One of the big tech events is Techcrunch50 where a bunch of startups launch their business with a presentation. It looks like a big mess of half-baked ideas from the outside - but hey, here’s a widget startup, so it can’t be all bad. Eh? I’m not judging Tingz at this stage, I’ll go take a look and give a more considered response soon.

TC50: Tingz Adds More Widgets to Your Life

Tingz has developed shareable widgets that work across multiple platforms such as the phone, computer, and TV. They can be used to manage and synchronize your data across these devices.

The startup presented today at TechCrunch50 during the Collaboration session. You can watch a video of its presentation here.

Tingz works on Mac OS X, the iPhone, and in Windows Media Center. In each, the interface is basically the same, which Tingz believes is the most useful feature it offers. And what it offers is quite substantial: it lets you find movie listings, watch trailers, pick showtimes, and purchase tickets, acquire recipes, and help find you restaurants in your area.

You can share your “Tingz” with friends that may want to see what sort of recipes you’re looking at or where you’re going for dinner.

The site has also set up some partnerships with content providers that feature a “Tingz” link that will let you expand the service and use its functionality directly in their software. For those sites that are not partners, Tingz sports a browser plugin that will add similar functionality.

Tingz was quick to point out that its Mac, Media Center, and iPhone integrations will sync with each other so you don’t have to worry about inputting your shopping list more than once. Equally as important, Tingz will roll out support for more devices, and add new apps, over time.

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Gigya’s CEO, Eyal, will be keynoting at WidgetWebExpo next month. They are doing some amazing things and getting some amazing traction. I’m really looking forward to hearing about it from the horses mouth.

Gigya Connects MySpace and Facebook APIs

Today Gigya announced that the company’s Socialize service will begin granting access to the API on Facebook and will integrate with MySpace later this month. The company is trying to bridge the gap for social application developers that are forced to spend time porting their Facebook applications to MySpace. Theoretically this implies that Gigya is also building a connector between OpenSocial and Facebook.

The service also competes directly with Google Friend Connect in that users can access their friends on any site that uses Socialize. Honestly, I’m not quite sure how significant of an announcement this is since the real challenge is sparking developer adoption. All the leading widget platforms enjoy boasting about the impressions that they have (such as Gigya has more than 150 million people that see their widgets each month) but few boast about developer adoption.

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I’m now working hard on the next WidgetWebExpo, which takes place in London on October 9 & 10th this year. We’ll have a great range of speakers and panels for you as usual. The call for speakers is open now and I encourage you to submit soon if you have something to add to the conversation. You can fill out the form here.
These are my ideas for subjects, but I’m keen to hear yours:

Widget tools

Widget marketing:

Media

Large companys using widgets:

Is there money in widgets:

Enterprise use of widgets:

Non-profit widgets:

Widgetized Intranets:

Platforms:

Social networks and widgets:

Affiliate networks in widgets:

SEO in widgets:

Widget Metrics and Analytics:

Case studies:

Tools and platforms

Licencing widget content:

Open standards for widgets:

Opensocial:

Dataportability:

Friend Connect:

Location

New Connaught Rooms

61 – 65 Great Queen Street • Covent Garden,
London WC2B 5DA

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I’m really pleased to announce that Josh Bernoff is speaking. Josh is one of the most experienced and long serving analysts and co-author (with Charlene Li) of the book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. His session is entitled “Using Widgets to accomplish business goals”.

Josh has been at Forrester since 1995. Josh’s research, analysis, and opinions appear frequently in publications like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Broadcasting & Cable, and on national television news programs. He writes a column for Marketing News, a publication of the American Marketing Association. Josh has keynoted major conferences on television, music, marketing, and technology in Barcelona, Cannes, Chicago, London, New York, Rome, and São Paulo.

Groundswell

Right now, your customers are writing about your products on blogs and recutting your commercials on YouTube. They’re defining you on Wikipedia and ganging up on you in social networking sites like Facebook. These are all elements of a social phenomenon — the groundswell — that has created a permanent, long-lasting shift in the way the world works. Most companies see it as a threat. You can see it as an opportunity. In Groundswell, two of Forrester Research’s top analysts show you how to turn the force of customers connecting to your own advantage. Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff show how leading companies are gaining insights, generating revenues, saving money, and energizing their own customers. Whether you’re in marketing, research, support, sales, development, or even running the whole enterprise, there’s targeted advice here for you, backed up with real-world ROI to prove it works. Groundswell is based on hard consumer data and experience with dozens of companies, large and small, from Procter & Gamble to Ernst & Young to a tiny but wildly successful winery in South Africa. Hoping to learn how to take advantage of communities, blogs, wikis, Facebook, or YouTube? We’ve got lots of examples with proof they work.

