Out On the Town

It's been a busy couple days for us.  There are several conferences in October where we've had and will have the chance to show off our stuff.  This past week, Tracy and Moses attended Community Next in Sunnyvale, CA.  We hosted the Red Bull table and spoke with a bunch of developers about how to make Widgetbox better.  One of the developers - Amit Gupta - demo-ed our App Accelerator for Facebook and blogged about it a bit.  Thanks, Amit!  Also, big thanks to Noah Kagan, one of the conference organizers, for supporting our involvement.

Yesterday, we attended Graphing Social Patterns in San Jose, CA which focused on the business and marketing of Facebook.  There were attendees from companies in the widget space and Facebook application development arena.  Giles spoke on a panel called Apps, Widgets, and Viral Marketing on and off Facebook and it went great.  One of the big questions was what happens to widget platform companies like Widgetbox in a world of Facebook APIs?  We responded, "Facebook helped validate the widget business and is only one of many platforms for widgets.  Widgetbox will continue to help developers write once and publish on Facebook and off."  We continue to make that commitment to make you successful both on and off Facebook.  See photo of Giles below.....

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Welcome new Widgetbox team member Tam Huynh!

The Widgetbox team is growing fast and we're super excited that Tam Huynh is on board.  Tam brings a ton of global perspective to Widgetbox despite the fact that he comes from LA (kidding! kidding!).  Tam is a global traveler having completed three trips around the world.  He's also a huge UCLA basketball fan and did not miss a home game in his entire four years as a UCLA undergrad. 

Having traveled across the globe, Tam discovered his love for world cuisine and has been to four iron chef restaurants - likely on those round-the-world trips.  He says the food is generally better in Paris than New Zealand but would recommend visiting both. 

His favorite book is the Lonely Planet, but of course.  And, his movie tastes have changed over time as he says, "In my 20s, I thought Before Sunrise was a great flick.  But, now in my 30s, I think Before Sunrise is far superior."

And, finally he is celebrating a birthday today.  Happy Birthday, Tam!

Oh, yeah.  Tam's a product manager.  You'll be seeing a lot of him around.

See Tam in Tokyo in the below photo on one of his world jaunts.

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What do Perez Hilton, Avi Goldfinger, Widgetbox, and RockYou have in common?

You guessed it - Facebook!!! 

Our new App Accelerator is taking off like a weed (or a rocket, which I guess goes better with "accelerator" than the whole weed metaphor...), and I couldn't be more excited about it.  As of this morning, 450 Widgetboxers have turned their widgets into Apps - and we only announced this a couple of days ago!  Wow, just wow.  It is so exciting to see the community response to this.  Some of these apps already have thousands of subscriptions, and this is just the beginning.

We are also so thrilled that we have partnered with RockYou to help our community take a first stab at monetizing their widgets through our DevShare program.  As I wrote about before, we firmly believe that the success of Widgetbox is defined by the success of our community, and we will continue to work as hard as we can to bring you widget fame and fortune.

If you haven't App Accelerated yet, be sure to give it a whirl, and then let us know what you think.  We're already hard at work on the next version of the Accelerator, so stay tuned for more widgetastic features.  We hope you are as excited about this as we are!

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Calling All Future Facebook Stars - Yes, That Means You!

Just wanted to let you know about a very cool product we recently released. It accelerates turning your Flash and HTML/JavaScript widgets into a Facebook app. Hence, we call it -- the App Accelerator for Facebook. The best part? Absolutely no coding needed (no need to learn FBML! How cool is that?).  Plus, it has some really great extra special features such as:

• Facebook news feeds, friend invites, and a comment wall all hook you into the heart of Facebook’s powerful social graph
• Inclusion in the Facebook application directory with your name as the developer of the app
• The chance to make money with our new DevShare program

Over 300 apps have been made by you guys in just over a week and we've gotten some great feedback from users. Also, Cnet and Mashable tested it out and aside from some bugs here and there (thanks for finding those, guys!), they said it was fast and easy.

The Widgetbox team worked really hard to get this out the door and our next version is coming soon so stay tuned! Big thanks to Moses, Giles, Grant, Ethan, Omar, Dave, Chris, George, and Julie for the outstanding effort. They worked many a long night to get this up and running for all of you. We hope you like it!

I also wanted to provide more detail on our DevShare program which is a feature of the App Accelerator. DevShare allows you to make money off your new-found Facebook fame. You just click the check box after you make your app. All we need from you is the email address attached to your PayPal account, and we split any revenue earned with you 50/50. Where does the money come from, you ask? Well, we just signed a partnership with RockYou we're super excited about. They're going to help us sell ad inventory on your app, with which they have had great success. We have other partners in the pipeline which will give you even more opportunities to make some moolah through DevShare – both on Facebook and off.

Let us know what you're thinking. We'd love feedback on the product and ideas you have to make it better. As always, thanks for using Widgetbox!

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Did You See??

So many exciting things going on at Widgetbox!  You may have noticed that as of this past Wednesday morning, we now have a very sexy new front door.  If you haven't seen it yet, stop reading right now and go check it out. 

Well, don't actually stop reading, 'cause we have some other fun things to let you know about - you can just check out this slick screenshot below.  As soon as you are done with this post, though, go look at the slick flash and clean site - promise??  And then thank George, Julie, Omar, and Pam for all their amazing hard work that went into this new entry into Widgetbox land.  We are pretty fired up about it, and we'd love to hear your thoughts!

If that weren't enough to make your Friday, we also announced today our partnership with Netvibes.  If you are unfamiliar with Netvibes, these guys are the pioneers in personal startpages, and they let individuals assemble all in one place their favorite websites, blogs, email accounts, social networks, search engines, instant messengers, photos, videos, podcasts, widgets, and everything else they enjoy on the Web. 

Today, Netvibes announced its premium widget partners, and we are thrilled to be working with them to bring Widgebox content to the Netvibes ecosystem. 

Netvibes is a great service, and one I use every day.  Up until now, I've been using our ability to post our widgets to Netvibes, but this new integration allows you to get our widgets directly on Netvibes, which is just fantastic.

We're are so excited to continue to be the conduit for our awesome developers to get their widgets all across the web.  It is our mission to help all of you spread your widgets as far and wide as possible, and this strategic partnership is another great step towards that goal. 

As always, we love to hear from you, so please reach out and let us know how we are doing.  And if you don't already have a Netvibes account, sign up for one today and add some Widgetbox widgets to your startpage! 

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