The well-known founder of widget leader Slide (and formerly a cofounder and CTO of PayPal), Max Levchin is the closest thing there is today to a rockstar in the nascent world of widgets. Slide had 134M uniques in June according to comScore. 
He noted that Slide has three of the top four apps on Facebook: TopFriends, FunWall, and SuperPoke. Gee, check out all the things you can do to your friends on that last one! Max said Slide is now working a lot on monetization, and doing well (movie promos, etc). Most people would agree that Slide seems to be mostly about "MySpacing" Facebook. But, that may not be a bad thing — because, with its numbers, it’s likely to be the widget company that most quickly figures out how to make money in this game, working with the advertisers that will be the main route to that $$ –and they already are very much talking to them, running lots of trial campaigns to prove their worth. Other than that, I didn’t understand a whole lot of what Max said….he talks really, really fast.
Tag: desktop widgets (Page 2 of 2)
Niall Kennedy kicked off his second annual event by telling us that we’d be hearing 33 speakers and some 27 hours of programming (!) over the next two days. Totaling up all the breakouts, I guess. He talked about the Vista Sidebar, now out 9 months, for which there’s already 1500 widgets….and about Mac OS Leopard (rumored to be coming Oct 26), which will have a button in the browser now to create a widget for you (and he noted the Mac OS is up to 3200 desktop widgets now after two years). 
He said Leopard will have a brand-new widget IDE that "will make things a lot easier" and a desktop widget that will "grab stuff on the web for you, so you see it in shrunken form." He noted that, in line with Newsweek declaring 2006 the "Year of the Widget," there’s really been a proliferation of widgets on personal home pages, in blog sidebars, and in social networks.
I’m in SF right now sitting in a Starbucks, ready to head over the Widget Summit, which goes through tomorrow. Check out the sessions and the schedule and tell me what you think. 
Which talks or panels would you most like to sit in on if you were here? What questions would you have for the speakers? Use me — I’m your intrepid conference reporter!
I’m all yours, and I’m all ears….
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.
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