VentureBeat

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.

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.

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.

Here’s the latest action:
1) For entrepreneurs: Zlango and the art of the PowerPoint pitch
2) DIY widget makers help you create your own Facebook applications, sell ads
3) Compete suggest smaller video sites are eating up market share
4) Do buyouts, young man, not venture capital

For entrepreneurs: Zlango and the art of the PowerPoint pitch — Zlango launched an icon-based language last year that it hoped would replace text messages as a faster, more intuitive way to communicate with friends.

A source slipped us the original Powerpoint presentation (download here) the company used to raise a first round of capital from Benchmark Capital and Accel Partners, and it’s an eye-opener. The slide below is an example of the crude language used, and it gets worse. We’re surprised this wasn’t enough to deter the VCs. But the Israel-based company happily landed $12 million earlier this year.

However, the icons apparently weren’t as intuitive as the company hoped. The company hit the news this week as it announced a couple of new services, one of them a “composer” to help you understand what the icons are supposed to mean. It lets you pick and choose from Zlango’s hundreds of icons, helpfully showing you the word an icon is supposed to represent. This sort of defeats the purpose of what was supposed to be an intuition-based language. Another of the company’s new features is called “zMess,” a Twitter-like micro-blog where you can quickly leave messages for your friends or the public.

The site has gotten somewhat positive reviews from Techcrunch and CenterNetworks; however, for a vulgar dash of reality, check out the hype-busting Uncov.

DIY widget makers help you create your own Facebook applications, sells ads — Widgetbox and Dapper both introduced new ways to easily create Facebook apps this week, proving simultaneously how easy it can be for anyone to create an app and how hard it is to create a distinctly interesting app.

Dapper lets you choose content from across the web and display it in a widget, useful for syndicating content (see the Answers.com Facebook app produced using Dapper). You can choose to pull in web data in various formats, including XML, RSS feeds, RSS feeds that you filter for based on particular keywords, HTML, even email. We created a Dapper app in a few minutes that pulled in all of VentureBeat’s stories. The Israeli company separately introduced Dapperads, which lets you create a widget that automatically displays contextually relevant ads from Amazon next to topics you choose within your web site.

San Francisco-based Widgetbox, another company that helps you easily create your own widgets (our coverage), released a tool this week called App Accelerator for turning those widgets into Facebook applications. It also announced a deal with widget creator and widget ad network RockYou — one of the largest widget companies — whereby people who have Widgetbox widgets on Facebook can run RockYou’s Facebook ads (our coverage) and keep 50% of the revenue.

Another interesting project that may lead to deeper integration of Facebook’s information with full-blown web applications is Drupal For Facebook. Drupal is a years-old open source content management system often used to create create web publishing software. More here.

Compete: smaller video sites eating up the big boys’ market share? — Yesterday, web analytics company Compete posted its results for the most popular online video sites for August. Notably, market leaders YouTube, Myspace and Yahoo lost market share while an assortment of smaller but-still-popular sites, such as niche music video site Blastro.com, showed significant gains. What’s more, the top ten video sites lost ten percent market share as a group — implying that smaller sites are gaining audiences at the expense of these larger sites. Coming months will show if this is a trend, or fluke.

Forget venture capital, young man, try buyouts – Remember the horde of MBAs that headed to the valley to enter venture capital firms during the last boom? That’s not happening this time, despite the robust financings we’re seeing. MBAs are headed instead to “private equity,” and “buy out” firms. Compensation in buyout firms, including salary, bonus and carried interest distributions, rose to $359,000 for the median professional, or 21 percent more than last year. That’s according to the Private Equity Analyst-Holt Compensation Study. Venture capitalists made $350,000, or 17 percent more than last year. The study pointed out that venture firm professionals are more senior than those in the buyout world, where you’re seeing the influx of younger guys. Even then, the buyout folks are making more. Venture and buyout firms are the primary destination for graduates from top MBA programs. At Stanford, some 12 percent of the graduating business school class are heading for these firms. However, venture firms are shriveling, while buyout firms have expanded — meaning most jobs are in buyouts. How long that will last is another question.

