I keep hearing rumors about the ridiculous amounts of money that Weebly is making. But the San Francisco company, which provides a set of tools for small businesses and other organizations to easily create their own web sites, has only scoffed at the nine-figure amounts I’ve thrown at them. Instead, they’ve shared something else — a new mobile app that lets new users quickly create their own sites, or existing folks manage what they have going.

In a series of quick swipes, it lets you get through naming a site, upload images, choosing a theme, and publishing your first post. If you want to get fancier, you can also take photos and alter them with a set of filters, or shoot videos to publish.

The admin interface lets users manage multiple sites, and comes with some of the core features from its home site, including comment moderation, and form creation for surveys, contact lists and submissions (which will all also work on mobile).

The free app is available (here) for iPhone now and Android later, cofounders Dan Veltri and David Rusenko tell me. Language support is currently available for English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Italian, Chinese and Dutch.

Web-savvy folks may not realize it, but many organizations still lack a strong online and mobile presence. For example, Frederic recently covered an industry study showing that 95% of independent restaurants don’t have a mobile site, and only 40% have online menus.

Yes, there are a number of other companies out there that let people set up their own sites. But Tumblr is more of a social network, Facebook and Twitter accounts are more about getting distribution than providing a full set of features, and heavier-duty blog platforms like WordPress require more work to set up and maintain.

Weebly’s main competitors are companies like Wix and Webs.com — or, rather, the lack of awareness among categories of users like those poor independent web site owners.

It’s making big inroads, though, which is why I keep hearing those revenue rumors. Since launching in 2007, it has gained 11 million registered users (people who have set up web sites), and accounts for around 2% of all sites on the web. Traffic is around 75 million unique visitors a month. Its net promoter score — an industry calculation of how likely users are to recommend a service to others — is an unusually high 80%.

Its revenues, which come from special features like e-commerce stores, have made the company profitable since January of 2009, the cofounders tell me from their awesome new offices downtown — and “very profitable” today.

Since its inception, Weebly has been focused on making it as easy as possible to build your own custom website using a WYSIWYG, drag-and-drop interface. And it’s done a good job doing that — CEO David Rusenko says that based on a recent Netcraft‘s survey, Weebly powers around 2% of sites on the web.

But even though Weebly is relatively easy to use, there are still plenty of people who don’t know the first thing about putting together their own website, and who would much rather pay someone to build it for them. Which is why Weebly is launching a new Designer Platform. It’s essentially a whitelabeled version of the service, giving a designers a way to quickly build a client’s site and then to provide a CMS that the client will actually be able to use once the project is completed.

Here’s how it works: first, designers create their own account, uploading custom logos and creating additional accounts for any of their coworkers who will also have access to client pages. Then designers can set about building out their clients’ page — they can use Weebly’s standard drag-and-drop interface as usual, or they can also include custom code if they want to give the page a unique look.

Once the site is nearing completion, the designer can give access to the client (who won’t even realize that the site is running on Weebly, since it’ll be sporting the designer’s own logo). Depending on how the designer how configured the site, the client will be able to make simple tweaks (adjusting colors, fonts, etc.) using the Weebly interface. Then, once the project is complete, the client will be able to add additional content, pages, forms, and other features using Weebly’s CMS.

Pricing plans start at $7.95 per month, which includes hosting costs for the designer’s sites (prices go up the more pages and storage you use). And designers are free to charge their clients more than that.

This guest post was written by Kovas Boguta, Head of Analytics at Weebly. In 2009, Kovas wrote a guest post about visualizing real-time social structures.

A decade ago, the open-source LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python) stack began to transform web startup economics. As new open-source webservers, databases, and web-friendly programming languages liberated developers from proprietary software and big iron hardware, startup costs plummeted. This lowered the barrier to entry, changed the startup funding game, and led to the emergence of the current Angel/Seed funding ecosystem. In addition, of course, to enabling a generation of webapps we all use everyday.

This same process is now unfolding in the Big Data space, with an open-source ecosystem centered around Hadoop displacing the expensive, proprietary solutions. Startups are creating more intelligent businesses and more intelligent products as a result. And perhaps even more importantly, this technological movement has the potential to blur the sharp line between traditional business and traditional web startups, dramatically expanding the playing field for innovation.

