Widgetbox, a create-your-own-widget company, gets more funding
Widgetbox is another create-your-own widget company, 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. Northgate Capital has led a $8 million Series B round investment in the company, joined by Sequoia Capital and Hummer Winblad. Widgetbox claims to have more than 25 million monthly unique viewers of its widgets around the web, even though third-party web analytics firms like Comscore count it for less (for more on that 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 (see widget left), you can also create simple games.
The simplest form of a Widgetbox widget is Widgetbox is also targeting network platforms offered by Facebook and now Bebo. The San Francisco company offers an easy way to create your own application for these sites — applications that access users’ social data, like a list of friends on Bebo, to easily invite to use the application too. Bebo’s application, which just launched, 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 said it will use the funding to grow its operations, develop its new advertising product, where advertisers can create their own widgets, and other monetization efforts.
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About the Author, Eric Eldon
Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.
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