A week ago, the news that Gigya had raised $11 million more in funding hit Techcrunch. this brings Gigya total funding to 23.5 in over two years. lots of things have happened with it in two years and it is one of the examples where you could said it has paid off what it was invested into it.
It got solid analytics, a good Widget Ad network and what is more important: Two good products.
Gigya Widlfire: Their High Spread Sharing module that is used as the main attraction to their offerings of backing it up with a easy way to port, distribute, advertise, manage and optimize any widget you have developed if you bring it to them. This makes Gigya a competitor to many widget start ups (musestorm, widgetbox, springwidgets and clearspring). yet it don`t competes directly with no one of them because of the way they do things and because they are most able to actually partner up with other widget startups like Sproutbuilder for example.
Gigya Socialize: Their Social Graph enabled Widget Strategy. i called it MyBlogLog 2.0 and i still stand by it even up to now because it gives a blog a Social Network by leveraging info from visitors and other social network and web 2.0 services just like MyBlogLog. with a big difference. Gigya Socialize seems to be truly making that portable into a Widget or Widgetization of a Blog or Site. this a approach recently adopted even by white listing Social Network builder LiveWorld with their LiveBar Widget. Gigya Socialize could be the consumer version of that too if they want it. it also competes with Google Friend Connect. this hints at it being a forward thinking product since none of the last two mentioned Widgets and Widget services are yet out for the public either.
Gigya seems to have quite a lot of faith in Socialize given the statements Techcrunch collected:
Gigya currently monetizes only its Wildfire service, and it does so through the use of branded widgets that get offered to consumers after they add non-branded widgets to their profile pages and blogs. While President Rooly Eliezerov says the company has plans to monetize Socialize a few quarters from now (through sponsored news feed items and other advertising-related means), it is currently focused on distributing the technology as widely as possible for free. The company has been working with big brands and media companies such as Fox Searchlight, which has integrated Socialize into its official Choke website
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Eliezerov says that, eventually, he expects Socialize to become about ten times the value of the Wildfire widget network since many websites (small and large) will become connected to social networks over the next couple of years.
Ten times the value of Wildfire.. that is quite a bold statement. even if they only managed to get Socialize to be 3 times the value of Wildfire. it does shows what they consider to be their most possible future. it is actually surprising because of how well Wildfire looks to be doing as it is. but the truth is that the Widget Space is a quite competed space. so having a plan b is a must. Socialization looks to be the common trend lately in terms of Widget Startups. Clearspring is now interested in Social Bookmarking and Content Sharing. ShareThis wants to compete with MyBloglog and take cues from Social News sites. Widgetbox gets into Blog Networking and now Gigya is saying they want to compete with Google and MyBlogLog too. i think that is enough to call it a trend on what is expected to be the future of Widgets for 2009: Further Socialization and Social Graph Leveraging. just as Advertising, Marketing and Analytics was the Focus in Widget Startups for 2008 up to now.
I think this is good thinking as long as it truly evolves the way Widgets expose themselves and bring up more developed portable experiences.
There is only one thing i wonder about. there will be a Gigya Directory site to bring up all that info together?. i would certainly like the idea of having a Wildfire Directory and check out what widgets are using a Wildfire H.S.S module and a site that will show me what blogs are using Gigya Socialize.
via Techcrunch
