Sexy Widget

So Who is Funding Widgets?

I thought it might be a fun exercise to go through the prominent widget companies – both platforms and applications – and explore which venture capital firms are cutting the checks to propel them forward.

Of course, just about every website has a widget or a widget strategy of some kind.  In terms of the applications / widget developers, I’ve tried to focus on those companies – like Photobucket - with monster, hugely distributed widgets, or those companies – like Lijit - whose widgets are the primary reason for their existence.

So without further ado, here are the folks and funds that have skin in the widget game.

Benchmark – Benchmark has invested in avatar company Gizmoz, widget distribution platform Gigya (review), and start page / widget aggregator PageFlakes.

Sequoia – Sequoia has invested in widget powerhouse RockYou, and is also rumored to have invested in Widgetbox.

Mark Cuban – Mark Cuban is an investor behind Goowy, which is the developer of widget platform and aggregator YourMinis.  Cuban has also invested in file sharing service Box.net (review), the developer of one of my favorite widgets.

Union Square Ventures – Union Square Ventures has invested in Feedburner (sort of a widget company), Adaptive Blue (review) (a toolbar / widget powered service), and avatar company Oddcast.

Trinity Ventures – Trinity was the lead investor in Photobucket.

Novak Biddle – This Bethesda, Maryland based fund has invested in widget platform Clearspring and site builder / widget aggregator Freewebs.

Steve Case / Ted Leonsis - Former AOL execs invested joined Novak Biddle in the Clearspring investment.

Columbia Capital – Fellow East Coast fund Columbia Capital has joined Novak Biddle in the Freewebs investment.

Index Ventures – Index Ventures has invested in start page / widget aggregator Netvibes.

Accel – Accel Ventures has invested in start page / widget aggregator Netvibes.

First Round Capital – First Round Capital has invested in Gigya.

Hummer Winblad – Hummer Winblad has invested in Widgetbox.

Mayfield – Mayfield has invested in photo widget Slide.

Blue Run – Blue Run has invested in photo widget Slide.

Khosla Ventures – Khosla Ventures has invested in photo widget Slide.

Founder’s Fund – Founder’s Fund has invested in photo widget Slide.

Lightspeed Venture Partners – Lightspeed is an investor in RockYou.

Partech – Partech is an investor in RockYou

Brad Feld – Brad Feld is an investor in blog search widget company Lijit.

Colorado Fund – Colorado Fund has invested in Lijit.

Boulder Ventures - Boulder Ventures has invested in Lijit.

Lighthouse Capital Partners – Lighthouse Capital Partners is an investor in Vendio, owner of Widgipedia.

MVC Capital - MVC is an investor in Vendio, owner of Widgipedia.

Bay Partners – Bay Partners has created a fund solely targeting Facebook App developers.

Google – Google has created a fund for Google Gadget developers.

NEA IndoUS Ventures (added 8/6/07) - Invested $3M in content discovery widget Minekey.

The Entrepreneurs' Fund III (added 8/7/07)- Invested in widget provider JS-Kit.

What’s striking to me is the blue chip nature of this list.  Funds like Sequoia, Benchmark, Hummer Winblad, Mayfield, Accel… these are the some of the most prestigious names in Silicon Valley. 

It would appear that the debate about whether widget powered businesses have legs is over – at least in the offices of the blue chip funds.

On Facebook Apps and Destination Site Growth

Today Quantcast released some fascinating data about the destination site growth that HotOrNot, Slide, and RockYou have experienced since launching their various Facebook Apps.

Interestingly, however, runaway Facebook successes iLike and Flixster have not seen the same sustained, destination site bounce that HotOrNot, Slide, and RockYou have seen.

Why is this?  I think it comes down to how the apps were built.  As I’ve written previously, iLike and Flixster were built to be seamless extensions to Facebook.  The critical component of this seamlessness is each company’s decision to create content hubs – band pages for iLike and movie and actor pages for Flixster – that reside on Facebook.com. 

The alternative, of course, as pursued by companies like Upcoming.org and Yelp, is to force folks to click through to their respective destination sites to get the good stuff – event pages in the case of Upcoming, and local business pages in the case of Yelp.

