“Electronic devices large and small are powered by the same type of intelligence, the microprocessor,” IBM argued.

While it’s true, you know those dastardly IBM lawyers are going to pick apart every single word of his contract.TechCrunch
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.

Last week the NY Video 2.0 meetup was held. Unfortunately I was unable to make it but Andy Robson from 3rdRail Inc captured all of the presentations and the video is below. The presenting companies included: Animoto, Brightcove, Innovid, Gigya and Ooyala.

CN Sponsor: CloudContacts - make your business cards work for you!
Other CenterNetworks Coverage: iminlikewithyou, FriendFeed, Web Jobs

Company

Widgadget

20-Word Description

Widgadget is the community portal for widget creation and distribution. It wishes to popularize widgets for users, bloggers and brands.

CEO’s Pitch

Widgadget is designed to help users, bloggers, brands and agencies spread their content exponentially, to get more websites/blogs traffic and to improve brand loyalty. It enables all users to see the best widgets and to create their own in three steps:

The registered user enters their feeds, then, he or she designs the widgets with sizes, colors, images, logo, titles, etc., and finally, adds information that enables the widget to get well-indexed in the gallery (titles, description, tags, etc.). Once created, the widget can be spread throughout social networks, blogs or desktops. The statistics allow every user to track word of mouth effect.

Mashable’s Take

Widgadget lets you create and distribute customizable widgets for whatever you want to promote, such as your website, blog, company, product, service, etc. Widgets can be created in Flash or Java, depending on where you want to use them. You can also embed your widgets on many different platforms, such as social networking profiles, blogging platforms (Blogger, Wordpress, etc.), websites and start pages such as Netvibes, iGoogle, Pageflakes, etc.

There are several competitors in this viral marketing widget space such as Gydget, Gigya, and Clearspring, which have all carved their own niches. For example, Gydget focuses mostly on the music industry, so most of their widgets promote musicians. All of these platforms provide easy to design widget tools and also a distribution channel with ways to monetize and analyze your viral marketing campaigns.

Widgadget offers all of the same core features without any major new features or niches, so it’s difficult to separate them from the pack. One of the things they do well is their customization for each member depending on what type content is being created and distributed. For example, their service is different for members creating widgets for personal use, business, blogs, or advertising for clients. Also, while creating widgets, the service’s performance seemed to be slightly better than the experiences I’ve had on some services such as Gydget for example.

Being able to track each widget and analyze the traffic and popularity of each creation could prove useful for future campaigns. In addition, being able to view all of the different widgets that you’ve created on one screen is very helpful as well. However, I was not thrilled with the inability to add any audio or video content to widgets, which is a feature many of their competitors have. This is significant because some studies have proven that some of the most successful viral marketing campaigns usually (NOT always) include some form of audio or video content. Being able to embed audio content like a song snippet, narration clip or video from YouTube has become a standard option these days.

Here’s a sample widget created on Widgadget in minutes for Mashable.

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Sponsored by Sun Startup Essentials

Earlier today we noted the arrival of The Karaoke Channel Online in the sing-along ventures market. Interesting enough, MySpace Karaoke too is pushing its name out into the news cloud to mark the debut of video support as well as a redesign, a new recommendation engine, and more options for users to share media.

Amy Walgenbach, MySpace’s manager of communications, says that the company believes online karaoke is analogous to music as blogging is to writing. Which can make for fairly deep or shallow analysis, depending on one’s perspective of that particular juxtaposition. But whatever the case, the features now being touted by the network, along with the statistics being flashed for the public - 4 million MySpace Karaoke users with over 500,000 recordings - are certainly ones that many karaoke fans will consider crucial to the art of jukebox heroism.

Design-wise, the new MySpace Karaoke is none too shabby. It’s uniquely MySpace-like, for sure (be that a pro or con, you decide), but give it a generous glance here and there, and chances are you’ll find it to be laid out quite well. Options are clearly represented, and jumping from place to place is easy. To be perfectly honest, I wish the well-publicized MySpace Music were as intelligently drawn as the network’s Karaoke site is. It’s that good.

Will video drive MySpace Karaoke’s usage numbers to much grander heights? I suspect not. The YouTube generation surely enjoys the limelight to significant degree, but the attraction of watching a user’s emulation of Elvis or The Beatles isn’t likely to pull a consistently big crowd. Unless of course there are to be phenomena among the mix, such as a LonelyGirl15 of harmonic allure. And since I wouldn’t put it past anyone to “break out” from the masses in such an unpredictable way, let’s just say that the new MySpace Karaoke is here and is open for goods and bads to strut their stuff. Let your voices be heard, if you dare.

