PostApp launches WidgetBox, a marketplace for widgets
Marshall Kirkpatrick
43 comments »
Stealth start-up PostApp announced at Thursday’s SuperNova Connected Innovators session the launch tomorrow of WidgetBox, its new beta marketplace for managed web based widgets, and $1.5 million in funding from Hummer Winblad.
If you like widgets, there’s about to be a whole lot more of them available for use in your blog or profile page. If you’d like to develop widgets and have some one else deal with the details, this could be for you. If you’re unfamiliar with widgets, see the “community powered search” box on the right side of TechCrunch - that’s a widget. Videos, slide shows, music players and news tickers that can be dropped into web pages are common types of widgets.
PostApp is headed and B2B veterans Ed Anuff, Giles Goodwin and Dean Moses. The company debuted its first offering, an eBay widget, in partnership with Typepad at the end of March.
PostApp will manage the process of turning web services into widgets that bloggers, social network users and others can insert into their pages. Outside developers will create web services, submit them to PostApp for transforming into widgets and content publishers like bloggers, auction sellers and social network users will select the widgets they want from the WidgetBox marketplace. The service will also manage the money for widgets that involve financial transactions like affiliate links or subscription, though developers will have first say in determining the business rules of their projects. PostApp will act as a master affiliate or subscription center, as appropriate.
As the number of photo, video, eCommerce and calendar widgets available online proliferates I can’t help but think that a central place for lots of widgets sounds like a good idea. I also hope that this will make it easier for developers to create other kinds of widgets, as the choices out there can feel pretty stale.
One of the first highlighted widgets will use the Yahoo images API to insert contextually relevant images into any website. RSS will be the basis of many, but not all of the widgets. If you love RSS as much as I do, you can probably imagine almost any information being delivered by feed and thus displayed in a widget. If an interesting variety of feeds are widgetized and then mixed with intermittent contextual advertising - then everybody wins. I’ll eagerly await the widgets of the future.
This is great and provides a better content and functionality for the blogs and Web 2.0 sites. This brings us much clossr to everyone creating their own version of webzine - text, audio, video.
Could be a very cool idea - can’t wait to try it.
Congratulations Ed. I wish you guys the best of luck.
The PostApp guys are great. You can add their eBay widget to your Typepad blog by going here: http://www.postapp.com/ebay/
It could become a great distribution platform. We shall consider using it to make our own widgets available to web publishers.
Getting $1.5m for such a website? People tend to forget so soon (.com bubble anyone?)
Nevil: I think $1.5 million for a site like this is a valid bet.
Compared with most of the obvious dogs reviewed on this site, 90% of which will be gone within 3 years (yes, like the .com bubble) this site is immediately appealing to web/development professionals who tend to be quite loyal.
We’ll see, but I’d bet this gets traction before yet another “meta” or “social” site.
Steve;
This is an excellent service and is definitely a step in the right direction, but I strongly believe in “meta” and “social” in the form of personal aggregation. People have SO much data located around the internet, with listings at site A, photos at site B, videos at site C, etc..
Perhaps when you say social, you mean a MySpace type of site, and when you say “meta”, you mean a site that simply does everything on it’s own. I’m not sure, but the above is just my opinion.
It’s interesting that there are so many companies today focused on providing the tools to extend user interaction across web sites with browser extensions, desktop widgets, site widgets, bookmarklets, syndication, and SMS. The potential is huge, particularly for traditional ‘online community’ sites to leverage these tools (or simply co-op the concepts behind the tools and provide their own) to let their community exist well beyond the boundaries of their traditional destination ‘web site’. More here on my post this morning.
Have a half-baked idea. Pitch to Hummer. Profit!
I think its great, as it gives the customer a way to become a “second level” sales lead for future larger business transactions.
Reading a blog, trusting the source, and making a small purchase as a result of a recommendation from the blogger is a great way for businesses to let customers get to know them, and even earn a few bucks along the way.
mmm, currently translating this article for TCF. Honnestly, I don’t think bloggers will be willing to actually “pay” to get those widgets.
i believe a Typepad pro subscriber will soon have access to some of the content offered by WidgetBox to make it easier for him/her to access those widgets, it might as well become part of the Typepad subscription
And I can already see Wordpress coming up with their free widget platform
Boy the AdWidget space seems to be Humming right along!
;))
Good Stuff!!
1. To Nevil: This is not another website
This is a service.
2. nothing else to add
This kind of services are the infrastructure of the “new internet”, where creating sites is not just notepadish b/w text, but information flow, it is just a completely different scene.
What comes to this particular service, time will tell if it is on time, or not.
And by infrastructure, I mean like sewage, because this is where the **** flows
I expect that the biggest users of widgets will be major brands. Widgets make compact, powerful brand platforms, with desktop persistence. They can be personalized, and can deliver myriad forms of information to build trust and loyalty. Think of them as brand/customer dialogues backed by RSS. Each widget becomes a brand”sidekick.” In a year or two widgets will be much more dynamic and interactive than they are today.
Really nice interesting site. thank you for it)
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Hi all! I really like this great site!
Please help.
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I Am going to go here, advise, what route is better for choosing? Of what agency to take advantage? On the internet it is a lot of sites offering these services (gotorussia.com, russia-travel.com, 3btours.com, russia.com, etc.), but it were would be desirable to hear opinion of people which already there.
Thanks
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I don’t think that widgetbox is as “big” as they are showing.
I think that widgipedia.com is similar with Widgetbox.