So which is better?  Certainly, the user experience of the iLike and Flixster Facebook apps is superior.  Seamlessness may also be a factor in how quickly a Facebook app takes off.  But what about from a business model perspective?  Given the facts as they exist today, I’d much prefer to be driving traffic to my destination site than allowing my community’s content to be consumed entirely on Facebook.  I know how to monetize traffic at home base – I don’t know how to do it on Facebook.  I know how to build relationships with my users at home base – I don’t know how to do it on Facebook.

So while companies that build standalone apps for Facebook may have a better shot at getting acquired by Facebook eventually, I’m still not convinced of the economics from the perspective of an independent business.  I just don’t know what the standalone apps are getting out of the deal besides some nice branding and potentially astronomical bandwidth costs.

Again, this could all change should Facebook decide to introduce a CPC charge to app publishers for siphoning Facebook traffic back to home base.

From Facebook’s perspective, there’s an odd tension here.  Clearly, Facebook would prefer that folks build seamless, standalone apps within the Facebook experience.  However, it would seem that there is more incentive for developers to build apps that have heavy link back to home base.  This reminds of an old MBA saying about “The folly of hoping for A, while incenting B.”  I wonder if Facebook will do something to juggle these incentives – either with the carrot, or with the stick.

For more discussion, see VentureBeat, The Next Net, Andrew Chen, and Snipperoo.

Facebook is the 'Burbs

Some gorgeous writing and analysis from Ivan Pope today:

The Web is something rich and strange and Facebook not something rich and strange.

Back in 1988 before the Web arrived we used to play a lot of image based games around the internet, passing encoded images back and forth and basically working hard to make some sense of this dark network where no-one could see anyone else. From that point on for me the internet and the web have been a rich and strange playground where each new person, each new application, each new network, added something unknowable to the sum total of where we worked and played. Facebook doesn't really do any of that. It's a nice tidy 'burb where everyone has more or less the same house, same garden, same car, same attitude.

Sure, we can all add friends and join networks and add applications, but it's always clear that there is no curtain behind which strange things might lurk. Facebook is the uber controlled environment - useful and wanted by many, but not pregnant with potential.

Click through to read the rest of this phenomenal post.

Gigya is Dead Simple for Widget Distribution

I’ve written extensively on this blog about the widget platforms.  Musestorm, Clearspring, Snipperoo, and Widgetbox all exist to help you publish, distribute, and track your widgets, and each of them has a lot to offer.

But I have yet to see as a widget distribution tool as simple and easy as Gigya’s Wildfire service.

Gigya has built one click distribution tools for the following social networks:

-    MySpace
-    Hi5
-    Friendster
-    Xanga
-    LiveJournal
-    FreeWebs
-    Facebook
-    Blogger
-    Tagged
-    TypePad
-    BlackPlanet

Now here’s what’s interesting about Gigya.  They are not hosting your widget.  To integrate Gigya tools, you don’t have to upload your .swf file into Gigya – all you have to do is to copy and paste some JavaScript into the page where you are providing your users with your embed code.

Basically, you just tell Gigya where on the page the embed code is located, and they provide a wrapper with one click add functionality to the big aggregators.

So one really simple implementation looks like this – your widget’s embed code, with the Gigya distribution buttons right below it.

This implementation took us about 15 minutes.

Simple.  Easy.  No trusting your widget load times to third parties.  I really love this service.

My only complaint so far is that using the Blogger or TypePad tools send the widget to a post, as opposed to a sidebar – but I would imagine that there’s a way to change this setting via the Gigya API.

Rumor has it that the Gigya guys are working on a Flash distribution tool that will enable widget to widget distribution.

No wonder why 6 out of the top ten dentists Comscore widget publishers, recommend Gigya.

And Now for Something Completely Different

I've mentioned Mo Kakwan's start-up Blabberize before.  It's basically a Monty Python-esque widget that lets you animate the mouths in photos, and add sound.  The mouths move to the sound.

It's ridiculous.  And fun.  And potentially viral.

