Widgetbox recently hit an important milestone - 100m monthly uniques as measured by Quantcast.
To put 100m into perspective, Widgetbox is now the web's 19th largest network.
It is tremendously rewarding to work on a technology platform that touches tens of millions of people a month, and Widgetbox's continued growth is huge validation that the atomization of the web and the rise of widgets as a valuable medium for content syndication, web page construction, and personalization continues apace.
In addition, Widgetbox's focus on self-service solutions and the freemium model is driving tremendous growth in customer acquisition as customers - prosumer, SMB, and enterprise - use the Widgetbox platform to widgetize, distribute, and measure their content.
Running on Empty indicts both Republicans and Democrats for ignoring two troubling twin deficits - the the trade deficit and the budget deficit - which, he believes, may ultimately bankrupt the country. The hard-hitting book highlights the off-balance sheet, unfunded entitlement program liabilities that will fall due in the coming decades. With trillions of dollars in Medicaid, social security, and drug benefits promised to current and future retirees, he warns of some very hard choices that face the nation. For example, he estimates if Congress was forced to fund promised entitlement programs, we would face, "an immediate and permanent 60 percent hike in the federal income tax, or a 50 percent cut in Social Security and Medicare benefits."
His recent book walks the reader through his quite amazing career. Quick CV
Northwestern BA
Chicago MBA
Marketfacts (research analyst)
McCann-Erickson (head of chicago office)
Bell & Howell (CEO at 36 of Fortune 300 company)
Chair, Council on International Economic Policy
Secretary of Commerce
Lehman Brothers (CEO)
Blackstone Group (Founder and Chairman)
Concord Coalition (Founding President)
Fed Reserve Bank of NY (Chairman)
What strikes me is the many various industries in which he excelled - research, advertising, manufacturing, government, investment banking, merchant banking, public policy.
Each very successful person is somewhat sui generis, however, one can always learn from those who have accomplished so much for so long.
This Sunday's NYT included an interview with John Donahoe, eBay's CEO.
When asked how his management style has evolved, he pointed to a lesson from an early mentor.
"Another part of my management style I learned from Kent Thiry, who was another one of my early bosses, and is now CEO of DaVita. I did not know it at the time, but I was suffering from a real fear of failure. Kent said, "you know John, your challenge is that you're trying to bat .900." And he said: "when you were in college, you got a lot of As. You could get 90 to 95 percent. When you took your first job as analyst, you were really successful and felt like you were batting .900." But, he said, "now you are playing in the major leagues, and if you expet to bat .900, eithr you come up to bat and freeze because you're afraid of swinging and missing, or you're a little afraid to step into the batter's box." He said,"remember, the best hitters in MLB can strike out 6 times out of 10 ands till be among the greatest of all time hitters."
And he said,"that's my philosophy - the key is to get up in the that batter's box and take a swing. And all you have to do is hit one single, a couple of doubles, and an occasional homerun out of every 10 at-bats and you're going to be the best hitter or best leader around."
The interview really resonated with me. The best performers understand that failure is part of the game, that one should focus less on discrete events (single at-bats) and more on the process of performance (practice and routines), and that fear of failure can be paralyzing and self-fulfilling.
In this marcro environment, strike out rates are going up, and it is even more important that leaders focus on singles, doubles, the occasional home run, and mind set that helps to get in the box and take a swing.
The site promised to "change how the world thinks about syndicating functionality on the web."
And so it has!
Since launch, Widgetbox has helped tens of thousands of publishers syndicate their content, service, and applications via widget technology. The company continues to ride the web widget syndication wave and we just finished our most successful month ever - serving over 740m widgets to over 89 million uniques.
Importantly, in addition to traffic, Widgetbox just reached an impressive customer milestone with over 400 paying customers.
While the widgets are all unique, some important commonalities exist. Content providers, e-commerce companies, and brands all recognize that widgets represent a powerful medium for reaching new users, driving traffic, syndicating content, and improving natural search performance. While the recognized need is universal, the implementation details continue to be a major friction limiting adoption.
