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    • WidgetBox : Page 1
    March 9th, 2011

    Sequoia-Backed Widgetbox Rebrands As Flite, Raises $12M For Rich Media Ad Serving Platform

    Flite (formerly Widgetbox) has raised $12 Million in Series C funding led by General Catalyst Partners with existing investors Sequoia Capital, Hummer Winblad and NCD Investors participating in the round. This brings Flite’s total funding to $27 million.

    Along with the funding, Widgetbox is rebranding itself as Flite. Since 2006, Widgetbox has built a name for itself by creating web widgets to aggregate content and increase engagement. The company then began building and distributing mobile web apps for the iPhone and Android. → Read More

    Evelyn Rusli, Contributor
    October 20th, 2010

    Widgetbox Mobile Launches, Create Mobile Web Apps In A Snap

    Forget Android, iOS and the rest of the mobile operating systems.

    Sometimes you don’t need to spend weeks building the sleekest mobile apps for native environments. And depending on your business, something a little bit more quick and simple can do the job just fine. That’s the theory behind Widgetbox Mobile, a new offering from the team behind ClickTurn ads, which aims to help businesses build mobile web apps in minutes.

    “There’s a new category of users who view the app store as not the best option for them,” says Widgetbox’s CEO Will Price. → Read More

    Evelyn Rusli, Contributor
    March 24th, 2010

    ClickTurn: Build Rich Media Ads In Half An Hour

    The momentum in online advertising is shifting away from traditional static text ads and towards rich media ads that are highly customized and interactive. Unfortunately, they generally take a lot more effort to create, which puts them out of reach for some companies. Enter Widgetbox‘s ClickTurn ad-builder. ClickTurn gives publishers a relatively fast and easy way to create dynamic ads with multiple tabs that include content from YouTube, Twitter and Facebook streams. Think of it as a mini site-within-a site where advertisers can showcase their best content and social media feeds.

    ClickTurn has delivered over 100 million impressions so far, collecting a $1.50 CPM. Not too shabby, when you consider that ClickTurn launched in December and has 12 clients under contract (including CBS, IDG, Linkedin). → Read More

    June 19th, 2009

    Widgetizing The Web: Widgetbox Hits 500 Million Impressions A Month

    Widgets were all the rage last year. And the trend seems to be growing. Widgetbox, a widget creation and distribution platform, is reporting 500 million impressions worldwide in the past month, according to Quantcast. Widgetbox says that the vast majority of activity exists across hundreds of thousands of publishers who embed the widgets in blogs each month and through partners who integrate Widgetbox’s widget galleries.

    That being said, Widgetbox is still behind other widget makers in the space, including competitor RockYou, which had 9.5 billion impressions in the past month, according to Quantcast. Clearspring also seems to have more of a reach than Widgetbox, but we don’t have the comparable Quantcast numbers. Clearspring’s widgets had 520 million unique visitors in April of 2009, according to comScore. → Read More

    September 18th, 2008

    Leading Widget Platform Widgetbox Launches Blog Network

    Widgetbox, one of the web’s largest widget creation and distribution platforms, is launching a new blog network and becoming a destination site in the process.

    Widgetbox’s homepage will now feature 29 blog channels ranging from parenting to technology. Each channel will include a lists of the most active stories in the network, as well as a leaderboard rewarding the most prolific and popular writers. Leaderboards use a normalized acceleration algorithm to ensure that content from both large and smaller blogs will appear regularly. → Read More

    April 22nd, 2008

    Widgetbox Unveils New iPhone Widget Gallery

    Widgetbox is jumping on the iPhone bandwagon by releasing a special gallery of widgets tailored to the popular device’s screen. There are 16 widgets available to start, including an RSS output of The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs and a BART QuickPlanner tool for finding mass transport rides around the Bay Area. A tutorial is being provided for developers to create their own iPhone-ready widgets, which will then go into the gallery. Despite Jobs’ insistence that all regular websites work well on the iPhone, it’s always nice to see websites tailored for the device because when it comes down to it, pinching to zoom in and out gets tiresome. This new gallery is especially nice because mobile users generally want access to quick information while on the go, and widgets are inherently designed for small bits of consumption. If you find a few widgets you like, you can add them to your home screen for easy access. Also see Apple’s own gallery for iPhone-ready web apps. CrunchBase Information Widgetbox Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More

