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Last week at the excellent TC50 event - a new company launched - adgregate-markets - claiming to be the first to market with a transactional widget. [really liked the distributed commerce comment at the start of their pitch]

The esteemed panelists: Entrepreneur, Marc Andreessen; MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe; Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com; Entrepreneur Yossi Vardi; and Ash Patel, Yahoo’s executive vice president of the Audience division - had the following comments [via Techcrunch post]

"Not too much was said about Adgregate markets because each panelist agreed on the most important element of any startup: it’s a great idea that will make money and address a need in the market. Chris DeWolfe at MySpace was quick to point out that Adgregate Markets’ idea could be used anywhere on the Web and has a strong business model in place that would attract publishers and advertisers, alike."

InternetRetailing has more indepth analysis and also covers other activity in the market from PayPal Storefront Widget and Tailgate Technologies

At nooked labs - we've debated the merits of enabling folks to complete the transaction within a shopping widget - and although technically possible - and on our roadmap - its not top of the agenda for our retailer or publisher partners - due to the many questions it raises.

We'd love to get your thoughts - and we've done a quick poll on transactional widgets.

We've heard lots of talk about widget marketing, widget advertising, widget monetization - but I recently went back over an old meme from a few years ago - "Sell Side Advertising" - which started off in some blog posts by John Battelle and Ross Mayfield.

Reading the article from John - this section does sound familar.

"Once the ads (insert widgets here) are let loose, here’s the cool catch - ANYONE who sees those ads can cut and paste them, just like a link, into their own sites (providing their sites conform to the guidelines the ad explicates in its tags). The ads track their own progress, and through feeds they “talk” to their “owner” - the advertiser (or their agent/agency). These feeds report back on who has pasted the ad into what sites, how many clicks that publisher has delivered, and how much juice is left in the ad’s bank account. The ad propagates until it runs out of money, then it… disappears! If the ad is working, the advertiser can fill up the tank with more money and let it ride."

Sounds like widgets.

Why is Sell Side Advertising Important

John Battelle - "I love this model because it's viral and it's publisher driven"

Jeff Jarvis "Let the consumers create the ads - Put the consumer in control." "A consumer who buys your product sells it for you to another consumer and you the marketer paid nothing to market it. OK, dream on."

Kevin Kelly - "The cool idea is that ads can now be packaged as little widgets that you can drag and drop onto your blog or website, as easy as it is to embed a YouTube video. This ease of placing ads has rekindled speculation about a new form of advertising that ought to be."

Fred Wilson - "I am convinced that this is how the market is going to evolve. But we still have a pretty closed system where the market can't work perfectly - There will come a time, and not so long from now, when advertisers will just post their ads, plus some data about them, and how they want them to perform, and how much they are willing to pay for leads generated by them, and the net will do the rest - There is a huge imbalance between the demand for pay for performance advertising and the ability to meet it right now. And the reason is that there are huge inefficiencies in the market. "

Whats the checklist for Sell Side Advertising solution [based on these articles]

1. Ads are on the net - where they can easily be found, or on their own sites

2. Ads are tagged with information supplied by the advertiser - who they are attempting to reach, advertising rate [cpc, etc]

3. People can cut and paste the ads - just like a link, into their own sites

4. Ads track their own progress, and through feeds they "talk" to their "owner"

5. Report back on who has pasted the ad into what sites, how many clicks that publisher has delivered, and how much juice is left in the ad's bank account.

6. Ad propagates until it runs out of money, then it... disappears!

7. Tracks where the Ad came from - remunerated for the network of influence.

Bring it back to 2008 - the checklist now looks like

1. Widgets are available - but let the consumer build them - control of look + feel, products, etc.

2. Widgets are tagged with information - income value to publisher, some t+c's around widget usage

3. Widgets support "cut and paste" - especially with the variety of platforms available

4. Widgets report back on progress - installs, impressions, clicks, etc - on what networks

5. Widget distribution rewards the influencers - they gain additional revenue/ranking for their social graph

To drive a self-serve sell-side advertising - you need feeds of advertisers product data - which requires a feedcommerce platform.

The nooked product checklist is almost done for sell side advertising - check out our latest update to the nooked service

We recently pushed live our "feedshop" widget live.

This shopping widget was developed by one of our team, John Blackbourn, using our feedcommerce platform APIs and using Adobe Air for widget development.

The initial goals was simple - build an exemplary widget marketing application on our platform - but it's proven popular with folks - so we decided to push out into the wilds.

The shopping widget is a useful utility for finding shopping deals from lots of retailers - enabling personalized commerce feeds.

