Sunday, June 25, 2006

PostApp

This week, Hummer Winblad portfolio company PostApp announced funding and the private beta of its WidgetBox service at SuperNova 2006. The press release can be found here.

TechCrunch wrote an excellent overview, as did Silicon Beat.

The funds will be used to pioneer a new type of marketplace for web-based widgets, called WidgetboxĂ‚™, that enables the placement of many types of applications, functionality and content into blogs, personal homepages, social networking sites, and auction pages.

A web widget is a piece of web service-based interactive content that can be dynamically embedded into a web page. For example, a web widget can be a auction listing, contextual search box, a game, a score box displaying a set of statistics, a weather box, an advertising box or any other functionality to be embedded on a web page such as a blog, personal homepage, social networking profile, or auction page.

Web widgets, sometimes called gadgets or modules, are increasingly used by web publishers to enhance their web pages, and web service developers are now frequently making their technologies available as web widgets. Many different technologies can be used to develop widgets: HTML, JavaScript, AJAX, Flash, Java Applets, and any web application platform: J2EE, LAMP, Perl, Ruby, etc.

PostApp is creating a marketplace that connects web widget developers with bloggers and other personal publishers. Widget developers include online services seeking widespread widget distribution such as Yahoo! and eBay, as well as small independent widget developers.

PostApp offers innovative technology to ease the pain of widget management including the Widgetizer EngineĂ‚™, a powerful but simple tool that lets you turn anything on the web into a widget, as well as tools that make it easier for bloggers to control their widgets quickly and intuitively.

Interested developers and users can sign up for the private beta here.



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