, and Prism Ventures.
• RockYou, a widget developer and ad network, raised a $17 million Series C in November 2008 from Softbank and SK Telecom Ventures. The company is also backed by Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
• Gigya, a popular widget distribution platform, raised $11 million in Series C in October of 2008 from  DAG Ventures.
• JS-Kit, Javascript widget platform provider, raised a $3.6 million Series B from Altos Ventures and existing investor The Entrepreneur’s Fund III (TEF3).
• Note: If you look a little further than 6 months you will notice ClearSpring raised $18 Million in May 2008 from New Enterprise Associates (NEA), look back a year and the amount becomes staggering $160 million+ with Slide raising $50 million in Jan 2008 as did WidgetBox raising $8 million form Sequoia capital, Gigya raising $9.5 million in March, Buddy Media with $6.4 million in April, RockYou raised $35 million in June and these are just the ones I know about. This does not include all the social ad networks or small “single purpose” widget companies.

Add up the numbers and its close to $50 million invested in the last 6 months, $160+ million invested in the last year or so if you look a little further – all this just on widget platform providers and developers! In the last couple of years, widgets have become the media marketing darlings of advertising companies on Madison Avenue. Hype from publications like Newsweek and GigaOm as well as ComScore’s Widget Metrix report have only added fuel to the fire!

But based on these numbers you would think widgets were taking over the world. Hopefully most of these VC’s have done their research, most however, have concluded that widgets are an opportunity they are banking on, but event $50M may be much! Many VC’s such as David Cohen, have been bullish on widget while other like Lightspeed’s Jerry Liew, Polaris Ventures’ Sim Simeonov, and Union Square Venture’s Fred Wilson have been more cautious. Most point to the lack of good business models (other than building them for a living). Personally, I tend to agree with Mobius Venture’s Brad Feld the most who rightly concludes in his post on widgets:

While there might be room for one or two “widget management systems”, there certainly isn’t the need for 23 of them.

If 2007 has the “Year of the Widget”, you can probably expect 2009 to be the “Year of Widget Fallout”. While widgets continue to be one of the best marketing ideas around for “packaging a website in a box”, how many widget platforms and networks and builders and generators do we really need?

Here is a quick roundup of a couple of recent interesting widget news and trends:

• Chumby – the real “Widet Box”
  Chumby makes a super cool $199 Linux-based “always-on” Internet media player with over 1,000 Flash-based widgets in more than 30 categories . Chumby recently partnered with Samsung to power a widget-enabled digital photo frame! Definately worth checking out!
• Widget from FDA Saves Lives! – Potentially
  Kudos to the FDA (yes, the US Government puts out widgets) for putting out a widget about the peanut butter salmonella recalls!
• New President Obama has Appetite for Widgets!
  Obama staffers are well versed in the art of social media marketing and make good use widgets including: Blist for doc sharing, iGoogle and WidgetBox “Spread the Word” and fund raising widgets during the campaign. Hopefully other politicians will follow!
• Widget Platforms Get Funded to the Tune of $50M!
  iWidget, a widget tools developer, recently raised $4.1 million in Series A funding. KickApps, a social media and widget platform closed a $14 million Series C in December, Gigya closed a $11 million Series C in October of 2008.  In November, widget developer RockYou raised a $17 million Series C. That same month, Javascript widget platform provider JS-Kit raised a $3.6 million Series B. Looks like a lot of money is being raised, all to make lil widgets! Did VC just put over $50 Million into widget companies in the last six months?

Since I get asked this question a lot, here is a quick round up of the more popular widget marketplaces, builders and distribution platforms (at least the ones that matter most):

1. Widgets to not appear to feature a full range of sharing options
2. SDK is not publicly available and adds functionality to the SproutBuilder

I predict that 2009 will be the year widget ad networks become a reality. Companies like Clearspring, Widgetbox, Gigya, SpringWidgets, and iWidgets have provided free widget distribution and/or development platforms for a number of years. Expect that to change in the future.  Widget platform providers are externally and internally experimenting with mechanisms to monitize their previously “free” services (ClearSpring announced their widget ad network in Dec 2007, Gigya announced theirs in January). The monitization trend makes senses, Web 2.0 companies have to figure out how to generate revenue, and with where the economy and financial markets are today, there is not better time to start than now.

Expect to see the following types of ecommerce models being applied to widget distribution.