    March 13th, 2008

    Hummer Winblad Partner Will Price Resigns To Head WidgetBox

    It’s not often a partner at a successful venture capital fund leaves to do anything except retire (although there is some evidence to the contrary). But Will Price, a general partner at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, has resigned from his firm and, as of today, is the CEO of widget startup Widgetbox. The company has raised $14.5 million from Hummer Winblad, Sequoia Capital and Northgate Capital. Hummer Winblad has been around since 1989 and has invested $620 million of so in startups. Price feels that Widgetbox is poised to take advantage of the huge surge in widget usage. And if the AOL acquisition of Goowy and the recent Slide valuation is any indication, there’s lots of room to grow for Widgetbox. I asked Price to write a guest post telling us why he made the decision to leave a very safe and very lucrative job and enter the very unsafe and risky world of startups again. His post is below, although it can largely be summed up in this post, too. If you want to follow Price’s regular updates, his blog is here. My name is Will Price and until yesterday I served as a General Partner at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, an early stage venture capital firm that was founded in 1989 (investments include TheKnot, Napster, HubPages, Omniture, Powersoft, Hyperion and others). While passionate about the firm and the venture industry, I am leaving Hummer Winblad today to take the CEO role at one of the startups I invested in – Widgetbox. Michael Arrington kindly offered me the chance to explain my decision to leave venture capital and to join Widgetbox as the CEO. While the detail follows, in summary the combination of my personal aspirations to return to an operating role and my passion for the widget market and the company (which I helped seed fund) made this a no-brainer move for me. My logic: 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. → Read More

    February 3rd, 2008

    Amid Yahoo Turmoil, AOL Makes An Acquisition

    On Monday AOL will announce the acquisition of San Diego-based Goowy, a startup founded in late 2004 and which launched, incidentally, in my living room in late 2006 (we had a TechCrunch party where Goowy, Meebo, Sphere and other startups launched). The size of the deal is not being disclosed. Their first product was a Flash-based webtop or alternative operating system. But later they went into the widget space with their YourMinis product, and that is the reason AOL has acquired them. AOL SVP of Social Media, Messaging and Homepages David Liu said this was a deal they’ve been considering for the last nine months, and that they plan to integrate Goowy’s technology into both user-facing AOL products (to widgetize them) as well as their Platform A advertising network. Expect Platform A to launch significant new advertising products in the widget space soon, Liu says. This is a significant win for Goowy founder and CEO Alex Bard, who has run a tight operation over the years. The company has just six employees and raised a single round of financing from Mark Cuban in April 2006 (the size of that round remains undisclosed, but it was almost certainly under $1 million). He says the Goowy team will remain in San Diego for at least the short term. Goowy competes with a number of startups in the widget advertising space, including Widgetbox, ClearSpring and Gigya. VideoEgg, Slide and RockYou also compete in this area. AOL has been busy acquiring promising young startups – they bought Israel-based Yedda last November as well. CrunchBase Information Goowy Widgetbox ClearSpring Gigya VideoEgg Slide RockYou Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More

    January 31st, 2008

    Widgetbox Secures $8M More in Series B Funding

    Widgetbox, a platform for the creation and distribution of web widgets, has raised $8M in a Series B round of financing led by Northgate Capital and joined by Sequoia Capital and Hummer Winblad. The company provides tools for both novice and advanced developers to create a variety of widgets, from simple embeddable RSS feed readers (called “blidgets”) to full social network applications for Facebook and Bebo. I first met the WidgetBox team at Bebo’s platform launch event, as it had helped create at least one of the applications that launched there. Out of the 956 applications now available on Bebo, 60% have been created using Widgetbox’s “app accelerator” tool. The company also claims that 15% of the applications on Facebook have been created using its tools. Since the widget business seems to be a lot about the numbers, here are some more: Widgetbox hosts almost 34,000 widgets in its gallery (the largest gallery on the web according to them) and these spread across over 210,000 domains and created by over 20,000 developers. Every day their widgets are viewed about 12M times. About half of Widgetbox’s advanced developers use Flash, whereas the other half use server-side languages like PHP or JSP. Widget usage on places like Blogger and MySpace is still very strong and growing. Expect to see even greater distribution when OpenSocial finally comes of age. Widgetbox says that it will use its new funds to scale operations, promote further distribution of its widgets, and develop its monetization strategy and revenue share program. Currently, revenue is only being generated from Facebook applications that have opted in to putting ads on their canvas pages. Widgetbox will be working to create other opportunities for generating and sharing revenue with its developers, some of which will involve advertising and some which may not. CrunchBase Information Widgetbox Facebook Bebo MySpace Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More