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David Armano is assembling his panel for the session Micro Interactions: Can portable experiences go mainstream

People, Places + Events

Our panel will discuss “micro interactions” from the perspective of
portable, distributed content and functionality. We’ll discuss
the potential or lack of for all this to go mainstream.

I’ll be speaking at Widget Web Expo and have assembled a fine panel of professionals including:

Brian Morrissey: Adweek

David Malouf: Motorola

Ian Schafer: CEO, Deep Focus

Steph Agresta: Internet Geek Girl

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Wikis, widgets, blogs, mashups and social networks - sounds like WidgetWebExpo

FORTUNE: Web 2.0 goes to work

Web 2.0 goes to work

By Michael Copeland

On the eve of the latest and largest Internet gathering this year, O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Conference and Expo, Forrester Research dropped a report that concludes that companies will spend $4.6 billion on Web2-related technologies by 2013. What that means for you, fellow office dweller, is that Forrester believes the world of wikis, widgets, blogs, mashups and social networks will increasingly find a way into your work life.

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It’s in the widgets - the web site as solid destination is dying widget by widget. Intel pushes it all along a bit with a Mash Maker, though I think we’re going to have to invent some new terminology for this soon. Effectively you are creating your own website out of parts on the fly - I think.

Intel Mash Maker: Mash-ups for the masses

Intel wants to make the whole Web editable, just like a single Wikipedia page.
The chip giant on Tuesday will make a beta available of Intel Mash Maker, a free browser extension that allows users to modify Web pages and combine information from different sources. Its first beta works with Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7, though at this point the features are far more mature in Firefox, Intel said.

What’s different is that the actual mashing up of information on Intel Mash Maker happens on the client, rather than the server. So instead of making a different Web application to, say, plot real estate listings on Google Maps, Intel Mash Maker lets people add a widget that adds visualization to the real estate listing site.

The idea is that people can create their own customization to Web pages, either by copying existing widgets or customizing widgets to different Web pages. A person who has a widget that displays leg room on Expedia flight results can modify it for another travel site, for example.

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Marc Canter, founder of Broadband Mechanics, opera singer and larger than life evangelist for the mesh, is on a roll. If you want some notion of how widgetized content fits into a larger context, Marc’s your man.

The value of open social networks for widgets
Everybody is in favour of open social networks where widgetized content can roam freely from one place to the next - but not everyone agrees on what the definition of open social networks is. This session will take a look at the myths and reality of social networks and ask what can be done now and what do we have to do next to achieve openness - if that is indeed a good idea.

Marc’s voice How to build the mesh - #3: Shared Structured Content Servers

OK - now that we’ve shipped a few networks and I’ve written up how one’s ID, Persona and Groups (#1) and persistent ubiquitous content (#2) are important domains in building out the mesh, I’d now like to focus on a domain which has been bubbling up for years and which will also play a key role in the mesh - shared structured content servers (#3). Call it micro-content, micro-formats, tagging, meta-data, semantic web, shared knowledge bases or what have you - the idea is that content comes along with extra ’stuff’ associated with it and that all that content and data is available on public, shared servers - where a community can contribute to it - and it’s overall value goes up.

Marc Canter is the CEO of Broadband Mechanics, purveyors of a white label social networking platform called PeopleAggregator. Marc started a company called MacroMind - which became Macromedia. That means Marc and his team created the world’s first multiple player (now called Flash), the world’s first multimedia authoring system (Director) and the first system where one could create a file once – and play it back on multiple platforms.

That was in the 80’s. Marc created Interactive Music Videos, Interactive TV Talk shows, scalable content and what’s now called Ajax in the 90’s.

PeopleAggregator outputs widgets and personifies all of the standards and principles of open social networking - eg. providing control to end-users to output and control their own user data. Marc will talk about how to “build the mesh” and how open standards and proprietary formats must live side by side. Marc blogs at marc.blogs.it

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