With some more work [US retailer data, Zip Code targetting] we'll also keep Mike Arrington happy - he wanted Tailored Local Offers (via RSS) but I guess we will do that without the hassle of understanding RSS.

Please download the widget - and provide us with some feedback.

In the recent Shop.org report - "State of Retailing Online" - 55% of online retailers want to focus more on widgets.

Here at nooked HQ we are seeing more and more retailers using widgets to engage with consumers - ranging from desktop widgets, facebook applications, twitter feeds and web widgets. Real validation of FeedCommerce.

More details from report

The study also found 53 percent of retailers surveyed allocated their marketing budgets toward customer acquisition and 21 percent of their marketing budget toward customer retention.

Other findings include:
* 35 percent of retailers will continue to market through search engines.
* 90 percent will use pay-for-performance search placement and 79 percent said they will make this a priority this year.
* 85 percent said they have used some shipping with conditions promotion in the past and 35 percent said they will focus on more of these promotions this year.
* 65 percent said they will increase focus on social networking advertisements
* 55 percent said they will focus on Web widgets.

from eBay’s CEO Meg Whitman’s interview on Techcrunch

Q: eBay, along with Amazon and Yahoo, is now one of the elder statesmen of the Web. Do destination sites matter anymore? Whitman: My view is that, just as in many businesses, brands really matter. There will always be a role for destination sites. Eighty million users come to our destination. I think that will be the vast majority of our future business.

That said, we must be in distributed commerce in the future, taking listings for auctions and Shopping.com and distributing them to other sites. If they are not going to come to us, we are going to come to them. We are not at all averse to distributed commerce.

Donahoe: In many ways, our buyers will lead us there. We are making it much easier to bring eBay listings to your Facebook page, Myspace page, and shopping listings to various sites. eBay�s unique inventory offers better alternative [than other sources].

Meg Whitman

What type of retailers want to use feedcommerce?

It turns out a variety of commercial ‘product’ data is suitable for distribution via feeds.

• Physical Products – online stores can expose their entire itinerary of products via feeds.
• Events – event promoters can publish feeds that contain entries for events that they are promoting.
• Contacts – social networks can publish feeds that contain members public contact details.
• Travel – airlines, hotels and agents can publish feeds of travel/accommodation deals.
• Reviews – online review sites can publish feeds of all their product reviews.

Consumers want control – they can pre-subscribe to ecommerce feeds and widgets based on their intentions – and those product offers will alert them when their intention is matched.

Check out this New York Times article on “Your Personal Shopper With the Initials R.S.S.”

How many feeds should retailers create?

It depends on how they want to present their product data. For example a feed could be a specialized list of offers and deals, such as specific flight specials based on routes, dates and price.

A feed could equally contain the retailer’s entire product catalog.

Retailers will of course want to be able to track activity on their product feeds and see how they are being distributed and how the market is receiving their products.

feedcommerce platforms, which we will discuss later, facilitate this.

Of course creating feeds is just a means to an end. Structured feed formats allow retailers to easily develop and distribute eCommerce widgets throughout the internet – but you need to build this from a platform – not hacked one-off widgets.

Examples of feedcommerce - eBay

Desktop widget (San Dimas)

The eBay desktop widget (codenamed San Dimas) is another example of distributed ecommerce to the desktop. The eBay desktop application enable occasionally connected use, customised content views, and a branded experience that can act as a platform for closer relationships with customers. Once click away from eBay on your desktop.

I was honoured to pick up a Net Visionary Award from the board of the Irish Internet Association last night in Dublin – at a plush black-tie dinner. The award is recognition to the nooked team – keep up the great work – and to the wider web2ireland community. Thanks to Fergal and the IIA team for a great night.

Amazon has proven itself to be one of the most innovative companies in e-commerce and that is no exception when it comes to feed commerce.

RSS Tag Feeds

Amazon provides support for RSS in the form of tag-based RSS feeds. For example see www.amazon.com/rss/tag/blu-ray/new – products tagged blu-ray for the very first time and my own tag feed for products http://www.amazon.com/rss/people/A1TN3320DDHFY4/products

Amazon Gold Box

Amazon Gold Box is a service that provides you with personalized deals every day. It provides an RSS feed with your daily deals.

Amazon Widgets

Amazon Widgets provides a range of widgets which include product data for reuse on blogging, social network and affiliate websites.

Amazon E-Commerce Service(ECS)

The Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS) provides APIs to allow third parties to build new e-commerce services, using the Amazon ECS APIs to generate product RSS feeds content.