Prior to the Blidget Pro, a widget strategy required material expesnive custom development, one-off anlytics and tracking, custom creative, questions regarding distribution, and a host of complications that frustrated the ability to levearge the opportunity.
The Blidget Pro is based on several important concepts that help explain its success:
configuration vs customization - no coding required
leverages existing content - syndicates existing video, image, post, and twitter content
custom branding and linkouts - maintains brand promise and drive traffic
leverages Widgetbox's platform - syndication, installation, and analytics included
Importantly, Blidget Pro is another example of a freemium model in action. Every month, thousands of content owners use Widgetbox's free servcies to widgetize and distribute their content. By providing value-added features to paying subscribers, Widgetbox is building important customer relationships with companies looking for a set of premium features that help them better meet their widget goals.
Another important element of our strategy is self-service. In a challenged economy and in an emerging technology category, it is vital that prospects are able to self-discover, self-qualify, self-provision, and self-deploy. All day long, customers discover Widgetbox, purchase a subscription, and deploy their widget without ever talking to one of our employees. As with all new markets, expensive technology that requires a push-based selling model will limit adoption.
All of us at Widgetbox are excited by the uptake in customers and in the success of the self-serve model. We are busy working on even better features and premium offerings and will keep our focus on simple, self-service tools that differentiate based on ease of use, ease of adoption, and rapid time-to-value.
Widgetbox just launched an embeddable widget creator.
Simply enter your blog feed, youtube, twitter, hulu, flickr, or vimeo user id into the the widget below and build a branded, tabbed widget that aggregates all your content, like the BBC widget in the side bar, in seconds.
My cousin is a wildlife biologist at the University of Montana. He just sent me an email from one of his colleagues about the wanderings of a wolf they had collared.
The email follows, but is an amazing reminder of the huge range predators require. Cool story.
and so it begins... :) One of my gps collared wolves is now famous! For those of you that don't know, this 1 1/2 year old female wolf was trapped/collared by a FWP wolf specialist for my project at the beginning of July. She was trapped in Paradise Valley outside of Gardiner, Montana. At the end of September she dispersed and over the following 5 months managed to travel all throughout the western half of Wyoming, through the SE corner of Idaho, NW Utah, and as of Saturday was located just outside of Vail, Colorado. I roughly connected her GPS locations and she has travelled over 1,000 miles as the crow flies!! Her data doesn't do much for my project (since I am using the collars to get accurate estimates of territory size), but it sure is incredibly interesting.
A Colorado news story on the wolve can be found here.
Atlassian is one of enterprise software's real success stories with over 14,000 customers in 109 countries. Confluence is their flagship wiki product and the following video illustrates how Confluence users can add relevant widgets to their project pages. Other Atlassian products include Jira, Fisheye, Bamboo, and Clover.
Sim over at Polaris Ventures is looking for founders to help him quantify dilution over the life of a company (financings, stock option refreshes, etc) and the impact of fund raising on the ultimate stakes founders enjoy in their companies.
Quick post to highlight two widgets currently featured on Widgetbox.
The first is from Pampers, one of P&G's crown jewels. The widget, seen below, is a pregnancy calendar that provides week-by-week updates on fetal development. The user is able to configure the title, birth month, day, and year.
Pamper's widget provides dynamic, relevant, and personal information to the user. By using configuration parameters - such as the birth date - Pampers allows each user to make the widget their own. Rather than simply serve an ad, Pampers is providing contextually relevant information to its target audience and inviting them to embed the widget on blogs, start pages, and social networks.
The second is from the CBS show, The Insider. Built by CBS using Widgetbox's Blidget Pro solution, the widget includes three tabs - Insider.com news feeds, video clips, and twitter posts - as well as custom branding. The Insider widget is a wonderful example of how Widgetbox can help content owners quickly and easily turn their content into attractive widgets that get installed across the web.
