updated After being a portal for events for less than half a year, Attendio has abandoned the the events industry, saying that market is too small. It has decided instead to become a widget-making company, jumping from one crowded industry to another.
It’s just the latest indication that the Web 2.0 market is bubbly, and raises questions about why VCs keep investing in the sector. The San Francisco company raised (see coverage) less than $1 million in funding from Sunbridge Partners earlier this year.
Renamed Gydget, the company’s widgets will link out to online articles, pictures, videos, and mobile-connected services. Users include several dozen celebrities and sports teams, like Beyonce and the Bengals.
Gerardo Capiel, the company’s CEO and founder, looks to be leaping from the frying pan to the fire. Even when Attendio launched, the events market was crowded: Other sites include Eventful, Zvents, Going and Yahoo Events (which acquired Upcoming).
Similarly, the widget-making boom has already arrived. Dapper, Widgetbox and Splashcast all offer some variation on the build-your-own widget theme. Capiel says Gydget’s offering is superior, as its widgets are capable of offering any type of content, while other companies focus on a niche like video or news.
Gydget’s advantage may be in simply having seen what works. Most traffic to Attendio already came from existing Gydgets like the game schedule widget used by the Oakland Raiders football team. By closing down Attendio and focusing only on widgets, the site may be able to capture a more significant audience.
However, it’s difficult to assess whether there’s a widget opportunity. Capiel declined to share traffic numbers. Widgets are fast becoming a commodity, offered widely around the internet. Pageviews also may not be as important a metric for the new business, as much of its revenue may come through affiliate sales of tickets for bands and teams.
Attendio first emerged during DEMO earlier this year. The company is in the process of raising another round.
Pledging Facebook fast — Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s remarks to outside developers yesterday that they can build applications for Facebook and keep “all the revenue,” with no revenue share, drew the biggest response from the crowd, and was clearly the most significant announcement about the company’s plans for partnerships. And now, given our prodigious Facebook coverage lately, we’re declaring a Facebook fast for at least 24 hours.
Big media linking to each other — Several large newspapers have signed a deal to link to each other’s stories, to boost their collective ranking in Google’s search results.
Attendio’s local events — Attendio, a San Francisco company, launched an local events service yesterday. You can search, discover, bookmark, and share events in your city. You type in a set of interests and set your location, and Attendio starts feeding you listings. If one strikes your fancy, you can bookmark it and add it to your favorites or send it to your phone, Google Calendar, Outlook, or any services that support iCal. Attendio also gives you a blog widget that lets you share the events you’ve bookmarked, add events on the fly. VentureBeat’s Dan Kaplan says he used Yelp for this sort of thing, but that Attendio has converted him. The company has raised $965,000 in bridge financing from individual angel investors, Felicis Ventures and Sunbridge Partners. Kristen Nicole at Mashable has more on the company.
Pricelock lets you lock into gas prices — Pricelock, a Dallas, Texas company, hasn’t launched yet, but it wants to let people buy gas in two months at today’s rate regardless of whether it has gone up or down. With prices rising strongly, this is a good service, because the assumption is that prices will continue to rise. However, the company hasn’t launched yet, and prices are likely (arguably) to slow down soon, raising the question of whether people are really going to want to bother about this. TheAlarmClock has more details about the service.
MyPunchbowl’s new technology to pick a date for events — When you’re organizing an event, it can be frustrating to find a date everyone can agree on. What’s surprising is that no site has come up with a good way to facilitate the diplomacy of event date setting. Punchbowl has just done that, with an algorithm that takes into consideration preferences of your invitees, needs of the host and of “VIP” guests, the ones who are really important. It gauges momentum around specific dates, as people start responding to a host’s invite and specified choices, and then figures out what to do in tie-breaking scenarios. Here’s video about how it works (RSS readers will have to click to site):
The three-person team is still looking for $1-3 million in VC funding, but is just about to finish an angel round to tide them over. Founder Matt Douglas says he’s lasted this long on reserves from his days at Adobe.
Bebo says Yahoo rumor not true — This came in response to rumors carried by the Telegraph that the social network was in acquisition talks with Yahoo.
Technorati’s big change — The blog search engine, Technorati, has redesigned itself, to reduce its multiple features (keyword search, tag search and blog directory search) into a single search bar. Chief executive David Sifry explains, blogs are now mainstream, and tags and other features can be incorporated into a single search. However, the result of the radical change is somewhat bewildering.
Google’s “hot” search results — Google now shows you trends along city, state and country lines. Here’s the service. More details here.
The Google Way — Google vice president Marissa Mayer explains how Google’s co-founders trained new employees: “The way Larry and Sergey trained us is they just gave us way too much responsibility and yelled at us until we became the people they needed us to become. And so I’m going to try to execute that program - with less yelling.”
Google tests Adsense in video ads — Google is running is ads in videos produced by any content provider (details here). Not much is known about how well these ads take advantage of contextual clues to target the ads, something that start-ups Adap.TV and ScanScout are doing. Publishers can choose the videos they want to monetize and where the ads will appear within the video; and they can track ad performance. Ads will be no longer than 30 seconds.
Google will figure out your life for you — Eric Schmidt, Google chief executive, on Google’s efforts to get better at personalization (Financial Times):
“The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ”
Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said gathering more personal data was a key way for Google to expand and the company believes that is the logical extension of its stated mission to organise the world’s information.
Environment in trouble — In a story earlier this week, we buried the link to the latest worrying report about the environment, so repeating it here: The National Academy of Sciences reports says things may be much worse than we realized.
San Jose, Calif. trying to become the center of clean technology investing — WSJ has details.
After being a portal for events for less than half a year, Attendio has abandoned the the events industry, saying that market is too small. It has decided instead to become a widget-making company, jumping from one crowded industry to another.
Pledging Facebook fast — 