PROBLEM, MEET SOLUTION

Even a modestly successful startup has a user base comparable in population to nation-states. The resultant mass of user data creates problems and opportunities. Problems because understanding the value of every user and transaction becomes more complex. Opportunities because the collective intelligence of the population can be leveraged into better user experiences.

Until just a year or two ago, analyzing this scale of data required the same kind of enterprise solutions that LAMP was created to avoid. Multiyear, multimillion dollar deals with the likes of IBM, Oracle, and Teradata. Of course, almost no startup can afford that kind of expense. Furthermore, the closed-source technological pedigree of these solutions makes them incompatible with startup engineering knowledge and culture.

Enter Hadoop. Hadoop solves these data processing problems in a way that is both startup-compatible, and technologically superior. As an open-source project developed by and for engineers, it’s very practical and squarely in the mainstream of startup engineering practice. And its architecture of map-reducing across of a cluster of commodity nodes is more flexible and cost effective than traditional data warehouses.

Given the pent-up demand, it’s no surprise then that Hadoop is blowing up. To see how an open-source project is doing, the first thing you do is look at the developer mailing list traffic. If you gather all the Hadoop-related mailing lists and plot the number of messages, you get the classic hockey stick growth curve:

In today’s world, it’s not much of a stretch to say that the future of technology is shaped by developer adoption. As more engineers and more startups adopt Hadoop, its capabilities are becoming a default assumption when designing the products and businesses of the future.

HADOOP IN TODAY’S STARTUPS

At the high-level, there are 3 areas where Hadoop is finding application in today’s startups: 1) Analysis of customer behavior, 2) Powering new user-facing features, and 3) Enabling entire new lines of business that were previously out of reach.

Eventbrite is an example where Hadoop is powering new user-facing features. The rapidly-growing events service lets organizers manage and promote their events, and helps users find relevant events to attend. To help grow the company faster, their data services team is using Hadoop to feed intelligence in, under the hood, into various parts of the product. For example, a recommendation system helps users find relevant events, and an automated classification system helps reduce user friction for creating new events.

At Weebly, we’ve deployed Hadoop to get measures of customer value — which users are going to bring in the most revenue, and how can we most effectively target them? This is a fairly complex calculation, involving many factors and data sources. With Hadoop, we can say “Let’s just compute it.”

A final category of usage is startups built from the ground up on Hadoop. Backtype, a marketing intelligence platform, is perhaps the archetype of the new species of startup made possible by Hadoop. The team of three engineers run its operation, consisting of over 25 terabytes of data and 60 servers for data processing, serving the dashboard UI, and providing data APIs to other companies. The industry incumbents have a huge investment in teetering older architectures, with little chance of matching Backtype’s iteration cycle.

HADOOP: A MOVEMENT, NOT JUST A TECHNOLOGY

Despite Hadoop’s utility, the predictable backlash has claimed it is overhyped, pointing to shortcomings like ease of use, ability to process realtime data, limitations of map-reduce for social graph data, etc. But this is like criticizing LAMP for PHP’s ugliness before Ruby on Rails took the stage, or MySQL’s scalability issues before Memcached sidestepped them.

The key to understanding Hadoop’s significance is that it’s not just a specific piece of technology, but a movement of developers trying to collectively solve the Big Data problems of their organizations. As the Hadoop growth curves illustrate, the technological foundation for a data-oriented open-source ecosystem has been laid, and a family of related technology is starting to emerge. Exactly in the same way Rails, Memcached and arguably even the Cloud emerged from the LAMP movement.

Already, HBase is rapidly gaining credibility as a realtime processing system, while efforts like Spark point to generalized architectures that can handle tasks like network analysis. And on the usability front, Cloudera has done much to simplify installation and administration, though more opportunities remain.

What is most remarkable is how the startup world is collectively creating this ecosystem: Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and a whole slew of earlier-stage companies are very actively contributing to the tool chain. This illustrates a new thesis or collective wisdom emerging from the Valley: If a technology is not your core value-add, it should be open-sourced because then others can improve it, and potential future employees can learn it. This rising tide has lifted all boats, and is just getting started.