Updated

More and more publishers and retailers rely on so-called “widgets,” little boxes placed on other web sites, to deliver their news, entertainment and product advertisements.

So measuring Web traffic to those widgets is important for deciding what content to deliver, and what sites to deliver it on. A number of companies now offer widget traffic measurement tools, with Quantcast being the latest.

Here’s a summary of some of the main players in this nascent but increasingly important field:

Quantcast – This relatively new San Francisco company monitors traffic to Internet sites. Today, it adds a video and widget measurement service, also free. It is still a test version and publishers include Slide, PictureTrail, RockYou, MetaCafe and MochiMedia. It reports on traffic to all Flash-based media, including online games and downloaded desktop widgets. The service reports a widget’s “reach,” the number of times a video has been “played” or that widget has been clicked on, and the categories chosen (a publisher can tag a widget or video as a “game” or “comedy,” for example). It will also report things such as which users clicked on the widget most often (frequency), and the demographics of these users, based on other information Quantcast collects. It provides this information in a pie chart. To use it, you have to register here www.quantcast.com/quantified-publisher.jsp, and more info is here www.quantcast.com/quantified-video.jsp. See chart below.

Clearspring – The company offers traffic analytics for publishers like Time, NBC, Universal and Maxim – which together now have more than 4.2 billion widget views. Last month, the company began letting developers write, distribute and tracking widgets through Clearspring. Like other offerings, it provides a dashboard, and tracks things like a widget’s source domain, number of visits and geography of visitor. Clearstone, like Quantcast, is hands-off on the widget creation process. You’ll need a third-party developer to build a widget if you want one built.

WidgetBox – This company provides a “wrapper” to widget developers so that they can track the widgets. Again, you’ll need to build the widget yourself.

Musestorm -– The company distributes widgets for both the Web and the desktop. Notably, though, this company goes a step further. Other companies put a “wrapper” around the widget and then track that widget. However, they can’t track activity of content within the widget. Musestorm lets you do that -– for example letting you know how many times a video within the widget has been played, and how users switch between surrounding audio and text. Quantcast, Widgetbox and Clearspring don’t offer that. Musestorm also lets you update widget content, adding and removing items, and so lets you track performance of variable kinds of content. Musestorm has a new release coming this summer containing other features.

Update: Comment below mention other providers, Comscore (see here) and Yourminis.

Widgetbox, a company that helps businesses like eBay, Yahoo and scores of Web start-ups offer their widgets to other companies at a central site, has added free analystics.

Some people are calling 2007 the year of the widget. Widgets are exploding in popularity. A widget is, in its most basic form, a box from a third-party that sits on your site. They can showcase a game, weather, ads or other content. eBay lets sellers carry an eBay widget on their blogs to better communicate with buyers. MySpace members can use widgets on their profile to show off the photos they take on the road.

Widgetbox facilitates widget use, offering widgets from a hundred providers; we wrote about the company here. Increasingly, widget users and designers say they want performance information on widgets. Some people use widgets just like advertising, and so the analytics offered by Widgetbox is not much different from the analytics already offered to advertisers. But the move underscores how mainstream widget use has become.

Developers can do things like gauge their biggest and most influential users, said chief executive Ed Anuff. They can track subscriptions (when a person clicks on “get widget”), hits (when a person views a web page containing the widget), referrals and conversions (when a person actually subscribes).

Here’s a summary. .

Anuff said eBay is a good example of how Widgetbox hopes to make money. When eBay sellers use Widgetbox to take an eBay widget for use on their blog, Widgetbox takes the status of “master affiliate,” and make on the order of seven percentage points on any transaction that takes place (Anuff wouldn’t give an exact number for his eBay relationship, but seven percent is an example of the market rate for this sort of thing).