Widgetbox, a pretty big create-your-own-widget company, gets more funding
Widgetbox is another create-your-own widget company doing well for itself, although it’s often overshadowed by larger competitors like Clearspring. Widgetbox lets you create and embed a snippet of software code on other web pages, like this game widget called BurgerTime.
The San Francisco company claims strong growth on social network Bebo, and says it is being undercounted by third-party web analytics services like Comscore. This might be a big deal: Widgets are of increasing interest to advertisers and marketers, as a way to spread branding on sites around the web.
Investors see an opportunity, at least, despite the many other widget-making companies competing with Widgetbox. Sequoia Capital and here).
The simplest form of a Widgetbox widget is a way to publish the RSS feed from your web site within a Widgetbox widget. As BurgerTime shows, you can also create simple games. It is also taking advantage of social network platforms offered by Facebook and now Bebo. The San Francisco-based company offers an easy way to create your own application for these sites, that use the developer platforms to access users’ social data, like a list of friends on Bebo that you can easily invite to use your application. Bebo’s application, which just launched, now has around 600 of its nearly 1000 applications created by developers using Widgetbox.
Widgetbox also lets a web user select from more than 34,000 widgets in its gallery, created by more than 20,000 developers (of varying abilities). These widgets reach more than 210,000 sites across the web and are viewed 23 million times, according to the company.
The company will use the funding to grow its operations, develop its new advertising product, where advertisers can create their own widgets, and other monetization efforts.
Source: VentureBeat