KEYS TO THE ENTERPRISE KINGDOM

There is an iron curtain in today’s tech world, separating startupland from the enterprise. Two technological ecosystems, engineering practices, and ultimately assumptions about what kinds of businesses are possible. But with Hadoop, startups are now creating substantial innovations on what is essentially business data, creating a common platform highly relevant to both worlds.

Hadoop is the ultimate trojan horse in enterprise IT. It strikes at the heart of business — the data — in a way that adds value immediately, while setting the stage for viral growth in the future, connecting the two ecosystems and the technological and cultural levels. The potential end result: a greatly expanded playing field for future startups, and cheaper, more flexible, and more relevant
solutions for the enterprise.

From the beginnings of computing, enterprise IT has ultimately been about the data. But the Kafka-esque proliferation of proprietary solutions and solutions to the solutions has made innovating on business data nearly impossible. You might have a better mousetrap, but you’re toast if it doesn’t “integrate”.

So who is going to integrate Hadoop in the enterprise? Amazingly, it’s the vendors themselves. Partially because of the hype, and partially because of real advantages in areas like unstructured data processing, the vendors are falling over themselves getting Hadoop-branded solutions to market. See for example EMC’s line of Hadoop data appliances, and IBM’s Hadoopified Big Insights platform. A Hadoop arm’s race appears to be well underway.

And now the key point: Hadoop adoption in the enterprise provides a hook for the rest of the open-source ecosystem, from data analysis, to web and mobile technologies, to the engineering talent pool. With a standardized Hadoop integration point, one can just download the Yahoo Latent Dirichlet Allocation code from Github and start datamining customer support emails. Or customize the Hive frontend for business analysts. Or use HBase to coordinate realtime dataflow between divisions. Or connect the data backend to any number of web or mobile applications. This massive catalog of open source software and hugely talented pool of developers can be “integrated with” via Hadoop.

In short, Hadoop has the potential to make the enterprise compatible with the entire rest of the open-source and startup world, by starting with the data and then extending out to the rest of the family tree, from the web, to the cloud, to mobile, to best practices for software engineering management. For once you can systematically manipulate the data, you have the keys to the kingdom.

After logging into your Weebly account as usual, you’ll notice that there’s a new button that says ‘Add editors’. Hit it, and you’ll see a dialog box prompting you to enter the email addresses of the people you’d like to associate with your account, and three different roles they can be blessed with: Administrator (full access to edit your site), Author (grant access on a per-page basis), and Dashboard-only, which lets them view your site statistics and moderate comments. You can also choose to let authors edit pages in a draft mode that requires an admin to later push their changes live.

Cofounders David Rusenko and Dan Veltri say that this has been the service’s top-requested feature for a long time, and it’s not hard to guess why. With the new system you’ll be able to delegate tasks to coworkers, and, if you have a blog on Weebly, you can have multiple authors.

Rusenko says that, between all of the pages it hosts, the Weebly network is now the 95th top-ranked site according to Quantcast with 40M unique visitors per month.

In conjunction with today’s launch, Weebly is also introducing a revamped homepage and a tweaked tagline. CEO David Rusenko explains that when the site launched, it was all about offering a super-easy way to build relatively straightforward webpages. But over the years, as it’s added photo editing, form building, and other features, the platform has gotten pretty robust. So now they’re adopting the tagline “Free. Powerful. Professional.” with a new layout to match.

Seeing Interactive, which raised $1 million in June, used to direct businesses to Weebly when they needed to build websites to supplement Seeing Interactive’s SEO-optimized Marketplace directory pages. Seeing Interactive has now integrated Weebly into its backend and as of January 1st will allow its newspaper clients to offer advertisers the ability to manage their website and directory listings from the same dashboard. Newspapers can now sell the two services as a package, or separately.

“Many of our end users–newspaper’s clients–have never used the internet past e-mail and Weebly makes it easy for them to have a premium website. We’re thrilled to be able to integrate with Weebly,” says CEO Lloyd Armbrust.

Seeing Interactive has already done a test launch with several newspapers including the Norfolk Daily News, The Daily American in Somerset, (the confusingly named) York News Times and Belo Corp’s The Press-Enterprise. You can see an example of a Weebly/Seeing Interactive site here and the power of the SI 81-point SEO audit and social media integration here.

