DEMOfall 07: Day 2 – MuseStorm…Dead-Simple Widgetizing for Publishers

Are you an online publisher dying to widgetize your content so you can hustle more audience, or just better  engage who you already have, wherever they may hang out on the Web — but have no idea where to start?  Well, bucko, does MuseStorm have a deal for you! 
How about a service that lets anyone — even large, traditional publishers  🙂 — create widgets in minutes. And, to show they mean business, MuseStorm has already signed up CBS, Simon & Schuster, and the Washington Post.

MuseStorm is in the business of empowering publishers and marketers to engage their target audiences
through syndication of highly interactive rich media content. It says it removes the complexity from widget authoring, "enabling companies to
nimbly and inexpensively develop and control intelligent multimedia
widgets with integrated advanced functionality, including user
interactivity."

MuseStorm’s platform lets publishers and
marketers access an unprecedented level of detailed distribution
and interaction metrics to capitalize on their content and dynamically
respond to audience preferences.  The web widgets you create with MuseStorm can also be cloned as desktop widgets.

You can embed your web widgets easily and quickly in a variety of
places. MuseStorm even showed in its demo that you can actually do it with one click….deploying them an any and all of the following:

• most
social networks (FaceBook, MySpace, etc)

• blogging platforms (Blogger,
TypePad, etc)

• start pages (PageFlakes, Netvibes, iGoogle, etc)

• and any
web site

After the company pitched on stage, I spoke with CEO Ori Soen at the company’s station in the Pavilion to see and hear more of the details. "If you’re a publisher, you’re hearing so much about widgets," he said. I guess I understand — who doesn’t want a viral little app out there driving people to your site? "But we buffer you from all the noise. With us, you just build your widget once, then clone it into whatever you want." The benefits, of course, are that the customer doesn’t need to have people learning all the various widget platforms and keeping track of multiple deployments.

But MuseStorm doesn’t just help you with the authoring of your content syndication widgets. It also has an
enterprise-grade syndication service that provides a secure,
high-capacity solution to deliver them,
too. It uses clusters of several types of application servers to
deliver the actual widgets and applications. And it gives you access to
your account via a
management console for authoring and updating, delivery, and metrics.

For analytics, MuseStorm claims previously
unattainable "precise distribution and audience interaction metrics,
including impressions, video playback, rollovers, and clickthroughs."
It says this intelligence lets  customers optimize their content and
delivery in real time to maximize the engagement of their audience.

The company offers (1) Distribution Metrics —
detailed information on the distribution and reach of your content and
message, ranging from impressions to unique users to domains and
geo-location data, and (2) Interaction Metrics — to give you
insight into how users actually interact with your content, "monitoring
every user action to create anonymous user profiles that can be used to
optimize your distribution."

MuseStorm is based in Israel, is privately held,
and was founded in 2005. Investors include famed Israeli entrepreneur
Yossi Vardi. It received a Series A of $1 million earlier in 2007.

UPDATE 10/2: To add this article about MuseStorm teaming up with Universal Music Group to promote the upcoming release of a Jimi Hendrix 1967 Monterey Pop Festival DVD — via a widget, of course.