Amazon Wish Lists

Although not supported directly from the site, Amazon provides web services to RSS enable your wishlist. Other examples – such as Jeff Bezos wishlist in RSS can be found here and also a Yahoo Pipe service for your wishlist

RSS feeds have long been a location for advertisement for commercial products or services. We have also seen the arrival of feed powered ads where the content of an advert – generally in widget format – hosted on a website is provided via an RSS feed.

A good example is the feed-powered advertising model on Gabe Rivera’s popular news tracking site Techmeme.

Although not new at the time (CNET, nooked, Pheedo, Feedburner and others had done this before) this concept has become increasingly utilized on the Web because it offers the advertiser a level of control over the advertisement content that is not possible via other advertising systems.

A benefit of RSS-powered ads is that the advertiser can update their advert at any point, to respond to new product inventory or address a particular issue – or perhaps just to become part of the online conversation.

Fred Wilson, had this to say on feed powered advertising

Here is why feed powered ads are so great. The ad unit simply is a mini feed reader. The advertiser retains real time control of what goes into the ad. They simply update their feed and the ad changes. And it brings advertising and content closer together.

next up – early examples of feedcommerce

We’ve previously mentioned feedcommerce – so here is a more detailed introduction to the concept

Online retailers have vast silos of product information in their websites that could be used to increase sales and revenue if distributed to consumers via the many feed based channels that now exist on the internet.

feedcommerce embraces this intent by enabling distribution of product information directly to consumers via feeds and widgets. Through feedcommerce retailers make their product information available to publishers via the RSS and Atom feed publication and syndication standards.

Publishers then present the product data to consumers via rich user interfaces like widgets, allowing consumers to filter the data to their interests.

Fred Wilson, a leading VC blogger, initially described feed commerce as:

...feed commerce is when I subscribe to a feed of items that are of interest to me. I have subscribed to feeds of iTunes music for several years. I get the top 10 new releases, top 10 albums, top 10 songs, etc delivered to me via a feed. If I want to buy any of them, I click on the link. I have never understood why more retailers don’t do this. I want to get my concert tickets this way. I want to get promotions and offers this way. I want my feed reader to be my offer inbox…

feedcommerce allows retailers to open their product information to all of the current and future Web platforms that reach consumers – such as social networks – facebook, blogs, start pages – netvibes and mobile services – widsets.

Today these platforms are driving retail distribution and consumption to the edges of the network.

feedcommerce creates the opportunity for publishers and consumers to generate revenue by endorsing retailers through widget marketing.

Bonus link – read more on how our client koodos is using feedcommerce

next up – we will discuss Feed Advertising

Fergus Burns, ceo of nooked will participate on a “widget” panel at ad:tech London 2007 – the Chinwag Live On Tour – Media Widgetised @ Ad:tech London, 2007

The panel is on

Thursday 27th Sep 2007 @ 3.35pm (discussion runs 3.35pm-4.30pm ) Place: Digital Consumer Forum, ad:tech 2007, Olympia 2, Hammersmith Road, London W14 8UX

To hook up with Fergus, please drop us a line here

Fergus Burns from nooked will be speaking at the What’s New in Online Marketing event by E-consultancy.com in London this Wednesday – 27th June, 2007.

Fergus is speaking at 2pm – and the topic is

“RSS and feed-based marketing – how should you be using feeds to open up and distribute your content? How do you market your feeds and track ROI?”

Do drop by and say hello.

nooked is participating in two of the “Widget Week London” events.

Chinwag have an event – “Chinwag Live: media widgetised” on Wednesday 16th May 2007 @ 6pm. Location – The Slug & Lettuce (Downstairs), 80-82 Wardour St, London, W1F 0TG

NMK have an event – “Beers & Innovation 10: Widget Nation” on Tuesday, 22nd May 2007 @6pm. Location – The CC Club – Unit 33, The Trocadero, London, W1D 7DH

If you want to meet up – ping fergus a note. [fergus.burns AT nooked.com]

nooked was profiled yesterday on readwriteweb as part of their international series – which covers Top Irish Web Apps.

nooked have been in the RSS marketing business now for a while, but they recently announced a forthcoming product codenamed feedshop – which is all about Really Simple Shopping (RSS). They are also about to launch a new widget marketing service, which will allow e-tailers to advertise their products through nooked’s network of blogs, widget partners and social networks. It’s all part of their strategy for a feedcommerce platform.

nooked was listed just this week as a RedHerring 100 Europe winner and a company to watch in 2007. Expect to hear a lot more from them very soon.

Congratulations to the other companies who are included – and no doubt Richard and David will have plenty more to write about the web2.0 Ireland scene over the coming months.

[disclosure: R/WW editor Richard MacManus is an advisor to nooked]