According to Armbrust, the new Weebly white-label website integration has made The Press Enterprise an extra $60,000 in the first three weeks of trial and Armbrust projects revenue of over $500,000 for the entire year. Here’s to saving newspapers, one search ranking at a time.

No, this isn’t anywhere near the first web-based image editor (also see services like Aviary and Google-owned Picnik). But it is tightly integrated into the Weebly experience — instead of kicking you into another window when you go to edit an image, ImagePerfect slides nicely into view, allowing you to modify your image in context with the rest of the page.

Rusenko says that the company looked at other web-based image editors, but they couldn’t find one that would tie as seamlessly into their site as they wanted — so they built their own. ImagePerfect doesn’t have as many features as standalone image editors, but it has more than enough tools for what the typical user will need: opacity, gradients, a variety of text and image options, layers, and other effects. You can import images from Flickr, your desktop, or a URL. The tool is built in Flash, but the images you create appear as standard JPGs on your Weebly site.

At this point ImagePerfect can only be used to edit header images, but Rusenko says that Weebly plans to let users utilize it for other purposes in the near future. Likewise, the service also intends to offer some header templates (which users can customize with ImagePerfect). And you’ll soon be to make the image frames rotate through a series of photos.

In other Weebly news, Rusenko says that the company has well over 4 million registered users, and 22.5 million monthly uniques globally from visitors coming to sites on the Weebly network. He also says that both the Weebly for Education and its deal with web hosting provider Endurance are going well.

When it comes to local advertising, everybody wants to replace the Yellow Pages, which makes money hand-over-fist from local merchants across the country. Seeing Interactive, A Y Combinator startup which launched last March, just raised a seed round of about $1 million from some high-profile investors to help local newspapers take more of those local advertising dollars away from the phone directories. The investors include Baseline Ventures, Lerer Ventures, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit, Delicious founder Joshua Schachter, and Alex Moore (an early employee at Palantir).

In small towns across the country where many people still haven’t heard of Yelp, the Yellow Pages is the only game in town for local business advertising. Seeing Interactive goes to the local papers and gives them a white-label service for selling online ads and services to local businesses. They are already selling these businesses print ads for $200 or so. Now for an extra $5 or so, they can turn those exact same print ads into online ads. They can also get listed in an online SEO-optimized directory of local businesses, and even get their own simple Website (via Weebly). In other words, Seeing interactive creates an online presence for local businesses and leverages the existing salesforce of local newspapers to sell those ads.

Each directory is different and tied to the newspaper. For instance, here is a local business directory created by the Herald-Mail in Hagerstown, MD. Each directory page has a map, address, phone number, description, and business hours. People can leave reviews using Facebook Connect. Seeing Interactive is currently working with 87 newspapers. iPhone and Android local directory apps are in development. It could also make deals down the line with local online-only news sites.

Lerer Ventures, Baseline (Steve Anderson), Paul Buchheit, Joshua Schachter, and Alex Moore (Angel, Early Palantir employee).

This is a pretty big deal for Weebly. Up until now, users have had around 80 themes to choose from, which pales in comparison to the number of themes available for some other site building platforms, like WordPress. You’ve always been free to use your own custom CSS styling, but many of the site’s users are using Weebly specifically because they don’t want to have to deal with that sort of thing. Now they’ll have a lot more variety to choose from, with no mucking around in CSS required.

At launch, Weebly’s theme gallery is still only going to consist of the 80 themes that already exist, since it’s just opening to submissions for the first time today. But CEO David Rusenko expects that to change quickly, in part spurred by the design competition the site is holding. He also believes that designers will be compelled to create themes for the site because of the large audience it reaches — Weebly now has 3.5 million site building users, who see 80 million page views per month from 17 million unique visitors. And he says that traffic is growing 20% month over month. It’s a bit surprising that it took this long for the site to roll out the feature (Weebly launched back in 2007), but Rusenko says that they “wanted to get it right”. Fair enough.

Users will be able to access the themes both through the site’s editor (which has been revamped a bit to accommodate the new gallery) and from this page, which you can view even if you aren’t a Weebly member. Themes won’t include attribution in their footers, but the gallery itself will allow designers to build up their own profiles, allowing users to see all of the themes they’ve submitted. At launch, all themes will be free, but Rusenko says that the site plans to begin allowing designers to sell premium themes in the future.

