Widgetbox wants to make widgets more productive

February 23, 2009 | Anthony Ha | Comments |

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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About the Author, Anthony Ha

Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.

  • Jordan Dea-Mattson
    If you haven't seen Confluence, then you really should check it out. Atlassian is an Australian software develop which has boot-strapped a $100M company with tools like JIRA, Confluence, Fisheye, and Crucible.

    There tools are used by a large number of Open Source projects (they make them freely available for that purpose) as well as a wide range of commercial users.
  • Confluence is an enterprise wiki (we use it for our intranet). That means that it has all the functionalities of a wiki like media wiki, but integrates with corporate directory to manage identities and allows user to edit pages usig Office, and allows administrator to manage permissions to single pages and so on. A great environment to store information about projects and convert them to knowledge.
  • "all funktionalaties...like media wiki"?
    What about the semantic extension of media wiki? I can not find this at confluence. Unfortunaltely.
  • I like the sound of a project widget whereby you can access the latest plans, cost estimates, forecasts etc. – but you need to be careful that the widget doesn't just add another level of bureaucracy to the work process. Don't confuse this for a proper form of communication (a bit like email there). That said, it would be great to see the end of constant emails pinging the latest documents round the team and client with the resulting lack of version control, saving updates and countless iterations that are not archived.

    For certain audiences on a project it would be a perfect way to provide a feed of information or archiving without endless emails or getting lost in internal files and servers. Want to know how a project is doing? It’s all in a widget, ideal.

    I can think of clients who are stakeholders in projects but aren't especially active in them - a widget could be a more productive way of keeping them posted on the work flow, progress, budget etc. A project widget that delivers all the latest files and information in real time … sounds like one for me.