Geckoboard, the London-based developer of an online dashboard product that lets businesses monitor company-related information in real time through the use of widgets, has today announced two key pieces of news to fuel its growth: it has picked up its first round of funding, $1.5 million, and it is launching a new feature that lets users create their own widgets for all the services that they would want to run on that dashboard.
The funding comes from a top list of investors led by Index Ventures that also includes 500 Startups, DN Capital, HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes, Path CEO Dave Morin, Alexander Bruehl, Christoph Janz and John Hunt, and it is through that investment that Geckoboard has been able to launch the new product.
“This funding will lead to an explosion in the number of integrations we can offer our customers,” Paul Joyce, CEO and co-founder of Geckoboard. “Companies recognise the need for real-time analysis of their business metrics and the Widget Editor will help us to offer more integrations much more quickly than we were ever able to do before.” That will also help it better compete with other startups that also work in a similar space, including iDashboards and Cyfe. Ironically, calibrated the right way, a Geckoboard could even compete against HootSuite, the company run by one of its latest investors.
As of today, Geckoboard lists 55 existing widgets on its site for users to drop into their dashboards for popular services like Google Analytics, Twitter, Salesforce, Pingdom, Basecamp, Zendesk and Facebook (maybe for when you want a little diversion…).
What today’s announcement will mean is that with a new widget editor, developers can code (with standard web programming language), debug and preview new widgets that Geckoboard hasn’t created itself. Geckoboard says that this is, in fact, the same tool it uses to create the pre-existing widgets. And that new widgets can be completed in “less than an hour” (with a video to explain ti more here). And because they are web-based they work on any screen with a browser across PCs, Macs, tablets and smartphones.
Geckoboard has called itself the “Chartbeat for everything else” — in reference to the tool used to monitor traffic and other metrics on websites. Geckoboard’s rise speaks to a growing trend among businesses to consolidate ever-growing lists of diagnostics and information into simpler views to be able to better assess that information — with dashboards being the mainstay for how it’s presented and consumed.
Since launching in February 2011, Geckoboard has picked up some 1,400 customers, including Atlassian, Groupon, Gdgt, SecondMarket and Stack Exchange.