The article also mentions our upcoming cooperation with PUBLICIS in Germany in regards to their AdTrinity banner optimization software, but more on that ‘officially’ in the coming weeks…

Below is a scan of the article. Our thanks a lot to the team at IWB for taking an interest in this technology.

Press Release on PRDoc.com

Here is a demo page . (WD is used for illustration purposes only on this page).

We believe this is a totally unique form of transactional banner and would love to hear your opinions about it.

Very much looking forward to presenting NextWidgets at Next10 conference in Berlin next week. Very fitting for us that this year’s motto is ‘Game Changers’

Get in touch if you’ll be there: @nextwidgets

The Next Web is one of the largest internet conferences in Europe and was being hosted for the fifth time this year. We applied to present there as part of the PayPal X Startup Rally which saw 245 companies apply, of which 25 were selected to demo their products on stage.

The conference took place over three days and featured some really awesome keynote’s such as the opening speech by Robert Cailliau discussing the past and future of the web, proper coding and the need to control population growth! Tim Ferris gave a fun presentation on an unusual topic; how to deal with ‘haters’, while Florie Brizel educated all of us on how mobile phones are changing our world and the need for a new social science called ‘mobilology’. Evan Roth was also amongst the top keynotes for me, giving us an intro into the Free Art & Technology movement and how to piggyback onto hype trends to deliver a social message.

A number of companies outside the Startup Rally also had a chance to present their products, such as dutch social network Hyves and their new integrated payment system that allows Hyves members to transfer money to each other and even pay in bars with through their Hyves account. Another real winner in my opinion was the presentation of Waze, which is an amazing crowd-sourced mapping project presented impeccably by Fej Schmuelevitz.

Large companies were also present, with Microsoft previewing their new Messenger which had a whole bunch of cool collaboration features such as the ability to view websites, videos and photos with your friends through messenger as well as announcing the Messenger connect product. PayPal also announced the open beta for the new ‘Library for iPhone’ which makes it much easier for iPhone developers to install the Pay with PayPal feature into their apps.

As for the Startup Rally, it was so much fun to present NextWidgets in front of such a large audience, and despite that we didn’t win, I came away from the experience with great feedback and ideas on improving our product. One of the most intense moments came after the 5 minute presentation when the jury was able to ask questions and when Werner Vogels, one of the judges and the CTO of Amazon.com, described distributed e-commerce as untrustworthy and “dangerous for users”. I really appreciate Werner’s comments and I think he has a very good point in the fact that all transactional widgets should have better authentication features. I’ll be doing a separate blog post this week about the security aspects of distributed e-commerce, our current position and our plans in this respect for the future.

Just to finish off this recap, here are a couple of funny interviews I was asked to give by yubby.com and even a one line video pitch for deLiftPitch:

Hope to see you in Amsterdam in 15 days !! Tweet us at : @nextwidgets

The topic of how healthcare publishers generate revenue was hotly debated on the first day, and many examples of European sites using sponsorship or subscription models were shown. Interesting conversations arose on the panel sessions when models from the US and Europe were compared and contrasted.

On the morning of the 2nd day, I presented NextWidgets for websites as well as for Facebook. The demo included a look at how the contextual product matching technology was displaying products relevant to the content of the site. While running through the Facebook demo, we even installed a shop onto Matthew Holt, the event orgniser’s, profile page, which was quite funny.

Thanks to everyone that made it to see the demo so early in the morning after what was a great night out at Les Invalides

Many thanks to the organisers of Health 2.0 for putting on a splendid event and allowing us to demo our product for a third time at their event.

Here is the intro paragraph:

“Overstock Drugstore Debuts First ‘Viral E-commerce’ Application on Facebook

Developed by NextWidgets.com, the Overstock Drugstore Facebook application is a version of the Overstock Drugstore online shop customized for Facebook and embedded on the Overstock Drugstore Fan Page within a separate ‘shopping tab’. Beyond the standard shopping experience, any visitor to the Overstock Drugstore shop can click the ‘Embed to my profile’ button inside the application, which allows them to instantly install the shop onto their own Facebook profile page. By embedding the store, the customer becomes an affiliate and can invite their entire network of friends to shop on their profile page, receiving a commission on every sale made through their store.”

You can read the full text on PRWeb

The entire team here at NextWidgets is extremely pleased to be launching the new Flash version of our shopping widget technology. The Flash version is now an additional option alongside our existing HTML based widget. Flash, owned by Adobe, is a tried and tested rich media display technology used by 85 of the top 100 Alexa ranked sites. It allows us to incorporate some unique features into the widget that would not be possible at this time with HTML alone. Most importantly amongst these, is the ability for our widget to be easily customized to different size formats, for example allowing us to offer it in standard IAB medium rectangle and wide skyscraper formats. With the help of a smooth-animation expansion feature the widget pops out to a larger, more functional size once clicked on.
Another very exciting feature is the ability to customize the widget to any desired colour scheme using a simple colour picker tool.
The core functionality of the widget remains unchanged, with product search, browsing by category or brand, carousel and list views and language selection all being identical to the HTML widget.
Processing of credit cards also functions the same way in the Flash widget except in some European countries that use ‘3D Secure by VISA‘, where we are still working on implementing this more complex form of payment processing into the Flash widget where the challenge is posed that the acquirer’s verification page is loaded in an inline frame session.

Regarding the wider discussion about Adobe Flash itself, in contrast to some recent reports that Flash is a dying technology and will be replaced by open standards such as HTML5, we believe that at least for the foreseeable future, the functionality and market penetration of Flash is so great, that it will remain the dominant technology behind rich media advertising.

To create your own Flash shopping widgets, go to our self-service Publishers page. Enjoy