• Recommended and sponsored widgets channels
• In-Widget advertising
• Mini ad banners within widget sharing menus
• Trial and premium widgets
• Premium widget delivery and tracking
• Paid widget distribution

Widget distribution platforms like ClearSpring, Gigya, and WidgetBox generally provide three types of benefits to widget developers, customers and marketers. These include:

• Distribution: Marketing exposure through listings in widget directories and marketplaces
• Sharing: Infrastructure for sharing widgets across social networks and communities
• Tracking and Reporting: Infrastructure for tracking widget usage, distribution and growth

Distribution is a given, sharing is dicey, but tracking is a real cost savings! Custom reporting engines can consume 20–30% of a typical wiget development project, but using tracking tools from widget distributors like ClearSpring can significantly reduce or eliminate that cost. Widgets are hard to track since many of them are developed in Flash and others reside on computer desktops so many times developers must include “analytics machinery” (as well as a report backend) to effectively track widget useage and distribution. ClearSpring, Gigya and WidgetBox can significantly simplify the problem.

ClearSpring does a pretty good job of providing an long list of tracking parameters including live traffic, audience statistics (uniques, geography and computer information), enagements (views, interactions, clicks, clickthroughs, installs, sharing) as well as custom events you can define in your own code. Gigya sports a slightly more powerful reporting engine that supports exporting data, custom reports and has a nift analytics dashboard.

Custom event tracking is especially useful when trying to understand more granular user interaction or sharing practicies.

Clients should definately consider using ClearSpring or a similar widget distribution platform for either primary or secondary tracking. The idea of secondary tracking is to either provide backup tracking or simply verify that your primary tracking is working accurately.  In the future, I will do a comparison of ClearSpring’s, Gigya’s and WidgetBox’s reporting features and functionality to help guide your decision making.

I have always been a big fan of Rapid Application Development (RAD). Wikipedia defines RAD as:

…the term and its acronym have come to be used in a broader, generic sense that encompasses a variety of techniques aimed at speeding application development, such as the use of web application frameworks and other types of software frameworks.

In the past, the key to a lot of rapid application development has been the use of software frameworks or toolkits. Unfortunately these types of frameworks are sadly missing when it comes to widget development.

Recent entrants in the space have failed to deliver compelling widget RAD solutions for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, most of them (such as WidgetBox and ClearSpring) are marketplaces or distribution plays and have no real intention at being or becoming a toolkit! Although both WidgetBox and ClearSpring have things such as “Facebook App Generators” or accelerators, these simply try and stuff existing Flash-based widgets into new social networking platforms and are not toolkits per se. Others like KickApps see themselves as hosted, white-label platforms! The closest thing to a widget toolkit is probably Sprout Builder, but its feature set has limitations, some find that its “development” environment is complex, and users have no control over the memory footprint or branding.

In general, here are some problems with many of today widget toolkits:

• Branding: Most toolkits (as well as “wrappers” from WidgetBox, ClearSpring and Sprout) have mandatory branding (that promotes their service) which cannot be removed.
• Size: Even if you can live with someone else’s branding, anything that is “general purpose” tends to be very large, and on the Internet size matters! I remember a recent client that tried to build a widget using one of the toolkits only to find that they had created a 500KB monster. We were able to recreate the same widget in 50KB!
• Cost: But wait a minute, you say, these toolkits are FREE! Unless you don’t put any value on your own time, then yes, is all free. Unfortunately the client I mentioned above had invested over 20 hours in the exercise, only to find out it didn’t meet their needs, and this does not take into account potential future support cost!
• Integration: None of the toolkits that I know of support any deep integration (other than an simple RSS feed) with client or third-party API’s.
• Tracking: Although a growing number of “toolkit” provider are starting to provide some support for traffic reports and analytics, this support is limited and cannot be customized or integrated with a customers existing reporting system.
• Support: Actually, the lack thereof. As you can imagine, most “free” toolkits do not come with support.

So what’s the alternative? At Metablocks, we build custom widgets to exacting brand, size and platform requirements. We have our own “internal toolkits” that speed up the process when it comes to things like XML communication, tracking and user interaction, but these are small and agile software frameworks that bring no extra “weight” (or wait) to the project. Obviously many of the things we do, cannot be duplicated with a general purpose toolkit. Thing like two-way communication (even within social networks), custom tracking and reporting, advanced video and audio support to name just a few. In addition, if something goes wrong, there is always someone there to fix it. If you have tried a general purpose toolkit and are less than pleased with the results, please give us a call!

Once you have a custom widget that works, THEN you can a marketplace like WidgetBox to distribute it. Remember that most of these companies (like WidgetBox and ClearSpring) are trying to solve a distribution problem, not a development or design problem!

Tags: widgets, widetbox, clearspring, sprout, flash