SaneBull Archive

NY-based SaneBull has announced the launch of a paid widget service. This comes as a result of large acceptance of their stock widgets and an overburdened server. They are offereing two plans: shared and dedicated. The shared plan is $20/month and includes shared bandwidth (though outside the public widget area) and Google Analytics. The dedicated plan is $60/month and offers a dedicated environment with an uptime guarantee, customized look-and-feel, Google Analytics and an adminstration panel.

Paid widgets are always an interesting discussion topic. The discussions I have had with people over the past year suggest that they could work if they provide an overwhelming value to the site’s visitors. For example, a site that pays $720 for a year of SaneBull must believe the expected benefit to its readers to be $720 or more. I do like the idea of offering a widget that would guarantee no downtime. There have been many bloggers who have discussed the effect of a widget on an overall site.  The key for Sanebull is to talk to the 1,000 blogs/sites who are using their widgets now, show them the plans, get feedback and make any necessary plan adjustments. I do expect more widget creators to offer paid versions that offer more benefits and uptime guarantees such as the one SaneBull is offering. Check out our previous SaneBull coverage.

Here are some updates from three startups we have covered in the past:

Geezeo

• Bigtime updates to the transactions module - auto-tagging, cleaner interface, etc. 
• We’ve added Safari support
• OFX data uploads to get your historical transactions
• Simple analytics with graphs for credit card accounts
• More internal security checks and balances
• Database clustering for more data reliability

Read their blog entry for more details and our previous Geezeo coverage.

down2night

Mark Michael, down2night founder sent over the following quote about their planned expansion, "by end of summer we will be national (with your city, town, college or university) with some international cities including London, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Sydney and Frankfurt."

Additional new features include:

• Nightlife based social networking (your friends, messaging)
• Heat-map of the hottest spots
• Nightlife venue based search
• Search for the mood you’re in: after-work, happy-hour, swanky, chill
• See who’s going to a venue that night (i.e. tonight’s rally)
• Able to create a night invite, select the spots (one or multiple) you want to go, and then invite your friends you go out with to join you (evite style)
• Add your house or apartment as "your pad" which only your friends can see. Then you can then add this to your night invites
• Yahoo Maps Mash up (thermal heat map). you can see what spots are going to be hot tonight in your city with a thermal map style overlay
• Upload your pictures going out tag them to a venue's page
• Now in 22 cities 
• Over 30,000 events across the US and Canada
• Mobile alerts for your favorite spots

Check the down2night blog for the latest news and our previous down2night coverage.

SaneBull 

SaneBull has launched two new plugins for their stock tracking service. It's pretty neat. One is for WordPress and the other is for everyone else. The WordPress plugin is very easy as anytime you add a stock quote to your blog entry, it will automatically convert it to a SaneBull optimized quote. You put your mouse over the stock symbol and a small window appears with the latest quote and volume. A click on the quote gets you even more information. It's very cool and almost like intellitxt for stock quotes!

Check out the installation details and screenshots on the SaneBull blog and also check out our previous SaneBull coverage.

Last week I reviewed a program called Stockalicious. In the review, I noted that SaneBull could partner with them as SB has some nice charts and graphs. Well the team at SaneBull let me know that they just launched a set of live financial/stock widgets. The widget types include:

• Simple – just shows a stock and it's current price
• Medium – has all of the latest information about a stock (price, volume, trade, etc.)
• Full – this is the same as the medium plus a graph of stock price
• Portfolio – displays the portfolio you setup at SaneBull

The widgets allow you to change the stock on the fly. I like the portfolio widget because you can display what stocks you currently own (or are following) to your site visitors. I could see a financial blog using these widgets heavily when they discuss a particular stock. Discussing Apple… include the AAPL widget. This way site visitors can always see the current price and can adjust as needed based on the content of the blog entry.

Update: Kristen has also provided a review of the widgets!