In an economic climate that isn’t ripe for funding, iWidgets, a social network syndication service, just raised $4.1 million in Series A funding from Opus Capital and University Venture Fund. The start-up previously received an undisclosed amount in seed funding from Opus Capital, Wilson Sonsini, and a few angel investors in June of 2007.
iWidgets, who lists CBS Interactive as one of its customers, drives traffic and interest for a client’s website by syndicating content and user activity to social networks and portals. For example, iWidgets could create series of widgets promoting and offering full content on CBS’s CSI Facebook page. iWidgets also provides a free self service widget creator on its site, so the masses can create their own widgets for their Facebook page.
iWidgets appears to have the competitive advantage over fellow widget producers. Sprout Builder recently discontinued its free widget service. Also, iWidgets’ applications don’t use Flash (many other widget creator do) making it easier to build a wide variety of widgets. And iWidgets’ WidgetWORA™ (Write Once Run Anywhere) technology customizes its widgets for specific destinations, “nativizing” widgets to they can take the look of social networks, including Facebook and MySpace.
Wow that is quite a lot of money to raise in this environment.
I’ll check it out.
Anjali Sen
http://smartbab...xy.blogspot.com
Test
It’s grate that they got solid funding in this difficult environment. But what do they plan tho use the $$ for and ant what evaluation did they get it?
I did a video with iWidgets two weeks ago: http://www.kyte.../ch/6118/325598 — they give me a demo of what they are doing.
Robert
You are everywhere … I thought you were in Europe conferencing away two weeks ago!
Anjali Sen
http://smartbab...xy.blgospot.com
For such a large investment, I wonder how much they had to give up to get that much money. They must have had a really good business model…
It’s an interesting concept, wish them the best of luck even though ill never use it.
Interesting concept. I had heard about them but didn’t follow up on it. With the funding, it looks like they are officially legit.
Sucks about SproutBuilder removing their free verrsion, I just made one there (on the right sidebar of my site) and loved the process–I hate that iWidget plasters the huge logo at the bottom of the widget, the one I have available is so much cleaner looking.
NewMoonMovie,
Your statement about Sprout Builder providing a much cleaner look is exactly why we are introducing a paid model. With a subscription there will be no ads, no branding bar, just your content. We are focusing our efforts to provide a professional grade product for clients who require it.
good luck guys.
tc readers I have a question?
with the real world rapidly approaching zero, does anyone seriously still give a fuck?
if you do, why?
Interesting – very large footprint form what I can tell – they have a lot of competition with folks like, springwidgets, and vortexme.com