My first guest post went up on Read/Write Web a couple of days ago. It’s called Widgetsphere: New Playground For Marketers, and it’s about a session I attended at the Web 2.0 Expo this week in SF. 
The CEOs of two widget syndication networks, Widgetbox and Clearspring, spoke about how widgets are becoming a must in the Internet marketer’s toolbox. (I covered Widgetbox a bit back in September 2006 when they debuted at DemoFall.) 
Anyway, it was fun getting to Web 2.0 Expo and meeting Richard MacManus, editor and publisher of Read/Write Web. What a hard-working guy! And now a media mogul in his own right… 🙂 He’s based in Wellington, New Zealand, but flew to California for a few weeks to attend the Expo and do some other business. 
Watch for another link to Read/Write Web soon, a recap of the whole Web 2.0 Expo experience. And I hope to be writing for this great blog again in the future. It was also fun hanging out again with Alex Iskold, a regular writer at Read/Write Web, who’s also founder of AdaptiveBlue. Alex is not only a smart guy and a great writer, but a fun guy, too! We had some laughs at the party Tuesday night snatching appetizers from the carts as they wheeled by on the way to the buffet lines, which were waay too long to stand in… 🙂
I saw this company debut at DEMO last year. They thought widgets were gonna be big….and they were right! The company’s been going great guns since then, becoming an amazing source of every kind of widget imaginable. They partnered with Typepad to introduce this “blidget” (blog+widget) concept. Mine looks like this: 
His company’s solution means “personalization without registration.” Once you enable the service at the company’s site (very quick), it’s a simple, one-click process to indicate your interest in a site without identifying who you are. PrefPass is essentially a portable, user-managed identity.
It’s a shaped-based search engine, which has obvious applications in finding manufactured parts. As Demo says, “If a picture is worth a thousand words, a doodle may well be worth that many keywords.” This search technology could be applied to many other industries as well, and who knows what possibilities in the consumer world.
Its gig is taking virtualization up a layer, separating it from the OS and allowing it to run in a new operating environment. The firm’s technology involves what they call an “application capsule,” which isolates an app into a known good state, said CEO David Roth. Their software essentially encapsulates the app from its underlying operating system and infrastructure. “And we get amazing performance,” said Roth, “typically less than 2% difference.” Demo says of Trigence: “Expect this company to follow a trajectory that maps to the meteroric rise of VMware, and to take that trip faster.”
And because it’s an open source system, it allows use of such technologies as Zimbra open source messaging and collaboration. “It lets Web 2.0 become a business reality,” said Greatwood. The most impressive part of this live demo, though, was seeing Greatwood take down his PostPath server, then do a restore in a minute or so, which would have taken hours with an Exchange server.
No plugins needed. Widgets — which are live, dynamic content — used to be hard to find and hard to use, said CEO Ed Anuff. Now the process is easy, since Widgetbox organizes them into a marketplace, where you can quickly find what you need and grab it. What’s more, developers (there were 5000 in the beta) now have a way to get their widgets out to a large and growing market.
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