Widgetbox wants to make widgets more productive

I think of widgets as marketing tools, but build-your-own-widget company Widgetbox says they can make you more productive, too. To that end, the San Francisco startup is making its widgets compatible with Confluence, a business wiki product from a company called Atlassian.

Now, I haven’t really heard of or seen Confluence in action, but it sounds like a basic project-management/collaboration environment. The concept of bringing widgets into that area sounds intriguing. (Widget-maker Sprout has done a lot of work to make widgets richer and more interactive — but again, as marketing tools.) Any of the 125,000 widgets built on Widgetbox can now be added to a company’s Confluence page; one obvious example of how they might be used in this context is a clock that counts down towards a project deadline.

Perhaps most promisingly, Widgetbox allows companies to build their own custom, branded widgets called Blidgets from any feed-based content. So the VentureBeat team could build and install a Blidget to help track the most relevant, up-to-date tech news within our Confluence workspace (if we had one).

Widgetbox says this is its first partnership with a business software company, although it has already made its widgets available in consumer products like website builder SynthaSite. In the current advertising environment, it’s probably smart to branch out into productivity.

Widgetbox raised an $8 million second round last year. Competitors include Gigya and Clearspring.

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