Not to be out done by the recent press release of RockYou’s $35M round of funding, KickApps and Clearspring announces a partnership to “ACCELERATE
WIDGET CREATION, DISTRIBUTION AND ADVERTISING.”
We’ve not seen any of the KickApps Widget Studio beta or features that spawn out of this partnership, so this is a very interesting development and we’ll keep an eye on it.
KICKAPPS AND CLEARSPRING PARTNER TO
ACCELERATE WIDGET CREATION, DISTRIBUTION AND ADVERTISING
Companies Collaborate on Advancing KickApps’ WidgeAD™ Format and Clearspring’s Widget Ad Network
New York and Mc Lean, VA, June 10, 2008 — KickApps, the leading on demand social media platform, and Clearspring Technologies Inc., the world’s largest widget syndication and tracking service, today announced a strategic partnership to further accelerate widget usage and monetization. Under the agreement, Clearspring will promote KickApps’ new WYSIWYG Widget Studio (currently in beta), a self-service widget-authoring environment to the Clearspring user base. This will enable Clearspring customers to easily build their own rich-media and interactive widgets with tremendous ease. KickApps will use Clearspring’s powerful distribution and tracking services to provide one-click distribution and in-depth analytics to anyone using the KickApps Platform.
Quality stock photos are hard to find and cost money. That is, until now…
PicApp.com is a service that states on their about page, “Add the best stock photos to your blog “for free!” Off course, it’s not “completely” free. You will have to give up some real estate for ads served along with the photos. It’s up to each individual person do decide if it’s worth it or not, but in our opinion it’s a pretty good compromise.
We like the “animated” version of their photo widget a bit better. The reason is that the ad is hidden after the initial load. Their classic widget displays the ad at all times and takes up more room. Both versions are embed below so you can see what we mean.
PicApp is pretty simple to use. However, the site seems a bit slow and the library of photos is currently lacking. They are a new company so we fully expect these issues to be resolved quickly.
Now, if this were a post about beach volleyball and in particular Kerri Walsh hitting against Elaine Youngs, you can see how PicApp can bring life and a lot of value to the post. And, it didn’t cost us a dime.
We had a quick exchange of comments over at widgetBeat a couple of weeks ago, following their review of the SimplyHired widget. During the comments, the thought of a job search mashup widget proved interesting. After finding some spare time, we were able prototype a functional widget. While the widget is mostly functional, it is more of a prototype and academic exercise than anything else. Keep that in mind if you choose to use this widget.
Searches are run against each of the services and the results are displayed in the widget.
Click on a job title to view a summary of the position. For more details from the source site, click on the “more details” button and a new page will open with the complete listing.
Whenever someone grabs the widget for themselves they will have the opportunity to set the size and default search criteria for their widget.
