VentureBeat

Youcalc is a Danish company that calls itself a “smart widget” company, because its widgets go beyond the brain-dead photo or gaming widgets you see on most social networking sites.

The company started by targeting its widgets to consumers. But it’s increasingly emphasizing business uses by turning the widgets into mini applications.

It lets you do things like create graphs and charts based on data you gather from around the Web and then insert this information in widgets that you can put on your Web site or social networking profile pages. Or if you’re a company, you can put the widgets in things like sales presentations.

Youcalc lets you interact with the data in powerful ways: For instance, it lets you manipulate the obtained data and apply calculation logic like pivots, which you can’t do in Excel. Youcalc says no other company does this, and that it owns a patent for this feature.

It’s one of the more inspiring companies here at the Berlin Web 2.0 conference, which concludes today.

It has two sets of users. First, advanced users can use Youcalc to pull data from any API (including XML, REST, SOAP, JSON, CSV, Excel, and Google Spreadsheet), and they can do it real time, as well as mash the data from various sources.

Once the widgets are made, those users can post them to their blog or other page such as iGoogle, or profile page on Facebook. More casual users — those who have no tech chops — can select already created widgets from a widget gallery at the company’s website.

Here’s why it can be useful: Sales or marketing people can create visualizations of their leads in Salesforce, or cases Highrise. Users interested in politics can do things like illustrate how much the U.S. presidential candidates are relying on weak or strong electoral-vote states, and how this has developed over time (some have been embedded on the site of the Bay Area TV station Kron4). The possibilities are endless — see the company’s archive here. Jens Sorensen, the company’s VP of product strategy and marketing, also has a blog with more examples.

In building your widget, you can add custom flash charts from a large chart library, using dropdown boxes, input boxes and submit buttons to add interactivity.

The company’s founders say they’ve been working on this for four years and have already raised $5 million They may be looking for more cash in the second quarter of 2009. The company says it wants 22,000 users by 2009. The service is free for consumers, but business users will pay $9.95 per user per month for building and running analytics apps on software-as-a-service (SaaS) business applications.

The company is coming to Silicon Valley early next month and will be launching its marketing campaign for enterprise usage of the widgets.

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