Note: MySpace Karaoke recording can be heard and viewed on Windows- and Mac-based computers, but recording is only possible with Microsoft’s operating systems.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Will You Use MySpace Karaoke?SingShot’s YouTube for Karaoke - Now Free!Votigo Challenges Bix in Video ContestsBreaking: SingShot Acquired By Electronic ArtsThe Karaoke Channel Goes Online (Invites)eSnips Launches MicroPortalsYouTube Underground Contest

Source:Mashable!

Widget platform Clearspring turned some heads last month when it said that it would have reach equivalent to the “7th largest web property” following its acquisition of AddThis, a provider of widgets that enable easy social bookmarking from blogs and Web pages. Today, new data from comScore shows that while Clearspring’s reach is indeed huge, another player in the space – Gigya – is actually reaching a few million more eyeballs every month worldwide.

According to data from August 2008, Gigya reached 174 million unique widget viewers worldwide for the month, compared to 160 million for Clearspring. Slide sits in 3rd with 154 million viewers, with other competitors running significantly behind the top three (however, it should be noted that RockYou was not included in the report). In the US, Clearspring holds a slight lead over Gigya: 71.1 million viewers compared to 70.3 million, respectively. Those numbers might swing back into Clearspring’s favor soon though, since the AddThis acquisition is not yet included in the comScore report.

In any event, what’s responsible for the huge reach of the widget providers would largely seem to be the placement of widgets on social networking sites, where Gigya says that the average widget is viewed by 25 different people. While those numbers are big, the reach of widgets isn’t quite an apples-to-apples comparison with the page views racked up by leading Web properties like Google, Yahoo, and MSN because they aren’t nearly as easy to monetize yet.

However, Gigya (as well as other optimistic companies in the space I’ve spoke with recently) see this changing. The company cites recent Forrester research and says that “with 83 percent of people trusting a friend’s opinion of a product or service, widgets, and their ability to reach friend networks as user-endorsed content, represent an important marketing opportunity.“ Gigya launched its own ad network earlier this year to begin addressing this opportunity, while Clearspring and Widgetbox have their own offerings too.

On the other hand, a global slowdown in advertising could obviously put a major dent in these plans, especially if advertisers prove reluctant to try less proven formats like widgets. Additionally, it’s to-be-determined how users will respond to increasingly obtrusive ads being placed in their widgets – especially if the brands represented don’t necessarily mix with their personal tastes.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Feedjit Shows Arrivals & Departures of Your Site VisitorsStartMobile Launches a Widget to Sell Mobile ContentClipBlast’s Video Search Widget is Personalized TooFreewebs Holding a Contest to Find the Most Innovative Widget in the WorldGruvr’s Latest Widget Puts Your Band on the MapLemonade Launches Facebook App for Making MoneyEdgeio Offers A Paid Content Widget

Zocdoc, the health appointment scheduling startup that launched at TechCrunch 40, has announced that Marc Benioff and Jeff Bezos - two of Silicon Valley’s most prominent figures - have joined the $3 million Series A funding round it raised last month that was led by Khosla Ventures.

ZocDoc allows users to book their doctor appointments online, even for same-day appointments. The site is especially useful for urgent visits and procrastinators who may wait until the last minute for an eye exam or prescription refill. Doctors can also maximize the number of patients they see by using the system to help reschedule missed appointments or fill in last-second cancellations.Source:TechCrunch
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 […]

Remember Bebo’s open media platform initiative? In short, it means that Bebo users can include premium music and video content in their profiles. At launch, Bebo had a long list of media partners, including BBC, Yahoo, Last.fm, MTV Networks, and ESPN.

Now, the partnership with ESPN is actually visible to users, who can access ESPN’s short videos, including highlights from sport events and short clips from ESPN original programming, through Bebo’s open media platform. The simplest way to find it is to go to this address: www.bebo.com/ESPNVideoSC; unfortunately it all works only if you’re located in the US.

Specifically, this content includes “SportsCenter Right Now, a twice-daily capsule of top sports stories, highlights and breaking news; clips from ESPN programs such as Mike and Mike in the Morning, Pardon the Interruption and Around the Horn; and breaking news and game clips from major professional and college teams and sporting events.”

