It’s a Widget World

Ike Walker
Database Architect

As part of Widgetbox's new staff series—we'll be bringing you occasional guest posts from members of the Widgetbox team.

It seems like everybody is obsessed with the World Cup right now: Who’s in, who’s out, who has exceeded expectations and who has disappointed their fans. I’ve been following it as closely as I can, and I find that even when I’m looking at our databases I think about the World Cup.

Given the global nature of the Internet, we serve millions of widgets all around the world every day. We also gather lots of data about these widgets and the way they are used. I thought it would be fun to take a peek at some of this data with a focus on the eight countries that made it into the World Cup quarterfinals this year.

Here are those eight countries, along with their current world soccer ranking (FIFA Ranking) and population. I ordered them by ”annual per capita widgets served”, which means the average number of our widgets seen by each resident of that country last year.

1) Netherlands
FIFA Ranking: 4
Population: 16,620,675
Annual per capita widgets served: 16.72

The Netherlands is perhaps the best team to have never won the World Cup. They’ve been runners-up twice, both times losing to the host nation and on one of those occasions losing in extra time. With their epic upset of Brazil, they're in the semifinals with a chance to change their winless World Cup history

We serve far more widgets per capita in the Netherlands than in any of the other countries on this list, many of them on the Hyves social networking site. The most popular one right now is Gratis.nl. Apparently that widget offers lots of free stuff. I’m sure what the Dutch fans want right now is lots of free kicks to help their team remain unbeaten in their quest for the Cup.

2) Spain
FIFA Ranking: 2
Population: 46,951,532
Annual per capita widgets served: 5.63

Spain is a country with a great team right now, but they do not have a long history of World Cup success. Their best finish was fourth place back in 1950. After their nail-biting win over Paraguay in their quarter-final match, they still have a chance to win their first World Cup title

Spain’s favorite widget is Marcador sportYou, a great source of Spanish language soccer news that is currently focused on the World Cup, like much of the rest of the world.

3) Germany
FIFA Ranking: 6
Population: 81,757,600
Annual per capita widgets served: 2.08

Germany has long been one of the best of many great European teams. They have made the semifinals at the last two World Cups, but haven’t won the Cup since 1990.

Germany’s favorite widget is Countdown Creator Pro. Countdown widgets have always been popular, and this has been one of our most popular pro widgets since we first introduced it. I’ve seen lots of World Cup countdowns making use of our cool Pro features, but one feature we don’t have is to predict who will win the Cup on July 11.

4) Argentina
FIFA Ranking: 7
Population: 40,134,425
Annual per capita widgets served: 1.96

World Cups are like Potato Chips; you don’t want to stop at one. Argentina was one of four quarterfinalists this year who have won the Cup more than once in the past, having won in both 1978 and 1986.

Argentina loves Maukie – the virtual cat. Maukie has always been one of our more popular widgets all around the world, but it’s especially popular in Argentina. Who knows, if you put Maukie on your site maybe you will see a big boost in traffic from Argentina. Just make sure you don’t confuse Maukie with Messi, the star of the Argentine National Team and the 2009 FIFA World Player of the Year.

5) Brazil
FIFA Ranking: 1
Population: 193,151,000
Annual per capita widgets served: 1.65

Brazil stands alone in many aspects of World Cup history. They have won the Cup more times than any other country (5), they are the only country to win the Cup away from their home continent, and they are the only country to have won the Cup without at least one of its Cup victories coming as the host country.

Brazil also loves widgets, with one of the favorites being the Google Maps widget. That widget might come in handy when Brazil hosts the World Cup 4 years from now and lots of international travelers try to find their way around Brazil to follow their teams.

6) Uruguay
FIFA Ranking: 16
Population: 3,361,000
Annual per capita widgets served: 1.49

Despite being a very small country in both area and population, Uruguay has won the Cup twice in the past and has made it to the semifinals this year.

The widget we serve most often in Uruguay is NeoCounter, a web counter that counts hits by country. So not only is that widget the most popular in Uruguay, but it probably knows that already.

7) Paraguay
FIFA Ranking: 31
Population: 6,349,000
Annual per capita widgets served: 0.39

Even though their quarterfinal match with Spain went the distance, Paraguay was the definite underdog, having never made the semifinals in the past and barely making their way into the quarterfinals by defeating Japan with Penalty Kicks. Useless trivia: Paraguay was the only landlocked country left in this year’s World Cup semifinals.

Paraguay’s favorite widget is the Twitter Widget. Whose tweets are they reading in Paraguay? Who knows, maybe the movie buffs down in Paraguay like to use the Twitter Widget to see what Roger Ebert has to say about the latest summer blockbuster (http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/).