And one more thing - if you ever get the chance to see Mo pitch Blabberize, don't miss it.  It's the funniest pitch in Silcon Valley.

Anyway, here's my collared lizard Coizinha singing "Que Onda Guero."

*alas, the widget didn't reduce very well to this width  Click through to see the singing lizard.*

Get a Blog Feedback Badge

RateItAll's blog feedback badge, modeled in the top left hand corner of this blog, is now in open beta.  Click through to get yours.

One cool aspect is that we are now aggressively promoting blogs that use the feedback badge on the RateItAll.com destination via a hottest blogs module, updated hourly.

So here's the pitch as to why you should add the RateItAll blog feedback badge to your site:

• Give your readers an additional voice on your blog
• Get feedback from your readers
• Convert readers to subscribers
• Let your readers interact with each other
• Drive traffic

Click here to see the full press release.

Couple of Links

I've been buried under some stuff for the last few days, but am happy to say that I have some posts percolating.

In the meantime, here are a couple of things that caught my eye today:

Niall Kennedy has a very thorough post about how to optimize your web widgets for scale and performance.

And Widgets Lab and Stickiwidgets both have posted their thoughts on what makes a widget successful.  Derek of Widgetslab writes from the perspective of a widget consumer, while Ming of Stickiwidgets comes more from the perspective of a widget developer.  Both are worth reading in full.

Some More Facebook Data

Here's some data that hints heavily that Facebook users will click through to your site if you let them.

SF New Tech Roundup

While I was sorry to miss Widgetcon, I thought that Wednesday’s SF New Tech, organized by Myles Weissleder, was outstanding.

It was an eclectic line-up featuring a big name VC, a talking llama, a productivity web app, a paid video network, and yours truly pitching distributed rating widgets.

It’s rare that you get to watch a VC – in this case, Guy Kawasaki – pitch a room full of entrepreneurs on a startup (Truemors).  And folks didn’t let him off easy either.  Jeremiah Owyang asked him point blank if Truemors would even have seen the light of day without the Guy Kawasaki brand behind it.  Guy was a great sport, and answered something to the tune of “Probably Not.”

My take on Truemors is a little different.  I think it’s actually a very clever concept with a real chance to get some traction.  Voting rumors up or down seems like the perfect, Web-based, wisdom of the crowds experiment.  The ability to submit Truemors via various means (web, voice, text), is a nice touch.  And certainly, the Guy Kawasaki brand is an unfair advantage in terms of link dev and PR.

Maybe it’s just me, but the spectacularly negative press that Truemors has received seems a bit personal in nature.

Of course, this wouldn’t be Sexy Widget if I didn’t point out that Truemors needs to get distributed in a hurry.  Folks should be able to submit and consume Truemors via widgets as they browse around the web – this is an absolute no brainer.

Check out Webware for a full review of the presenting companies.  If you’d like to watch my distributed rating pitch, click HERE.

Widgetcon Announcements

Today is Widgetcon, the widget conference put on by Freewebs, and the widget related announcements are starting to trickle in.

Widgetbox has announced a partnership with Forbes to deliver editorial / news widgets using Widgetbox's management and analytics platform.  There are two interesting things about this announcement.  First is that these widgets will support in-widget advertising (from Visa Small Business), and second, that this would appear to be one of Widgetbox's first partnerships with a large mainstream media company.

Here's the press release.

In other announcements, Freewebs has announced that it is hosting a widgetized advertising campaign for Universal Studios for the movie Knocked Up.  Folks can upload pictures of themselves with a supposed partner, and the service cranks out a remixed baby photo which combines the features of the "parents."  This, hideous photo is then available as a widget (and I assume, as a module on Freewebs).  It's actually pretty clever - you can try it out here.  Here's the press release.

And finally, Gigya has announced that six of the top ten widget publishers (as reported by Comscore) are now using Gigya's Wildfire widget sharing and tracking tool.  Assuming this is true, this is an incredible amount of traction in a short period of time for Gigya as a widget platform - I'll try and take the service for a spin in the next couple of days and share my thoughts.  Here's a review I wrote of Gigya's widget email service.