The design competition has a submission deadline of April 30, is open in any country where such contests are valid, and is being judged by Michael Cronan, Scott Thomas, Jason Putorti, Andrew Wilkinson, Dustin Curtis, and Rob Martin.

Weebly has provided Endurance with a dedicated set of servers that will be running the service. By keeping the Weebly machines on site, Endurance will be able to keep access speeds high to its customers, and can better control reliability and data storage. But while Weebly won’t be directly in control of the servers, they’ll still be pushing regular updates as Weebly proper gets updated.

Weebly CEO David Rusenko says he can’t disclose details of the deal, but that Weebly will make money through a revenue sharing agreement. Endurance customers will be offered Weebly’s premium features, with pricing tiers set by Endurance. Customers will pay through their Endurance accounts, and Weebly will take a portion of the proceeds. The tool itself will look identical to Weebly.com, but will be accessed through an option in the hosting provider’s control panel.

This is a win for both Weebly and Endurance users. Anyone who has recently used a web hosting provider knows that the page building options almost always leave a lot to be desired — sure, you may be able to install WordPress using an automated script, but for building a custom website your options are extremely limited. These integrataed tools typically leave you with something that looks like it was designed in 1999. Weebly is a big step up from these outdated tools, allowing users to build custom sites that can include everything from blogs and rich media to Ecommerce.

Rusenko says Weebly is in talks with other hosting providers to launch similar integrations, so it’s likely we’ll be hearing related news in the near future. He also notes that Weebly recently passed 3 million users.

The new product is similar to the normal Weebly editor, but with a few key differences. For one, Weebly has stripped out all of its monetization and retail features that wouldn’t be applicable to students. And more importantly, the site is letting teachers manage the accounts of all of their students. Because schools obviously wouldn’t want some of this content to be avilable to the public, teachers can elect to keep their entire class’s accounts set to Private, which means only the student and their teacher can see it.

There are countless potential uses for this, but the obvious ones are for personal blogs and for reports (you can see an example of what a Weebly report might look like here). Teachers can also create their own publicly available class websites, allowing students to easily upload assignments and giving parents a place to look to see what their children are up to at school.

At this point most of these features are pretty basic, but I see quite a bit of potential here. Imagine letting teachers build out individual student profile pages, where students would be greeted with photos, their recent grades, and maybe a personal note from their teacher (I imagine that would be more popular with younger kids). There are obviously some education products already out there, like Blackboard, but most of these are pretty spartan and data driven — Weebly would give teachers a new degree of customization and it’s more user friendly to boot. That said, schools are notoriously political, so Weebly may have some trouble getting its foot in the door.

Weebly is offering the product for free for teachers with up to 40 students, and then $1 per additional student account, purchased in packs of 10. Teachers can also sign up for Weebly Pro for $40/year, and all of the pro features extend to their students. There’s also a discount for teachers who refer each other.

As part of today’s news, Weebly has also announced that it has partnered with National History Day, a program held in schools across the country where over 500,000 students create a research project describing or reenacting a historical event. One option students have is to build a web site for their project, and this year Weebly will be the only officially sanctioned way to do that.

Weebly, a popular WYSIWYG webpage maker, is launching a new feature today that will allow users to quickly make fully customized web stores using the Weebly interface they’re already familiar with.

Using the new feature is simple. Weebly has added a handful of new ‘revenue’ elements to its main menubar, which allows you to drag-and-drop items onto your page. Simply drag one of the four available ‘Product’ elements onto your page, and you’ll be presented with a small box where you can describe your product, add a photo, and set a price (you can easily create a new item in less than a minute). After creating a product once, you can add it to your other pages without having to recreate it.

The store supports both PayPal and Google Checkout accounts, and allows users to add items to a virtual shopping cart as they browse (you don’t have to buy one item at a time). And aside from any fees you might have from PayPal or Google, the Weebly storefront is totally free – the company isn’t taking a cut of any of your sales. To make money, Weebly plans to offer ‘pro’ features for power users at a premium in the future (the site also generates revenue through its pro accounts and domain sales).

There are already quite a few services online that allow you to generate your own virtual marketplace, but Weebly cofounder David Rusenko says that most of these do a poor job allowing you to customize the look and feel of your store, which often leads to something generic. Because Weebly can already be used to build your own fully customized webpage, adding the ability to sell items seemed like a natural extension to the product (especially since many users were already trying to sell items from their Weebly pages on their own).