8 ) Ghana
FIFA Ranking: 32
Population: 23,837,000
Annual per capita widgets served: 0.04

Ghana has a lot of great young players, having recently won the under-20 World Cup in 2009. They were certainly an underdog in the World Cup, but they are very popular and advanced further than any other African team.

Fittingly, Ghana’s favorite widget right now is the Sky Sports – Football widget, a widget devoted to soccer news. That widget is seen mostly in the US and the UK, but after that Ghana is its most popular country.

—When Ike isn't being a Renaissance Man--Karaoke Master, Copy Editor, Music Video Star--he's moonlighting in Boston as our Database Architect

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Contegix Spotlight of Widgetbox

This month our friends over at Contegix launched both their newsletter and client spotlight series, and we were very excited to be featured in both!

The client spotlight and newsletter spot featured our Co-Founder and CTO Giles Goodwin in a Q&A. Giles spoke about our use of Contegix as our managed hosting provider, how they enable us to deliver awesome widgets and mobile sites to our customers, and how the fit with our future product strategy.

To find out about our work with Contegix, read a copy of the interview below, or read the original interview post on the Contegix site

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June 29th, 2010

Monthly Client Spotlight: Widgetbox

Each month, Contegix will spotlight one of the many, unique clients that call Contegix home for their internet infrastructure. They range across industries – from innovative tech start-ups, to software giants and Fortune 500 companies. You’ll learn what challenges they faced while growing, and just how technology plays a crucial role in their daily operations. We’ve also opened the floor to our clients to ask us a question of choice – from the serious to the somewhat silly, but all informative. Enjoy!

FIRST UP: Widgetbox –

Co-founder and CTO, Giles Goodwin

Contegix: Why was Widgetbox started?

Giles:

In 2006, content was highly available through feeds like RSS, Atom and JSON, but we believed content syndication should be the building blocks of websites, blogs, and profiles–not just consumed in feed readers. So we built Widgetbox to provide a gallery of Widgets – tools for developers to build widgets, and a platform for anyone to wrap that feed content up in attractive and interactive mini-applications called widgets. Our widgets can be used as building block components to add content to sites and applications ranging from interactive content rich ads to mobile sites optimized for iPhone and Android devices.

Contegix: What are some of the challenges that Widgetbox faced while growing?

Giles:

The two biggest challenges we’ve faced are keeping up with the fast pace changes in the internet -like the shift users made from MySpace to Facebook, and the emergence of the iPhone-and keeping up with the growth of our user base. We grew from a few thousand widget impressions a day, to nearly a billion a month over the last three years. Both of these challenges mean scaling up our technology to work with multiple other systems to be reliable for all our users.

Contegix: How has technology played a role in the success of Widgetbox?

Giles:

The natural re-usability of widgets has been key for us. We use the same underlying widget components and infrastructure to serve ads to the world’s largest online websites as we do to provide small businesses their html5 iPhone sites. This means we can develop new products and features quickly and they scale well without any extra work. We also have a very productive product organization. Our process for building software works well, and we release new code to users each week. Finally, we take advantage of lots of open source projects such as MySQL, Memcached, and Spring, like many other internet companies, bringing big advantages to development and operations.

Contegix: What made Widgetbox decide to go with us?

Giles:

We needed a managed hosting provider who could provide us with very good reliability and work with us to understand the specifics of our software. I asked around and Contegix was recommended by 3 different CTOs or Ops Leads at various other companies we worked with. My initial meetings with Matthew and Craig were great, and they actually helped us out with some issues we were having with our previous provider.

Contegix: How do you see us fitting into your technology strategy now and in the future?

Giles:

Contegix has proved to be great at both supporting us day-to-day and managing our growth. We recently doubled capacity of one of our services over a weekend. They handled that very well, and came up with creative solutions to specific issues that would have blocked other hosting providers. We’ll use them more as we grow because we know we can count on the service they provide and they’ll own the problems with us, not provide us with new ones along the way.

Contegix: What other companies in the tech field (and beyond) do you admire, and why?

Giles:

The obvious ones are Apple for design, and Google for scale; also Amazon for turning a book selling business into a revolutionary technology company. There is also a slide deck floating around the web about Netflix’s values, which is pretty impressive and full of things I hope we can claim when we’re as big as they are.

Contegix: Fair Game: Ask us a question. Serious or silly. And we’ll answer. What would you like to know about us? (Question will go to a tech person or management member for answer.)

Giles:

What are your long-term goals for Contegix? How do you plan to reach them?

