Guess what? You may have seen the coverage this morning in TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Mashable, and Wired, among others, but this morning we announced the close of $8 million in Series B financing, which we are incredibly excited about (I might even say I'm Super Fired Up, which anyone here can tell you is the highest level of excitement I have). We are truly honored and humbled by the commitment and excitement our current investors Hummer Windblad Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital (by the way, did you check out their new widget?), and Michael Dearing have shown to Widgetbox, and we are thrilled to welcome the good folks at NCD Investors to the mix.
This funding illustrates the increasing value widgets are playing in the online world, and is a strong show of support for the vision of Widgetbox as we move to the next phase of our growth as a company. Just to give you all a snapshot of where we are today, Widgetbox currently works with 26,000 developers, who have created over 33,000 widgets which you can find in our gallery and on over 210,000 domains around the internet. That's a hugely distributed widget world! Just a reminder - sites like MySpace count as just one domain in our minds We are serving about 12 million widget views per day, and we had 28 million unique viewers in January, and we're growing like mad. In addition, through our accelerators, Widgetbox widgets now represent about 15% of Facebook's applications, and 60% of Bebo's. All in all, it has been an amazing year and a half since we publicly launched Widgetbox at DemoFall in September, 2006.
We've got a lot of exciting things in store for this year, and we can't wait to share them with all of you. One of the really cool things we are working on right now is helping comScore, who has recently started tracking widgets, do so more accurately. As you may or may not know, comScore is not currently counting javascript widgets in their reports, which they are working on a fix for as we speak. Since many of our widgets are javascript, this correction in their reporting will make a big difference for us and our developer community. We are thrilled to be working with the comScore team on these efforts!
Aside from metrics, there is a ton going on at Widgetbox these days. We always post about our new features and products on this blog, so please stay tuned as we've got some super cool stuff coming your way very soon!! In the meantime, I want to offer my heartfelt thanks to Giles Goodwin, Dean Moses, and Ed Anuff for having the amazing vision and foresight to start this company 2 years ago. It has been phenomenal to join this incredibly smart, driven, and fun team when we were teensy, and participate in the amazing growth we've experienced over the last year and a half. And of course, we couldn't be here without Mitchell Kertzman, Jim Goetz, Michael Dearing, and Will Price who have supported and advised us so wonderfully - thanks guys!
And while I'm being sappy, I want to offer a huge thanks to all of you, who make this community such a vibrant place to be! You are 100% awesome. Really. So here's to you (and if you are ever in the neighborhood, stop on by and say hello - we'll take you to Grumpy's)