At this point my only complaint about the Weebly store is that it doesn’t yet offer templates, though Rusenko says they’re on the way. This means that whenever you create a page for an item, you’re going to have to re-drag all of the links to your other items back to the bottom of the page. This may allow for a wide degree of flexibility, but I think it will also lead to inconsistency on some stores, as some designers forget to add links to their other products (or they get lazy). Rusenko ackowledges that this could get frustrating, but says that the Weebly storefront is really meant for people with small inventories, so this shouldnt be as much of a hassle as it would be for major retailers.

Beyond the new storefront functionality, Weebly is doing quite well. The site has almost 2 million registered sites (and is growing steadily, see graph below).

Weebly, the WYSIWYG website designer, has introduced integration with Google’s AdSense API that will allow its users to easily monetize their pages. The site is also introducing new ‘Pro’ accounts, which will give paying members access to increased privacy and other features.

After selecting a desired ad size, users can place their AdSense widget by simply dragging onto their page in the Weebly editor. From there they can modify its appearance without having to muck with CSS or HTML. The site has also eliminated a few steps in the AdSense application process, but it hasn’t been able to do away with it entirely (users will still eventually have to enter their contact and required financial information, but Weebly won’t make you do it immediately). Users will split revenues from their site 50/50 with Weebly.

Weebly’s new Pro accounts introduce new features like embedded audio, increase file size limits, and the ability to customize or remove the Weebly footer. A year costs around $60, while users who sign up for two years will get a discount.

Weebly’s AdSense integration is sure to be a hit with people looking to quickly monetize their sites with as little hassle as possible (though Weebly might have to educate some of them on what AdSense is). Some more tech-savvy users might balk at the prospect of having 50% of their revenues paid to their hosting site, but Weebly isn’t really made for this kind of user in the first place. The Y Combinator-funded site has seen explosive growth over the last few months, and has seen its usage double in size since February, from 300,000 to over 600,000 users (you can see a graph below).

There are a number of other players in the WSIWYG page creation space, including Jimdo and Synthasite. For those that aren’t using page creation software, Triggit allows users to embed AdSense ads into any site using a line of JavaScript.

They aren’t new, and we’ve covered them before. The reason we left them out is that we’ve had some difficulty in categorizing them.

In many ways Sampa is a blog platform with a focus on privacy features, like Vox. But we’ve also compared them to easy site creation tools like Weebly, Synthasite and Jimdo.

But recently they’ve added new features to focus on family story telling and milestones. There is now a Geni-like family tree feature, and trusted visitors can upload photos directly as well.

And they’ve also added a MyBlogLog-type feature that shows visitors to the site – both their name and an avatar. Sampa sites have areas that are private by default, so only people you invite in see the site (they see it via an invitation URL, and subsequent visits are authorized via a cookie.

The hodge-podge of features results in a really compelling hang-out for families to tell their stories, celebrate weddings and births, and share photos and family tree information. The site is also free, although eventually users will be able to pay to have advertisements removed.

It’s a good site, and one of many startups that are doing a lot on very little capital – the company has raised just $310,000.

Online website designer Weebly has done better and provided a lot of the functionality MySpace should already have. They’ve spent the last several months not only creating their own MySpace profile editor but also an integrated widget platform to boot. It’s all hosted under a new site called SnapLayout.

The SnapLayout editor is pretty straight forward. You log in with your MySpace credentials, and can use a WYSIWYG editor to make drag-and-drop changes to all the major features of your profile. You can select a pre-made template or start customizing changes on your own. The editor lets you move around boxes, use Flickr photos for a backdrop, adjust text size and style, or even change the entire color pallet of your profile (i.e. summer and winter themes). It can also add a slide show of all your uploaded photos to the header of your profile. I’ll defer the details to Justine Ezarik and surprise guest MC Hammer in their demo video below.

The more significant piece, however, is the widget platform that lets users select and add widgets to their profile. All you need to do is click on one of the widgets and drag it to where you want it on your profile. Their first example is a free gift widget that lets you and your friends give virtual gifts to each other. When you give a gift to a friend, you just need to log in to MySpace to verify your true identity. There’s a viral aspect to the widget because users that want to show their gifts will have to have a SnapLayout profile as well. They will be adding a select number of widgets in the coming weeks and eventually opening the system.