Answered by Matthew Porter, Co-Founder and CEO of Contegix:

“Long-term goals are often difficult to reach in any business, especially in technology. Therefore, we believe the goals must always be based around our core value. For us, that is pushing technology and our delivery of technology to meet the customer’s needs. We make steps on a daily basis to achieve these goals. This is what caused us to deliver on the promise of an enterprise-grade cloud in 2009. In the next few months, our customers will hear of a few exciting announcements that will allow us to better serve them in a big way.”

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Widgetbox, YQL, and Pipes

The following was a guest blog post that was featured on the Yahoo! Developer Network Blog. Read the original post on the Yahoo! network.

Widgetbox, YQL, and Pipes

The tools we offer at Widgetbox allow publishers and casual developers to quickly turn structured data like RSS or ATOM feeds into Web widgets and mobile sites. However, despite the number of blogs and CMS instances, not all publishers have access to their own data in an easy-to-use format like XML. Small companies — such as independent retail shops and restaurants — still rely on static websites.

Yahoo! provides the tools to bridge the gap between static or unstructured content and Widgetbox tools, such as our blog widget and Mobile Site Builder, which require structured content. Yahoo! Query Language (YQL) is a single REST endpoint with a SQL-like syntax for accessing data from large variety of web services.

YQL also exposes a collection of data manipulation tables that make working with existing data, such as HTML, much more concise than traditional screen-scraping techniques.

Suppose a restaurant has a menu on its website with the following HTML structure:



The following YQL query selects all of the content (*) from the list item tags in any unordered list with the class "menu" using a XPATH selector.

select * from html where url="http://myrestaurant.com/menu.html" and 
     xpath='//ul[@class="menu"]/li'

The result is a XML result-set that is one step closer to being transformed into a widget or mobile site.





While the YQL XML results could be transformed through a content proxy using XSLT, Yahoo! Pipes already provides the rest of the tools needed to transform the raw XML into nicely formatted RSS. When you combine the YQL query and the Create RSS Pipes operator, and then map the paragraph and span tags from each menu item to the title and description elements of an RSS feed item, you transform the static HTML menu into an RSS feed.

Updating the HTML menu by hand updates the RSS feed automatically.

The Open Data Tables collection enables developers or content providers to open access to their Web-based data through YQL. Open Data Tables helps to unify API endpoints that can change between API versions, and it simplifies syntax by using the YQL query syntax. While YQL provides a wealth of data and access to many Yahoo! APIs by default, Open Data Tables allows for a mapping between YQL and any web service.

For instance, continuing with our restaurant example, Yelp already provides RSS feeds for restaurant reviews. Any of those RSS feeds could be plugged directly into a Widgetbox blog widget or a mobile site feed page. However, a restaurant will most likely want to feature its best reviews, While Yelp ratings are inserted into the title of each review, YQL queries and Pipes manipulations makes highlighting the positive reviews much easier.

If you enable community data tables and enter the following query, you search for the term "Horizon restaurant" with review ratings four stars or better, in San Francisco.

select reviews from yelp.review.search where term='horizon restaurant'

   and reviews.rating > 3 and location='San Francisco, ca' and

   ywsid='6L0Lc-yn1OKMkCKeXLD4lg'

The result is YQL XML with more information than the regular Yelp review feed.



Again, using Pipes to map the reviews to RSS items makes the result usable in any feed-based Widgetbox product.



Creating a mobile site for our example restaurant turns their otherwise static web site into a mobile site with just a few more clicks.



For comparison, here's the original static web site:

Guest post by Jeff Remer, Software Engineer, Widgetbox

Make a customized mobile site using our Mobile Site Builder »

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10 Incredibly Useful (and Free) Resources Every iPad Developer Should Know About

Omar Megdadi
Software Engineer

As part of Widgetbox's new staff series—we'll be bringing you occasional guest posts from members of the Widgetbox team.

Last month, Widgetbox began to equip the front-end Development team with brand spankin' new iPads. It was definitely an Oprah moment during that morning's SCRUM meeting, you could imagine Giles our CTO shouting out "You get an iPad! You get an iPad!" It was actually happening, I was becoming an iPad owner, I was in. If you could have seen my face, I'm sure it looked something like this :-o. I was excited to begin using it, in a new toy kind of way, but also as a canvas to unleash my creativity. At first, I expected the experience on the iPad to be very similar to that of the iPhone I've been using for years, after all the iPad is basically a larger iPod Touch, right? If you have used an iPad, then you probably know, although it's similar to the iPhone's user interface, the iPad is a completely new device meant for new applications designed for the large screen. When iPhoneOS 2.0 came out, I began seriously trying to learn Cocoa Touch and have since built a few applications in my spare time (that haven't seen the light of day.)