It’s all nice and dandy, but I always have the feeling that users are being given scraps instead of the real thing: full shows, entire sporting events. This deal certainly won’t hurt Bebo’s Open Media Platform, but from the user’s perspective, it’s really not all that big of a deal.

—Related Articles at Mashable - All That’s New on the Web:ScoreCenter. Worldwide Sports Scores All the Time.Bebo Open Media: Bebo Makes Its Platform MoveBebo Hires a Bank. Looking to Sell?Bebo Open Platform: 4 Million App Installs in One WeekESPN Online, Free for College and MilitaryBebo Opens Developer Platform with Support for Facebook ApplicationsBebo Adds RSS

Source:Mashable!

Gigya Socialize is a widget based connections service for your Web site. It turns any Web site into a social network just by installing the application. Gigya received a major infusion of funding earlier this year, and it seems they have been putting it to good use expanding the capabilities of their service.

Gigya Socialize has been said to be in direct competition with Google’s Friend Connect. That’s true, but it also goes up against MySpace Data Availability and Facebook Connect. Before this round of improvements to the service, it was fighting with one hand tied behind its back.

Now Gigya Socialize can come out swinging and let us know how it will stand up to the competition. It now calls to the API of both MySpace and Facebook. This means that not only can you add social sharing and social networking to your own Web site with the widget, you can integrate your friends lists from the two heavy hitters of the social networking sphere, MySpace and Facebook.

From Gigya regarding the new feature: “Users of sites that incorporate Gigya Socialize will be able to easily enjoy the social features of those sites in conjunction with their MySpace and Facebook friends, by explicitly approving the websites for third party access to their MySpace and Facebook friend lists.”

Being able to have more complete ways to share social graph data on your website, from more social networks, is a step in the right direction for distributed social data. Will Gigya take the place of my preferred OpenSocial? I’m not sure. A lot will depend on how the application affects load times for Web sites.

I like the idea of Gigya Socialize as a way to include your social networks in your site as a full experience. As with anything that involves a component where content is shared, I’m leery of ways it could be abused. In reading the Gigya Socialize EULA I found that while they do not specifically address the concerns of data ownership once data is socially shared by your network, they also don’t stake a claim on it, which is encouraging.

Gigya Socialize offers a few main components: Newsfeed, Invitations, Notifications and a Friend Selector. They also offer a generic Friend Graph API module that more advanced user can customize somewhat more to their needs. The most useful aspect aside from friend integration from multiple networks is the content sharing and being able to track friends.

Pulling in your friend data from MySpace and Facebook using the companies’ own API is a great step toward true social distribution. Gigya Socialize already worked within sites like Facebook as a type of application for sharing content, this is just the next logical step.

—Related Articles at Mashable - All That’s New on the Web:Gigya Launches Wildfire for Developing Facebook AppsGigya Offers Widget-Tracking NetworkGigya Gets $9.5M to Grow Widget AdsGigya Brings MySpace Layouts to EmailGigya Widget Ads Launch to Compete with GoogleMySpace Friend Updates Arrive. Is Anyone Still Using MySpace?Gigya Puts MySpace Layouts in Email, Gets $4M

comScore will release their latest Widget Metrix report later this morning. From the report, "A total of 615 million people, representing 65% of the worldwide internet users, viewed or engaged with a widget in June 2008." While this number seems high, I would have expected it to be even higher. Nearly every page has a widget on it across the Internet these days.

I’d wonder exactly what comScore defines as a widget. Must a widget need to be viewable by the user to be counted? Would script code used in analytics tracking be considered a widget? I still believe that widgets will replace most traditional online display banner advertising by the end of 2009. The benefits of widgetizing an ad far outweight the cost to implement.

Gigya leads the pack serving over 150 million widgets during the period. In the U.S., Gigya served over 55 million widgets, giving them a 29.2% market share. It’s interesting to look at the charts below and compare a widget distribution platform like Gigya with a widget provider like Slide. Gigya doesn’t produce their own widgets, they help widget creators with distribution, monetization and analytics. Slide creates and distributes their own widgets. It’s hard to do a direct comparison.

Here’s the worldwide Top 10 Widget Metrix chart:

Here’s the U.S. Widget Metrix Top 10 chart:

Good to see SplashCast on the list - haven’t heard much from them lately. Check out my thoughts on widget installation and ethics, 2008 widget predictions and all of our widget coverage.

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