The danger is, of course, is that MySpace releases their own system in the coming months. But their snail’s pace of innovation doesn’t make that likely. Lets just hope that MySpace doesn’t find the service in violation of their terms of service and shuts down yet another third party application that adds functionality to the site.

http://www.viddler.com/player/82f20d0f/

Weebly’s core product is an AJAX website editor that creates personal pages using template skins and drag-n-drop website content widgets, similar to the way you control layout on any of the various personal start pages. Previously users could only create static pages composed of content widgets for things like text, images, video, and some widgets like Google maps or adsense. The new blogging platform and WYSIWYG editor lets users add dynamic content to their pages.

Blogs can be added like any other Weebly page to the navigation bar of your Weebly site, except with some specialized widgets. The blog supports the basic blog features, such as posting, commenting, categories, and archiving. Webjam, which raised $2 million in March, has a similar AJAX blog editor for their user’s personal pages. However, unlike Webjam, Weebly allows editing the page and posting on the actual page in a truly WYSIWYG interface. Also, each post can contain any of the Weebly widgets, just like the regular pages. Like other platforms, posts can be drafted, published, and tagged.

The upgrade also features some new widgets, like the Twitter badge, although you can embed any widget by placing the code into a standard HTML Weebly widget. Weebly’s creators plan on rolling out more wrappers for popular web widgets and eventually opening the platform to the community. Unfortunately since it is built on their own platform Weebly cannot take advantage of pre-existing plugins from other popular blogging engines such as WordPress.

True WYSIWYG editors are a welcome addition to blogging, which has been reducing friction to publishing on the web from Geocities all the way through Blogger.

Weebly is a Y Combinator company.

Y Combinator funds startups twice per year, in batches. Funded startups that have previously launched include Reddit, Kiko, Loopt, ClickFacts, TextPayMe, Snipshot, Inkling, Flagr, Wufoo, YouOS, PollGround, LikeBetter, Thinkature, JamGlue, Shoutfit, Scribd, Weebly, Buxfer, and Octopart. Today, Y Combinator invited in TechCrunch and a select group of investors and industry experts to view the current crop of companies, just getting ready to launch. Michael Arrington and I attended the sessions, and our notes on the new companies are below.

Here’s a rundown of who presented, minus a few who are still in stealth mode:

Zenter
Zenter is an web based presentation app that promises to really take advantage of being online. Users will have the regular functionality of PowerPoint, but with the ability to directly add content from the web (Google Images). Each public slide show will also be put into a public library, for other users to remix or just drop into their show.

Weebly
Weebly is an AJAX website creator that recently joined Y Combinator. Weebly’s drag-n-drop interface lets you quickly put together a personal website any way you like. For the demonstration they recreated the Benchmark Capital website. They recently had a great upgrade to their site which included some slick new themes and layouts possibilities. Our previous coverage of Weebly is here and here.

Virtualmin
Virtualmin is taking on the lack of innovation in the server admin programs, like Plesk, by making a more accessable version for pages managed by the non-technical crowd. The program will feature simple installs of popular programs like content management systems that often cost extra on other providers. It will also let you administer your website from your desktop and mobile device.

Octopart
Vertical search engine Octopart, which launched not too long ago, focuses on putting an end the inadequate search engines used by electronics parts manufacturers. Octopart lets you search, compare prices, and view specifications for parts on Allied Electronics, Digi-Key, Mouser, and Newark InOne. They have a deal with how-to hobbyist’s site, Instructables, to make buying parts for your project a snap. They’ve also got more parts supplies calling to get their data up on the site.

Tsumobi
Mobile applications have so far been nightmares to implement. It’s often hard to gain adoption due to complicated installs and near impossible to get users to upgrade their version once the product has shipped. Tsumobi hopes to solve this problem by creating their own language. The new language will sit on top of J2ME and process applications downloaded (via URL) for Tsumobi enabled sites. This means that developers will be able to change Tsumobi applications on the fly and have Tsumobi enabled phones automatically get the updates just by visiting a link.

