TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Bold tech & web commentary

TechFold is technology discussion, commentary, reviews, and opinions from well outside the valley. There's no koolaid to drink here, and TechFold is not in SL, or on Twitter.

Widget-Maker JS-Kit Gets Funded

JS-Kit, maker of comment, voting, rating, and ranking widgets has been funded to the tune of 1.2M by The Entrepreneur’s Fund III, taking Kim Miller, VP of Marketing for HP.com, into their BOD. JS-Kit, in their press release, claims 5,000 sites using their products, with 1,000 new additions monthly. JS-Kit monetizes via ad-supported widgets, or ad-free subscription options.

Significance: This underlines the importance of the widget economy and ads credibility to widgets as an ad-unit and messaging vector.

Congrats and good luck to JS-Kit!

funding, js kit, vc widgets

eBay launches embeddable listing widgets

Good grief - eBay is actually doing something useful. Today, as covered by TechCrunch (I copied their widget, btw), eBay has released embeddable flash widgets. Anyone can widget any auction, and any widget you see can be easily cloned for embedding in your own site (as I did with the one on TC, it was about a 5 second process).

The widgets, are slick, useful, and easy. The are created through togo.ebay.com, and can take a variety of formats (single items, search results, slideshows). The process is very straightforward, with the exception of the fact that you need to manually enter an Item ID.

That Item ID part is the big opportunity that eBay is missing with this: IMHO it would just make sense to embed the creation tool in each listing page so that anyone can promote any listing without the need to copy and paste Item ID’s between eBay sites. A single click, in-listing widget creation tool would get much more utilization. Hopefully this is in the cards.

blogs, ebay, embed, togo widgets

5 Suggestions to make Teqlo a Survivor

Teqlo is a company that needs to find a strategy and a community - or it will at best languish in obscurity. Like Ning in its prior incarnation or Yahoo! Pipes, Teqlo aims to turn the average Jane or Joe into a developer - “A Mashup Platform for Everyone Else!” Teqlo’s everyone-friendly platform consists of an often confusing UI that allows you to link a limited selection of widgets together via a limited set of interactions to create an application which you can then run in your Teqlo account.

What Teqlo has missed are the same two points that drove Ning’s recent self-reinvention as a canned social network host, and what will keep Yahoo! Pipes a curiosity:

Conjecture #1: There’s a big difference between those who would create something new, and those who wish someone else would create it.

Conjecture #2: Those motivated enough to create something don’t need an “everyman” platform in which to do it.

Human nature is a pain in the ass when it contradicts an idea that sounds golden on paper. Teqlo’s stated target market is the very small slice that includes those with motivation but without a traditional web skill set - an awkward, small middle ground between the masses and the technically competent.

If you recall, Ning had a gruesome, flat-growth year trying to grab this market before they switched value propositions and streamlined their business model. Teqlo is heading for the same place.

Teqlo need not end up as an eBay firesale, however. IMHO, their challenge is the same as Ning’s: market segment identification. Teqlo has a unique and valuable infrastructure that should be tailored to increase acceptance in a few key, revenue driving segments.

To get there, Teqlo needs to open up their platform, and segment their marketing:

Make the “everyman” platform part of a larger segmentation strategy, and focus on the “motivated people” and find ways to make their work easier. Ning has targeted a single segment in their relaunch - social networkers; in doing so they’ve gotten out of the tiny slice left by conjectures one and two above.
Publish a widget spec so that the Teqlo community isn’t dependent on Teqlo for functionality. If WordPress can do it, you can too. Keep all of the widgets GPL’d too to spur community development. See what widgets are developed and let this inform your strategy. Support the widget community like Ballmer supports developers.
Enable external publishing of applications. If the functionality is there, enable it already, see how its used, and let that usage inform your strategy.
Clean up the vocabulary. Are they “Teqlets” or “Widgets?” What’s a “teqlet” anyway? Is a “PowerPack” like a template, or something else entirely? The mishmash of un-words makes the creation process difficult to parse out conceptually.
Aesthetics of the process: Implement a cleaner UI on the application builder. Again, IMHO WordPress sets the benchmark with their easy handling of plugins, themes, and widgets.

That’s it in a nutshell. Teqlo no-doubt has great value tied up in their plumbing, but without a strategy (other than “build it and hope they come”) informing its deployment and a community contributing to the project (as opposed to just using it), its going to fizzle away.

api, ning, pipes, techfold, teqlo widgets