Widget Summit. Day 1.

There are about 250 folks here at the Widget Summit, a two day conference for companies that are building, syndicating, tracking, and monetizing Widgets.

I was on the the enterprise widget panel (a new addition to this year's conference) yesterday morning with Jeff Ragusa from Google Apps Solutions.

Jeff spoke about their over-arching web-based platform for search, e-mail, and portals. I focused on our real-world successes; customers who are deriving value from a desktop dashboard within the enterprise. It was great to be able to talk about our customers (Lufthansa, PNC, EMC, and IBM) and their deployment of our product.

Some of the questions we received were: "How do third party data sources help deploy widgets within the enterprise?" While Google said that enterprise is interested in adding third-party data, our experience suggests a different answer. In our experience, when the IT group deploys a dashboard, they are laser focused on getting their internal business data on the employee's desktops, and their data alone. In fact, they want a product they can completely lockdown, manage the deployment, and keep everything within the firewall.

I ended up chatting with quite a few companies afterwards about widgets in the enterprise, and the message was the same: download and try KlipFolio yourselves. It's easy to get your data into the product and, when you want to deploy it, we have a product called KlipFolio Enterprise that can help.

Here are some themes we saw at the conference:

There are companies springing up to support the widget vendors.
Last year there were just the widget vendors, this year there are companies that are springing up to service the widget vendors. Specifically, tracking widgets and managing ads in widgets.

No one seems to be making much money yet.
The business models for widgets (i.e. companies that are in the business of building widgets) are still being worked out. It's early days as developers move from stand-alone widget platforms to integrate with social networks.

Enterprise is still early days.
There was lots of interest in our panel session, but not many companies had started using widgets in the enterprise yet. Yet many of them could see the value of having a dashboard and alerting platform.

Widget providers are starting to go vertical.
The gydget platform was focused just on the entertainment space.

Facebook is making a big impact.
Over half the web-based widget providers talked about their experience creating widgets for FaceBook. Two comapnies that were seeing big update were rockyou.com and slide.com .

The success with FaceBook APIs are being replicated across the social networks
Many folks commented they are seeing (or expect to see) the other social networks open their platform.


Fred