GigaOM

When it comes to the widget ecosystem, lavishly funded companies like Slide, Clearspring and RockYou hog the limelight. But it is Userplane, now a subsidiary of AOL, that seems to be revving up the money engine without much fanfare. The company that started out offering a web-based chat system has now morphed into a many-faceted business, including owning what might just be one of the largest widget ad networks out there.

At the D6 Conference this week in Carlsbad, Calif., I ran into Userplane founder Mike Jones, who sold his company to AOL in 2006 and now works for AOL. During our conversation, I marveled at the amount of money being pumped into the widget ecosystem while at the same time fretting about the paucity of revenue opportunities. My skepticism about the sector was outlined in an earlier post that focused on Clearspring’s latest round of funding.

While Jones generally agreed, he was quick to point out that when you serve a gigantic amount of ads in social media, you can actually make money. Userplane has been selling widget ads for a while, and Jones said that his company is doing about a billion widget-ad impressions a day. That makes it one of the top 30 ad networks as ranked by comScore. Continue Reading

Twitter, in a post on its blog, has acknowledged that it’s been having problems. It attributes some (not all) of them to so-called “popular” users that it says overloaded the system when they sent updates in too quick a succession. In other words, it was a tactical acknowledgment by the company of problems that have already been widely reported.

Of course Twitter’s most popular user is Robert Scoble, and as far as numerous successive posts have argued, he is the real source of the problem (prompting some not-unexpected foot-stomping on Scoble’s part).

Continue Reading

Microsoft Corp., in its effort to woo telecoms has come up with yet another project, Echoes, a services platform that will likely to be sold to telecom carriers. It combines Microsoft’s Live Messenger, with over the air syncing of people’s address books with presence and gift wraps it as unified communications platform.

Mary Joe Foley points out that Bill Gates has been referring to Echoes in his speeches recently. Echoes was incubated by Microsoft Israel Research’s Corporate Vice President Moshe Lichtman and is being developed by Microsoft’s Israeli Strategic Development Center, Foley reports. According to one of her sources, the new platform will be able to:

• Syncs Address book contacts over the air.
• Ensure that IM messages work seamlessly with SMS.
• Windows Live Messenger contacts get local numbers.
• Voice calls from Messenger on PC to mobiles.
• Some sort of presence.

Skype, GrandCentral and others already deliver many of these services. From that perspective there is nothing new here, except for the need of being tied to Microsoft’s platforms. Echoes’ outlines Microsoft’s biggest challenges: the inordinate amount of time they spend on developing products that are either a platform or a suite forces them to make too many compromises. One can’t blame the company whose DNA is Windows (Platform) & a Suite (Office.) This is a malady which makes them unable to move ahead and define the future.

In thinking about the desktop/web hybrid platforms that have launched or are about to be launched, I’ve decided that even if last year they were overhyped, this year we’re going to see real adoption and applications. But that presents an interesting problem for developers and eventually, for users. The vast array of options and functionalities not only makes the web experience different for different users, but it makes developing sites more complicated, much like the rise of different browsers and the proliferation of Flash has in the past.

I’ve written about MySpace using Google Gears for email, but apparently WordPress is going to take advantage of Gears in its next version, too. Twhirl uses Adobe Air to bring Twitter to the desktop and a fun program called Snackr pulls random bits from your RSS feeds to stream across the desktop. We’re still waiting for Prism from Mozilla, and yesterday Yahoo launched BrowserPlus. Again, the sheer number of these presents its own set of problems. Continue Reading

Just as any online content producer or web site owner is hungry for metrics about their web site, iPhone application developers are bound to want the same types of facts and figures surrounding the usage of their programs. New York City-based startup Pinch Media, which has received an undisclosed amount of funding from Union Square Ventures, First Round Capital and a handful of angel investors, offers iPhone SDK developers free code that gives them analytics based on unique users, active users and length of time the application is in use.

Not only has Apple has sold roughly 5.4 million iPhones to date, but it’s working hard to get the device into as many people’s hands as possible, launching it in country after country around the globe. At this point, it’s hard to gauge how large this market could become.

And with the iPhone SDK coming out in June at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, we’re about to see an explosion of apps being offered by mobile developers. Indeed, as the iPhone ecosystem continues to evolve, startups that offer tools such as Pinch Analytics are going to be really valuable.

The first day of Google I/O seemed like a coming out party for Google App Engine, the company’s competitive threat to Amazon AWS. For one, the registrations were thrown open to everyone, and for another, two new APIs were released: the image manipulation API, and (more interesting to web app hosting in general), the memcache API. Now the memcache API was something I expected from Amazon a long time ago, but perhaps they don’t use it themselves as much so it’s not in AWS.

With Yahoo in limbo and Microsoft missing in action on the Internet, Google is making a huge play for developer mindshare. As Microsoft and Sun both demonstrated very effectively, focusing on getting developers excited and making them happy is the key to the success of a platform. Google I/O appears to be Google’s big play for developers. And so far it seems to be working. Continue Reading