• Social network widget maker RockYou has raised $14 million from Japan’s SoftBank (largest investor in Yahoo Japan) and $3 million from Korea’s SK Telecom.
• RockYou & SoftBank are creating a joint venture company with their sites set on three major distribution opportunities:
  • Xianoei, “Chinese Facebook” that rolled out an app platform similar to Zuckerberg’s earlier this year. Recently the site unveiled a virtual currency system that requires the fake dollars to be purchased by real cash to buy virtual goods, a space that RockYou is no stranger to thanks to Facebook. (SoftBank has invested $400M into Xianoei.)
  • Yahoo Japan, which is bigger than Google in the country, is launching its own version of Yahoo’s developer platform that RockYou could gain a foothold in, especially thanks to SoftBank’s influence.
  • iPhone. SoftBank is Japan’s iPhone carrier with a reach of 700 million mobile users. (Fun fact: iPhones sold by SoftBank come with a Yahoo Japan icon in the launchpad.)
• SK Telecom owns Cyworld, a virtual world that is gaining traction in Korea (17m new subscribers/mo). If they integrate w/ OpenSocial, RockYou’s apps could easily be implemented.
• RockYou currently reaches 100 million social network users per month.
• After a prior round for $35 milion, RockYou’s total funding now comes to $52 million.

Venture Beat

• WidgetLaboratory is the widget creator that got into a fight with Ning in August after having their widgets banned from the site without proper notice.
• Now they have partnered with Bright Things, a UK based company that is rolling out a self-serve private social network creator called SocialGO (currently in public beta and it’s the same as Ning).
• Features like video chat, an open account API and a member billing system will be the main differences. Widget Laboratory will be their first third party developer. Hopefully everyone is happy now.

• Yourmini’s is the AOL startpage concept that spwaned from their pucahse of Goowy’s in 2006.
• The site was similar to iGoogle, providing a homepage to add widgets created by Yourmini’s that could be exported to work on the desktop or on other destinations (iGoogle, Pageflakes, Blogs, Websites)
• Today they announced that on Oct. 27th, they will be shutting down the homepage business and urge users to export their Yourmini widgets to other destinations where they will still work.
• They have decided that they will just focus on making widgets as their startpage has yet to gain as much traction as the widgets themselves. Best of luck guys.

TC

• Netvibes, the site that lets users customize their homepages with a variety of widgets, has partnered with the Yahoo of Russia, Rambler.ru
• Rambler, who recieves around 40M users and 3B monthly page views, says the deal is in the ‘multi-millions’
• Netvibes is marketing its widget distirubtion platform to popular regional portals that compete with the likes of Google in foreign markets.
• NetVibes has raised $16M to date.

TC

• Alert Thingy, which launched earlier this year, began as an Adobe AIR application that brings FriendFeed to the desktop.
• Since then the have grown to include Twitter and Flickr. Now they have announced they will expanding to include Digg, YouTube, Facebook, Jaiku, Pownce and Tumblr as well.

TC

• Utterli lets you share text, pics, video and audio among your friends.
• They just announced their new destop client run off Adobe Air.

Mashable

• Israeli startup, Gigya, takes in $11m series C from DAG venture, and returning investors Benchmark Capital, First Round Capital, and Mayfield Fund.
• Gigya focuses on two areas: 
  • Widget distribution platform and advertising network. 
  • Socialize. Their plug-in that allows any site to integrate social networking features. 

• Widget platform/ad network Clearspring has acquired AddThis, one of the top widgets for sharing content across bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us and Digg.
• Clearspring raised $18 million in May.
• Competes with ShareThis.

• ShareThis, maker of the familiar news sharing widget, has acquired madKast, which does essentially the same thing.
• Terms of the deal were undisclosed as the acquisition won’t be finalized for another few days.

What other acquisitions can we expect out of the TechStars Demo Day?

Made tiny from: TechCrunch.com original post

Update: College Football Live is currently #24 in the top 25 free apps in iPhone App Store. Congrats Plusmo.

• Plusmo is easy widget creation, distribution and management that allowers publishers and readers alike to plug in their favorite content.
• The plusmo interface as demoed on an Nokia N95 is reminiscent of Nokia’s own WidSets widget management application/platform but is not, unlike WidSets, restricted to only Symbian devices.
• Their College Football Live application is a great showcase for the platform and the soon to be released iPhone app, which they demoed for us today, is especially slick and information rich.

Is there room for widgets in the low to mid-range handset group or will the increasing adoption of smartphones decrease their relevance?

A tiny original from: GigaOM’s Mobilize ‘08

• Tingz Is A New Kind Of Widget Provider That Let’s You Deploy Redundant Widgets Across Multiple Platforms and Devices.
• Take content from Tingz such as a recipe you have found, a schedule change you have made, and sync this information with any other device or share with friends.
• Tingz scale to the size of whichever display you are using them on, whether it is TV, iPhone, Computer, etc
• Navigate the widgets with a multitude of navigation controls such as a TV remote, touch screen, mouse, and keyboard.
• Mark Cuban led the panel in a unanimous decision that this concept is attempting to attack too saturated a market. Cable providers are already beginning to integrate their own apps, the iPhone obviously has plenty and the computer is a tough place to have a stand alone business of providing widgets

Do you agree with Cuban that Tingz doesn’t stand a chance?

Made tiny from: TechCrunch 50 Conference

• Praized Media lets blogs, social networks, etc. add their own version of Yelp to their site.
• They have created a database of thousands of locations, restaurants and more that can be accessed via their open API.
• With a few simple lines of code, publishers can ask questions to their viewers such as “What’s the best coffee in San Francisco?”. A user can then select a coffee house from the database, review it and give it a rating.
• CEO Harry Wakefield first tested the service out on his own blog, MocoLoco, to great success. View a sample of how he uses the service HERE.

A tinyCrunch exclusive.

• iWidgets, which lets publishers syndicate content across social networks, just closed a deal to distribute CBS video through its service.
• CBS video content, including full television episodes, will be directly embeddable within major social networks.
• Based on the success of sites like Hulu, this should be a good play for CBS.

Made tiny from: Mashable.com original post