The four panelists did a great job yesterday handling my barrage of questions in the Widget Strategies and Social Platforms session, Hooman Radfar (Clearspring Technologies, Inc.), Walker Fenton (NewsGator), Pam Webber (Widgetbox), Ben Pashman (Gigya) discussed widgets strategies. I asked each of them to suggest an image or icon that best represents their company (an idea to make the panel more memorable from Pam) and they each suggested the following:
Clearspring was like a cable, as they were a connector Newsgator was like a kitchen where you come and create Widgetbox was like a DIY Pottery store where you come in and make your own product Gigya was like a like a spine, as they were the backbone or infrastructure
While there are many challenges to widgets (and every industry) the panelists did a great job refuting them, demonstrating their expertise in the area, and suggesting how to work around any bumps that we may see. If you want to refute the challenges, I certainly encourage you to leave comments on that post or leave a link demonstrating how you can overcome those. It’s all part of a healthy dialog.
The challenge questions? on the difficulties of measurement, lack of brand control, the hurdles of distribution, and how to monetize the space. I also asked them to share how they help clients develop strategies, and to provide clarity around the most common misconceptions. Each of them shined in their own right.
To hear what the rest of the panel said, Alex Nesbit did a great job live blogging the session. Beth Kanter (who did a great job presenting with passion yesterday) shares her notes from the session. And Peter Kaminski, CTO of SocialText writes on his wiki the high level notes. It makes sense if everyone updated the wiki, rather than having several blog posts it could centralize and make the effort more collaborative and efficient.
Jeremiah,
You did a great job moderating the panel. Your preparation made it the most informative of the day. I especially loved some of the visual aids that were used to represent the companies (the frog pottery was very nice).
At some of the meetings I’ve been at, those of us using Macs have written collaborative notes during the meeting using SubEthaEdit. This application was designed for collaborative coding but works great during meetings since multiple people can edit the same document over wifi. Then just one document can be posted for everyone. It can be quite a bit of fun. I actually think Peter was using it at GSP but I could not join him to help. Maybe I’ll have to update my copy.
Richard