Last week, I was fortunate to spend three days in Sydney as a guest of Fairfax Digital, one of Australia's leading media companies. Fairfax's assets include the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Domain, and RSVP, Australia's leading dating site.
Fairfax Digital and XMedia Labs organized a one-day digital summit, Media09, that included speakers from around the world. Speakers included, among others, media executives from the BBC, Guardian, Washington Post, Wikia, Blue State Digital, and Widgetbox.
Ben Self, from Blue State Digital and the Tech Director for the DNC, provided a fascinating synopsis of the Obama's use of the Internet to manage online fundraising, constituency- building, issue advocacy, and on-line social networking; see Obama Case Study for more details.
I really enjoyed my time in Australia - the city spectacular, the people welcoming, and the conference a terrific overview of the media strategies of some of the world's leading media companies.
My talk centered on the lessons of Ray Oldenburg's classic book, the Great Good Place, which introduced us to the framework of the Third Place. My talk is embedded below.
Thank you to XMedia Labs and Fairfax for a wonderful trip and a super day.
The widget below is one I made for Fairfax to demonstrate the power of aggregating content via Widgetbox's widget platform in order to better reach the Internet users aggregating in today's on-line 3rd places.
Widgetbox just released Blidget Pro: the next generation of our successful Blidget tool and our first subscription-based service.
The Blidget Pro is a far more powerful version of the Blidget - a tool that has converted nearly 100,000 blogs into widgets and served 2.3 billion impressions since its initial launch in 2007.
The Blidget Pro represents a major innovation and is the easiest, fastest way to turn all your feed-based content (videos, images, tweets, posts...) into dynamic, branded widgets.
Since launch, Widgetbox has served over 6.5 billion widgets and widgets are proving to be a very valuable way for publishers and developers to to reach new users across the web. However, to date, many publishers and developers have found the high cost of custom creative a friction in leveraging widgets. Priced at $3.99 per month, Blidget Pro is designed to be the self-service, no coding required solution of choice for those looking to widgetize their content assets.
The best way to appreciate the product is to see a few in action - all made using the solution.
Getting on a plane? Keep a list of must-read books?
Over the holidays, a friend casually suggested that I read a book by the Spanish author Zafon. 7 hours later, I had finished what is the most wonderful book I have read this decade. Carlos Ruiz Zafon's, The Shadow of the Wind, is simply amazing. The book, written in 2001, takes place in post-war Barcelona - the narrator, Daniel Sempere, is the teenage son of a bookseller. After finding a book by the little-known auther, Carax, the boy discovers that, despite the brilliance of Carax's work, all his books are being destroyed one by one.
As Daniel seeks to uncover why, he stumbles into a spider's web of forgotten murders, doomed love, and secret pasts.
The book is a gift and one to savor. Let me know if you enjoyed it and if you can suggest one that proved equally moving to you.
For all my Obama friends, please find below a Change.gov widget that will help you track the transition and the Office of the President-Elect over the next month.
Warren Buffet allowed Schroeder unparalleled access to his records, business partners, and family and delivers a masterful portrayal of a master businessman. In return, we are granted valuable and entertaining insights into Buffet's life, philosophies, and world view.
Occam's Razor states that, "all things being equal, the simplest solution is the best." Of all of Buffet's strengths, the trait that leaves the greatest impression on me is his ability to make simple that which others make so complicated. In that simplicity, the confusion fades and things appear so clear and easy to understand.
His ability to digest ungodly amounts of information - 10Qs, 10Ks, CNBC, the paper, magazines, deal pitches - and to identify signal amongst the noise is simply amazing.
He is loved not just for his brilliance, but also for his complete authenticity - an amazing sense of self and constancy in the face of a world fraught with change and uncertainty.
While few us, maybe none, will replicate his investment track record, there is much to aspire to in regards to his clarity of thought and his internal compass that maintains a steady heading in a stormy world.
