Google today announced a new partnership with social login providers Janrain and Gigya that will bring its Google+ sign-ins to thousands of new sites. In February, Google launched Google+ sign-ins to developers who can use it on the web and for their Android and iOS apps and starting today, all of the 400,000 sites that use Janrain to provide social logins and the 600,000 sites deployed across… → Read More
“Social infrastructure” provider Gigya released some data this morning that highlights its growth over the past year. The biggest number? The 1.5 billion unique users reached by Gigya’s tools each month, up from 1 billion a year ago.
To have that kind of reach, Gigya presumably needs big clients, and the company says new customers added last year include Wal-Mart, DirectTV, RedBox, Beats… → Read More
Businesses understand the importance of implementing a social strategy in the Facebook Era — and not just because it’s cool, but because it can have a real effect on user engagement. Just ask Salesforce, which recently acquired Buddy Media for $643 million or Oracle, who followed suit by snatching up Vitrue for $300 million. Over the last five or so years, we’ve more or less seen the maturation… → Read More
On the Web, it’s all about engagement. Site owners, administrators, content producers, eCommerce companies — and everyone in between — are constantly trying to find better ways to keep their customers engaged and interacting with their content and products. With the share-pocalypse at hand, brands big and small have to find ways to better utilize and harness social media in their content… → Read More
Site owners, administrators, web business owners, content producers, and everyone in between are always trying to find the best ways to encourage visitors to spend more time on their sites. It’s hard enough getting people there in the first place, but keeping visitors and customers on the site (and engaged) once there? No walk in the park. But doing so is critical — Just ask Groupon.
As one… → Read More
Many companies have begun to realize that social is not just a new channel or a new fad, it’s a new way of doing business. But learning the ropes, how to use social networks and social channels, and optimize and tailor social features for one’s business, is easier said than done. This is where Gigya enters the equation. The startup offers a SaaS technology (or a social CRM platform, if you will)… → Read More
Eyal Magen, founder of social sharing software maker Gigya, a couple of weeks ago announced that Dave Yovanno, who joined the company as chief executive officer in October 2008 after serving as COO of ValueClick for almost a decade, was stepping down.
Turns out Yovanno will be returning to ValueClick as the new general manager of Mediaplex, the company’s technology division.
Yovanno will report… → Read More
ShareThis, which you may be familiar with thanks to all the buttons online publishers worldwide have been plastering on their sites to lure you into spreading their content, is now live at roughly 1 million websites, aggregately reaching more than 400 million users.
The company has now tapped Kristen Fergason, formerly a marketer at Yahoo, as its new CMO to grow even more. In addition to her… → Read More
If you are still wondering why Google is pushing so hard with its new product Buzz, it is because it wants in on social traffic. For many sites on the Web, social traffic coming through Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace is beginning to rival, and in some cases overtake, search traffic as the single biggest source of traffic. This traffic comes from shared links, photos, and videos. What isn’t… → Read More
Many of the widgets scattered across the Web are made in Flash, but Adobe doesn’t participate in the widget economy. Today, it is taking a first tentative step towards changing that with the release of a new Distribution Manager for widgets created on the Flash Platform. In addition to making it easier for people to share the widgets across 70 Web and mobile destinations, it will track their… → Read More
Gigya, the Israeli startup that helps other companies easily distribute their widgets, has released some of its latest figures on the recent holiday season.
Most notable: December 23rd set the new record for total number of widget installs in a single day, with 900,000 widgets installed across all of the service’s supported blogs and social networks. Gigya obviously doesn’t account for every… → Read More
MyBefia is a great little site to compare Apple iPhone applications based on their rankings in the App Store. Add up to three applications (the only annoying thing is you have to look up its iTunes Store URL) and see how rank has changed over time. It also shows estimated market share, review rankings over time and popularity. The widgets are embeddable via Gigya. → Read More
Gigya has raised $11 million in a Series C round led by DAG Ventures and joined by all existing investors, including Benchmark Capital, First Round Capital, and Mayfield Fund. The round brings the Israeli startup’s total funding to about $23.5M, an amount raised over the two plus years since its founding in summer 2006.
The money will fuel two main widget services: Wildfire, which helps widget… → Read More
Distributing friend connections across the web has been quite a hot topic in the Web 2.0 community as of late. MySpace, Facebook, and Google have all come out with their own initiatives for sharing social graph data with any number of websites. And there appears to be a struggle over just who will ultimately control the aggregated data – if anyone. So it may or may not come as a surprise… → Read More
Spottt, which went into private beta at TechCrunch40, launches to the public today. The product is part of the Adbrite advertising network, but is being run as a separate brand. It is a reincarnation of sorts of LinkExchange, an advertising network that launched in the mid nineties and was later acquired by Microsoft in 1998 for $265 million. LinkExchange co-founder Tony Hsieh (also the CEO of… → Read More
Widget distribution company Gigya has publicly launched a distribution service for branded widgets, a premium service for advertisers that complements WildFire, its free service for the distribution of non-branded widgets. As <a href="we described last April, WildFire helps to distribute widgets across the web by making it easy for users to install them on their social network profiles and… → Read More
We’re not exactly sure how long it’s been around (it appears to have launched late this Fall), but we recently came across a simple widget service with no press coverage to date called Hyplet that helps you create digital business cards and flyers. You can spread them around the web by embedding in blogs, social networks, websites, and emails. Hyplet’s end product is nothing… → Read More
For developers designing for the other 99.9 percent of the web not running solely on Facebook, Gigya offers Wildfire, a simple interface for spreading, tracking, and monetizing your widget across 12 social sites. They’ve been chosen to handle distribution and tracking for 6 of the top 10 Widget properties (RockYou!, PictureTrail, BunnyHeroLabs, BlingyBlob.com, POQbum and… → Read More
Getting a widget onto a website, whether its a blog or a MySpace page or anything else, is a bit of a pain. Users generally have to copy an embed code, log into their website, and paste it into the appropriate place. While that hasn’t proven to be an insurmountable obstacle, widget startups that have found ways to make it easier for users to add widgets to their sites have seen significantly… → Read More
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