Whitenoise Networks
Whitenoise is like a social network for the music industry. It comes with specially made tools for bands, agents, publicists, and venues to manage each part of their business. Bands will be able to manage their cross country tours by map, using a venue search to find gigs in any town they’re passing through. Venues will get access to a full list of artists in their area along with samples and ways to reach their agent to book a show.

Buxfer
Buxfer is Quicken for 20 somethings. As we covered before, it solves a problem similar to Billmonk, but with more advanced features. Buxfer tackles the unique needs of young people trying to find out where all their money evaporates to and reign in their expenses. To date, they’ve been tracking $8.4 million in over 30,000 transactions.

Writewith.com
Writewith is a collaborative writing web app, enabling you to easily flow through the steps of writing, editing, and publishing a document with a group. A document is started by uploading an existing document (.doc, .txt, .rdf) or just typing away. After the initial draft is completed, you can invite other editors by email and assign them tasks. Writewith has full version control and even lets you post comments to each other, making it possible to edit together in real time. Currently Writewith is in beta testing with 15 college newspapers including Stanford and two of Canada’s largest college papers (which even includes a national newswire).

Socialmoth
Socialmoth is a community to post your thoughts anonymously. You can view postings (mostly gossip and secrets) from the whole community as well as get updates for when someone in your group of friends makes a post. The vast majority of their members appear to be women, with over 600 posts being made per day. These guys will also be taking a new spin on their idea, launching Disenchat.com, a place to post anonymously about your workplace. The system will verify your organization by email address (like Facebook) and let you start riffing. Outsiders will be able to see the existence of the forum and volume of posting, but not the specific comments.

View3
View3 plans on changing the way 3D models are made. Like Photosynth, View3 will let you walk into and explore 3D images of photos, but will let you use as little as one photo to get started. The project has been started by a group of 3 Stanford grad students and currently holds 2 patents in the area.

Auctomatic
eBay power users make an average of 400 listings per day. With 5 pages to fill to make a listing, that’s 2000 page views and a lot of clicking. Auctomatic plans to make this a whole lot simpler first by cutting it down to a single page and then adding more management features on top. eBay sales management is a category currently dominated by Vendio and Marketworks, who together contribute about $1.8 billion dollars of goods to the auction giant. For their service, these providers often take a percentage of sales, as well as a monthly fee that can be as high as $400. Auctomatic plans to have more a more flexible program and pricing. They have already raised $400K in angel financing apart from Y Combinator.

Snipshot
Snipshot is a photo editor that lets you start editing any photo with one click of a bookmarklet. You can use Snipshot to crop, resize, adjust colors, an automatically enhance you photos within your browser and then save it back to the web. There are a couple other photo editors in this category and Photoshop plans to get in as well.

This is a company that we initially passed on writing about in the late summer due to bugs, but we took another look in November and came away impressed. As VentureBeat mentions, they integrate better with Google Maps than Google itself does with its own web site creator.

Everything seems to be on track with Weebly except that annoying business model. With all of the competition in this space, the price has been set firmly at zero. Trying to add advertising won’t fly with customers. Perhaps they can make money on hosting sites. Or just keep the burn rate low and flip it before the money runs out.

Weebly has made it as simple as possible to try their product. Just pick a username and password, no email required for testing.

We’ve taken another look over the last few days, and Weebly has come a long way in those two months.

Weebly allows users to create simple multipage websites using a drag and drop Ajax interface, with just a few clicks. Users can then save those websites to a Weebly server or download them for use elsewhere (if you download the site, the Weebly header bar is removed). A RSS element can be included. In addition to standard text and image tools and RSS support, Weebly supports Javascript-based elements like Google Maps, the Flickr Badge, etc.

Some recent commenters in blog posts (see comments here for example) have complained that the site is slow, although in our testing it responded extremely well. This may be an issue with traffic load to the Weebly site. We’ll see how it performs in the coming days with periodic testing.

Weebly is also making good use of video to show people what it’s all about. This is something we continue to suggest to new companies, and recently profiled Amberjack helps startups do this. We’ve included a demo video for Weebly below (if anyone knows what porn movie they stole the music from, please let me know). There are also a number of videos available to help users with certain aspects of the service.

Note: Weebly is open for registrations but they are limiting the total number of new users. If you can’t sign up, be patient and try again in a few days.