    September 24th, 2007

    MuseStorm Debuts Widget Engagement Platform

    Silicon Valley/Israel based MuseStorm will launch a new end-to-end widget syndication platform today at the DEMO conference. The new offering which MuseStorm is officially dubbing a “content engagement platform” provides four widget syndication aspects: Authoring, Distribution, Analytics & Monetization. The highlight of the platform is the authoring functionality. First, it provides non-programmers the ability to develop rich media (audio, video, photo, text) widgets. Second, MuseStorm’s platform instantly exports the “source” into a variety of Web formats, including MySpace, Facebook, iGoogle, Netvibes, PageFlakes, etc. Desktop widget export currently features Windows executable, but support for Google, Yahoo, and Mac will be added in the near future. Updated are propagated seamlessly to the universe of deployed widgets, regardless of format. The distribution aspect of the platform includes Web and Desktop widgets as noted above and will be expanded to IM and mobile. From the analytics standpoint, the MuseStorm platform provides distribution and user interaction analytics which should help publishers optimize their offerings. Publishers can monetize their widgets by integrating ads using advanced features such as event triggers, location of the ad within the widget, and more. MuseStorm is targeting its offering toward high-end publishers requiring a complete widget strategy. This is in contrast to offerings by Widgetbox and Clearspring which are geared at publishers that are in need specifically of distribution power. Several publishers have already given the nod to MuseStorm’s new platform. These include Simon & Schuster (BookVideos), CBS (The ShowBuzz), and even MicroSoft which launched a Halo 3 FaceBook app powered by MuseStorm. Founded in 2005, MuseStorm is based in Sunnyvale with R&D in Or-Yehuda, Israel. Dr. Yossi Vardi provided seed funding in the low six digits. In July 2007 $1M in Series A was provided by Elron (NASDAQ: ELRN). This is Elron’s first Internet investment. → Read More

    Duncan Riley, Contributor
    August 27th, 2007

    Amnesty Hypercube Brings Web Widgets To The Desktop

    Mesa Dynamics has announced the alpha preview release of Amnesty Hypercube, a desktop platform for web widgets. Amnesty Hypercube allows users to use web widgets, such as those provided by Google Gadgets, Pageflakes, Widgetbox and others on their desktop in a similar fashion to Apple’s Dashboard, Yahoo Widgets, Google Desktop and the Vista Sidebar. The theory goes that there are “hundreds of thousands” of publicly available web widgets, flash games, and videos that are designed to run on the web; Amnesty Hypercube brings this choice and variety to the desktop. Amnesty Hypercube includes a directory of over 150 web widget providers that can be browsed by category and explored from inside the application. Widgets from the directory can be imported automatically into Amnesty Hypercube via its “NoClick” technology. Desktop widgets tend to be something people either love or hate. If you’re a serious desktop widget connoisseur and are stuck using something like Vista (which is a fairly dismal range of widgets) Amnesty Hypercube could well be for you. As a Mac user I don’t see the need quite as much, however using something like this does expand your widget options. Amnesty Hypercube is available for both Windows and Mac, and is offered as freeware. → Read More

    Robin Wauters, Contributor
    May 30th, 2007

    Widgetbox Remote Gallery: An Open Platform For Widgets

    Widgetbox have announced the wide-spread adoption of its new Widgetbox Remote Gallery feature which eases the transition to an open platform for social networks. The Widgetbox Remote Gallery feature enables social networks to embed a select number of widgets from third party developers and provide access to the over 10,000 widgets from the Widgetbox main gallery, giving their users the ability to easily find and use widgets to customize their profiles, blogs and web pages. Partners can brand their own Widgetbox Remote Gallery and have control over the widget selection in the Widgetbox Remote Gallery. Galleries can be as large or small as desired and widget selection can be rotated as needed. Launch partners include Freewebs, imbee.com, Xanga and Six Apart’s TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox. → Read More

    Leena Rao, Contributor
    June 22nd, 2006

    PostApp launches WidgetBox, a marketplace for widgets

    Stealth start-up PostApp announced at Thursday’s SuperNova Connected Innovators session the launch tomorrow of WidgetBox, its new beta marketplace for managed web based widgets, and $1.5 million in funding from Hummer Winblad. If you like widgets, there’s about to be a whole lot more of them available for use in your blog or profile page. If you’d like to develop widgets and have some one else deal with the details, this could be for you. If you’re unfamiliar with widgets, see the “community powered search” box on the right side of TechCrunch – that’s a widget. Videos, slide shows, music players and news tickers that can be dropped into web pages are common types of widgets. PostApp is headed and B2B veterans Ed Anuff, Giles Goodwin and Dean Moses. The company debuted its first offering, an eBay widget, in partnership with Typepad at the end of March. PostApp will manage the process of turning web services into widgets that bloggers, social network users and others can insert into their pages. Outside developers will create web services, submit them to PostApp for transforming into widgets and content publishers like bloggers, auction sellers and social network users will select the widgets they want from the WidgetBox marketplace. The service will also manage the money for widgets that involve financial transactions like affiliate links or subscription, though developers will have first say in determining the business rules of their projects. PostApp will act as a master affiliate or subscription center, as appropriate. As the number of photo, video, eCommerce and calendar widgets available online proliferates I can’t help but think that a central place for lots of widgets sounds like a good idea. I also hope that this will make it easier for developers to create other kinds of widgets, as the choices out there can feel pretty stale. One of the first highlighted widgets will use the Yahoo images API to insert contextually relevant images into any website. RSS will be the basis of many, but not all of the widgets. If you love RSS as much as I do, you can probably imagine almost any information being delivered by feed and thus displayed in a widget. If an interesting variety of feeds are widgetized and then mixed with intermittent contextual advertising – then everybody wins. I’ll eagerly await the widgets of the future. → Read More

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