Now that I have an iPad, and with Apple's recent public release of iOS4.0, the idea of developing for the device sounds pretty intriguing. I have been trying to get a handle on iOS (formerly iPhoneOS) for a few years now. It hasn't been the easiest transition from my garbage collected world of Java and ActionScript, but with the help of Google and a few lucky queries I managed to find my way. I've collected 10 of my favorite resources, the ones I've returned to time and time again. Whether you're a seasoned iPhone developer looking to get jump into iPad development, or a complete newbie to Cocoa Touch, you'll want to bookmark these links to help you make the most out of your iPad apps. As an added bonus all of the resources listed here are FREE resources available for you to use! We'd love to hear what you think are your essential iPad developer resources, let us know what sites are your go-to references in the comments. Enjoy! (Listed in no particular order.)

1. iPad GUI PSD (Photoshop Template) http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/2010/02/01/ipad-gui-psd/

Teehan+Lax does it again! This time they have put together a free PSD containing all the parts of the iPad's UI in a beautiful template (PSD Format). If you find yourself needing to mock up a screen or having to create a custom button, this is the place to start. You'll find a host of resources buried within this template from fonts to buttons, UIKit elements, and even a full iPad layer perfect for mocking up marketing materials. This is just as complete as their first version created for the iPhone. The template includes incredibly high fidelity replicas of the most common iPad UI elements. I highly recommend that you keep this close to you. (Download PSD).
I use this template for designing layouts, creating screenshots, and just pure inspiration.

2. LiveView for iPhone & iPad http://www.zambetti.com/projects/liveview/

From developer Nicholas Zambetti, comes a nifty application called LiveView which allows you to interact with your apps on the device without having to pay the $99 Apple Developer Program fee. It's not the real deal, you won't be able to install your apps on your iPad with this software, but while you're learning how to use the SDK it's a nice option for testing if you want to avoid shelling out the cash. The app is basically a VNC app for your iPad that allows you to see an iPad sized region of your computer screen letting you see your UI in your hands on the device. It easily connects to the LiveView Sceencaster server application which you need to have running on your computer. In recent versions, LiveView can go fullscreen, and it also has the option to relay touch events through to your computer allowing you to interact with your apps while they are running in the iPad Simulator. The first time I experienced one of my apps on an actual iPhone in the palm of my hand was a very gratifying experience. They offer iPhone support as well. Get it now!
I use this app to test out my user interfaces and verify the interaction experience.

3. XCode Tips & Tricks http://stackoverflow.com/questions/146297/what-are-those-little-xcode-tips-tricks-you-wish-you-knew-about-2-years-ago

I am a Java coder by day, spending most of my time coding in IntelliJ. One day I was frustrated with how noticeably more efficient I am in IntelliJ than I am in XCode. I was pretty sure it was the software, but the more I got to explore XCode, I found out that it was, in fact, a beast. So I went to Google to ask what I was missing. You ask and you shall receive... This is one of my favorite webpages on the entire internet. Partly because I practically Googled this exact question only to find this thread with almost 2 years worth of tips and tricks. But mostly due to the fact that it contains so many gems that I have yet to find in any other posts regarding the subject, making this the most complete collection of XCode tips and tricks I've ever seen on the Web. I can't even pick one as my favorite, so just head over to Stack Overflow and check out the endless amount of community involvement. If you have something that's not on the list, make sure to add it.
I used these tips to become an XCode ninja, seriously.

4. iPad Human Interface Guidelines http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/General/Conceptual/iPadHIG/Introduction/Introduction.html

Apple has done the hard work for us by defining what the Human Computer Interaction should be like on the iPad. In my opinion, they have done an exceptional job of encouraging developers to produce experiences that really embrace those design principles. The tools provided for you in the SDK are great to get you started, but visually they aren't the most exciting elements. The UI building blocks available in Interface Builder are intended to be used as a proxy for how your app will behave. At first, I was frustrated with the limited customization available within Interface Builder, but once I figured out how to make the UIKit elements look like I wanted, I understood the power of Apple's iPad HIG. It is intended to establish a consistent user experience so that when a user finds my app, they just know how to interact with it making the entire experience a consistent one regardless of what application context you are in.
I use this document to help me understand what my app should and shouldn't do.

5. Today in iOS Podcast http://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/today-in-ios-podcast-the-unofficial/id252820844

As soon as I got my iPad, I found that I began using my iPhone a lot more. But really, it was just to get to know my iPad a little better. By the recommendation of our CEO, I have now become addicted to listening to podcasts with the Stitcher Radio iPhone app where I found the recently renamed Today in iOS podcast. These guys offer a great show full of Apple updates, iPad news, app reviews, interviews, and many other topics surrounding Apple's iOS. If you're looking for a good way to keep up-to-date with iOS news, this is definitely worth checking out.
I use this podcast to get my weekly fill of topical iOS banter.

