Founder and CEO Alex Savic presented his company NextWidgets at this week’s next2010 in Berlin. The company’s product creates fully transactional banners for websites and facebook pages that enables anyone to integrate their online retail store into a banner.
TechCrunch Europe took the opportunity to talk to Savic about what is next for the Swiss startup, including details of a new less intrusive side tab widget.
NextWidgets says it is the first company that lets users to embed a store into their social media profile in an effortless way. This makes the recruitment of fan-based affiliates very cost effective. NextWidgets reads the text of a website and then pulls in the keywords to create a customized offering that is relevant to the context of the content. This means that if you are a car parts retailer, the content of the e-commerce widget will match the blog or site’s content in which it is embedded.
NextWidgets says it will launch a new side tab widget in the next couple of weeks. Publishers started to voice a preference to use the integrated e-commerce opportunities but not as overtly as is currently offered. The side tab widget does exactly what the integrated banners do, however, but remains less visible until called into action by the user. This makes the “experience of integrated, contextualized e-commerce even less intrusive and doesn’t take away any ad space that publishers might want to use” says Savic.
Two weeks ago at The Next Web in Amsterdam, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels called NextWidgets’ business model and products “dangerous” and pretty much shot it down in one sentence. The argument being that the implementation of e-commerce into banners poses considerable risk with regards to authentication for the stores and customers alike. Savic responds “I can understand why Werner would say this. However, we don’t see the dangers that he does. Our products create more opportunities for business and that is what matters”. He says that better authentication is something they continue to work on.
NextWidgets is Angel funded and is still working on the larger use-cases to build its case for VCs.