widgets

iGoogle attacked by giant widgets

Google's personalized home page, iGoogle, is getting an update Thursday. Widgets on the page can support a new "canvas view," which expands the widget to the full iGoogle window.

The 16 new or updated widgets that Google is currently promoting support this feature. There are more than 40,000 iGoogle widgets available, iGoogle group product manager Jessica Ewing told me.

Google will not restrict monetization schemes from running in canvas view. Developers can put whatever they want in the pages. In the smaller "home view," Google does not allow advertising or other direct revenue-generating content. … Read more

App company JS-Kit raises $3.6 million

JS-Kit, a start-up that has created an array of social-networking apps for sites to install, has raised $3.6 million in venture funding in a Series B round led by Altos Ventures. Existing investor TEF3 also contributed.

With the funding, JS-Kit plans to make more hires beyond its team of 12 engineers as well as broaden its management team--DataPortability Workgroup organizer Chris Saad has joined the company as an advisor. The company also plans to hone its business-development strategy so that it can reach the magic "profitable" milestone sooner rather than later.

"Each of these areas … Read more

Widget maker Gigya gets $11 million Series C

Looks like they're battening down the hatches: Social-network apphaus Gigya has raised $11 million in a Series C funding round led by DAG Ventures.

President and co-founder Rooly Eliezerov called it a "pre-emptive round" in a release Wednesday; the company's Series B round was only seven months ago. But Gigya insists that this new funding is to keep up demand, not to have some disaster insurance in the face of the current financial situation.

Still, economic crisis notwithstanding, Gigya and its brethren may still have a tough road ahead: Blogger Nick O'Neill recently found that … Read more

Widgetbox turns on 'Blog Network'

Widgetbox is one of many companies that jumped on the widget bandwagon, and now it's jumping on the ad network bandwagon.

So far, the company has 135,000 embeddable objects and 64 million monthly consumers of its widgets, which live on blogs, social-networking sites, and other Web destinations. The most popular widgets are "The Fun Classic Super Mario Game In Flash," BabyTicker: The Baby Countdown Pregnancy Ticker," "Cyber-pet," "Bubbles," and "Idiot Test."

While Widgetbox claims 462 million widget views in a month across 500,000 discrete domains, the big numbers … Read more

Yahoo's Blueprint yields a Buzz

Updated at 11:50 am on 9/16/08 to clarify the role of Blueprint.

Yahoo isn't wasting time advertising Blueprint, the seasoned mobile development platform that received renewed attentions in San Francisco last week at CTIA 2008. On Tuesday, the company released the most recent fruit of Blueprint's labor, a widget for the mobile application Yahoo Go (review) that peddles Yahoo Buzz, its Digg-like social news service.

From the Yahoo Buzz widget, social newshounds can access a summary of top stories voted on in the previous twelve hours by Yahoo users' popular vote. They'll click for … Read more

New Google Desktop: Speed is a feature, too

Google has released its new version 5.8 of its Google Desktop software for Windows, with a focus on speed.

The software indexes a computer's files so users can search their machines and provides a mechanism to house small applications called widgets, but Google heard gripes that Google Desktop was too big and slow. "We heard the message loud and clear and decided that the Google Desktop 5.8 for Windows release would be based entirely on performance," Jói Sigurðsson, Google Desktop tech lead, said in a blog post Monday.

Google said it … Read more

Tingz offers up cross-platform widgets that share data

Tingz is a new widget engine whose big feature is cross platform data sharing. At the TechCrunch50 conference it was shown off on a Mac, iPhone and Windows Media Center PC, with various widgets pulling together the same data set.

The example given was a recipe widget on your computer that tells you how to make something, and if you don't have one of the ingredients you can bookmark it. This information gets ported over to a shopping list widget, which you can then access on-the-go via the iPhone application.

Presumably users would have it installed on both platforms … Read more

Yahoo plans software push for Net-enabled TVs

Yahoo on Wednesday announced an effort to provide the software underpinnings of network-enabled TV, a move that could transform not only what it means to watch TV but also what it means to advertise on it.

Though the TV experience has been spiced up by voting for American Idol contestants, it generally has retained its famously passive character. Yahoo wants to change this by bringing a version of its Yahoo Widget Engine, a software foundation that can run small applications called widgets, to network-enabled TVs.

This new version, called the Widget Channel, will resemble the version that's available for … Read more

AOL works affiliate marketing into widgets

AOL's Platform-A subsidiary is now bringing affiliate marketing to widget ads. If that sounds like a lot of media speak, that's because it is.

To power widget ads, AOL acquired start-up Goowy in February, and it has already worked the acquisition into Platform-A. As part of Tuesday's announcement, Goowy's technology has been officially incorporated into Buy.at, an affiliate network that AOL also acquired earlier this year.

"Once a publisher places a widget on their Web site, consumers can grab it and distribute the widget to other locations on the Web, including social-network pages, desktops, … Read more