6. appsamuck http://appsamuck.com/

This one's more of an iPhone developer's resource, but I had to include it because it's too good not to. 31 FREE downloadable iPhone applications (with entire source code) available for you to download and learn from. I came across appsamuck while reading their iPhone Game Development book where they offer great tutorials and tips for getting started with iOS game development. Here you'll find tutorials ranging from something as simple as setting up your first iPhone application to advanced topics like how to implement particle emitters to simulate flames for visual effects. Each application has a description page which tells you a little bit about the application and what lessons it can help teach you. They say the best way to learn is by example; if that is true, then this is the best way to learn.
I use these examples (and book) for code samples and to learn Objective-C.

7. Glyphish http://glyphish.com/

Glyphish is simply a free set of monochromatic icons for use in UI buttons and tab bars. The set includes 130 icons ready to import into your project. There is a great range of icons available allowing you to satisfy most UI requirements. If you can't find an icon in this set, you're probably trying too hard. The icons are distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
I use these icons so I can spend time focusing on the details.
I use these icons so I can spend time focusing on the details.

8. three20 http://three20.info/

An Open-Source iOS UI development framework. Have you ever used the Facebook application and wonder, "Man, I wish I could have these UI elements in my app without the hassle of having to build it all myself?" Well, me too! You don't need to wish, because three20 is here to solve this. This is the UI framework that the actual Facebook application is built on top of. The developers have done the community an amazing service by making this available for us to use. The overview provides a nice glimpse at what is available via this framework. If you're planning on building any custom UI, this is a great place to start your implementation.
I use this framework to include complex UIs in my apps without needing to code them.

9. OpenFeint http://www.openfeint.com/

OpenFeint is an Open-Source Social Gaming Network that runs embedded within thousands of iOS apps. The premise behind OpenFeint is not to allow for interactive gameplay, but to act as a hub for players of various games to manage contacts, share their achievements, post their high scores, and find out about other games that might interest them. They claim to be "The coolest thing since sliced awesome." I'm not sure what that is supposed to mean, but from my experience, OpenFeint is pretty awesome. Although Apple recently announced plans for their own social gaming network, Game Center, I'm not suspecting OpenFeint will be going anywhere soon. Every game I've played with OpenFeint integration has had a consistent great experience around the social features making it a definite plus for me when purchasing games in the AppStrore. From a development perspective adding it to a game can be less than a days work. It's an entire social gaming hook for your app that is pretty much pluggable. It's awesome.
I use OpenFeint as a gamer, and want to build a game just so I can implement it.

10. Cocos2D-iPhone http://code.google.com/p/cocos2d-iphone/

Cocos2d for iPhone is a 2D graphics framework for managing your 2D assets. The framework allows for building robust applications using the same API as the original cocos2d design, but instead of using python it uses Objective-C. This framework is being used in many of the games in the App Store, and is a great accelerator for any project that includes custom graphics beyond the standard UI components. Using Quartz or Core Animation in your app can be an insurmountable challenge for some; if you're having trouble, give cocos2D for iPhone a shot, you may be surprised how easy it is to create elaborate transitions and effects using the built in cocos2D classes.
I use cocos2D to easily manage the sprites in some of my application that require animation.

For another iPhone resource, check out our Mobile Site Builder. With our Mobile Site Builder you can quickly create an HTML5-based mobile site for your business or brand.

—When Omar isn't destroying co-workers at the iPhone game Eliminate or planning romantic dinner dates for his wife, he's a front-end engineer here at Widgetbox

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Inform Audiences with the Video Widget

The Video Gallery widget—the newest addition to our Pro widget collection—allows you to easily assemble your Facebook, YouTube, and Vimeo content into a professional-looking video gallery.

With the Video Gallery widget you can inform audiences of your services and products with videos such as screencasts, recorded conferences, demos, product showcases, and more.

Once you’ve added all your videos, you can further personalize your widget by arranging the order and changing the titles of your videos, and customizing the look and feel of your widget.

To help you get more out of your Video Gallery widget, we also recently added a social sharing feature that allows users to post and share content from your Video Gallery widget to their Facebook and Twitter pages.

As with all of our Pro widgets, all users can make a Video Gallery widget, but Pro users get even more customization options for their widget.

Make your own Video Gallery widget »
Go Pro to take advantage of Pro features »

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