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MuseStorm, a company that offers a platform for developing widgets and social networking applications, recently expanded its toolkit, enabling merchants to extend their own marketing reach to iPhone audiences in an easy and innovative way.

Expected to be released on or around July 12, 2008, Apple's latest iPhone incarnation, the iPhone G3, is a combination phone, iPod and Internet device that works over fast 3G mobile networks. Not even released yet, the newest iPhone is already in demand by consumers and the number of iPhone users is expected to top 13 million by year-end.  To this end, the MuseStorm Platform lets you target this ever-growing iPhone user base by creating widgets that are designed specifically for delivery on the Apple iPhone.

Using MuseStorm to Create Widgets and Apps
With MuseStorm's Platform, you can produce, deliver, manage, and then analyze metrics for the widgets and social applications you create using the platform.

The technology offers all the tools you need to create content that you can relay to consumers, and potential customers of course, in the form of interactive widgets and social applications.

Called the MuseStorm Engagement Platform, you start by producing the content in the toolkit's Widget Studio. Here you can create an application from scratch, or you can use existing Flash, audio, photo, RSS feeds, and other multimedia to produce your own branded interactive widget or social application.

The content you create can be modified on-the-fly so that you can edit it at any time during your campaign. The Widget Studio also offers an easy drag-and-drop interface for adding interactive features including chats, polls and user comments.

Marcia Kadanoff, VP of Marketing for MuseStorm, told Ecommerce-Guide that when using the MuseStorm Engagement Platform, small businesses don't have to decide between investing time and money into developing a widget or a Facebook application, but instead can expand their marketing reach to multiple environments using this single development platform. 

Once you have created your widget you can easily morph it. You can make small changes or even update your content and use MuseStorm's tools to turn it into a Facebook or Bebo application or a widget for a different platform. The MuseStorm Intelligent Delivery system is the part of the MuseStorm Platform that enables the delivery of your widget across the multiple platforms. These include the desktop, Web sites, instant messaging and mobile platforms — all with a single click during production. Your widets can also be syndicated to a variety of blogging platforms including Blogger and TypePad or used on start pages like PageFlakes, Netvibes or iGoogle.

MuseStorm also includes a tool called Total Analytics, which is built into the platform and is easily accessed through a Web dashboard. Total Analytics basically tells you how well your widget or application is doing on different platforms during your campaign. Marketers can access the detailed metric reports to see how consumers are interacting with your widget, letting you know what works, what doesn't, and from which delivery platform your content is viewed on the most.

Total Analytics lets you access detailed data such as the geographical distribution, the top Web sites hosting your widgets and daily changes in the top-level domains hosting your widget. You can also see impressions and users per day and per-hour-performance on a variety of social networking sites.

The iPhone Advantage
The MuseStorm Engagement Platform was recently extended to include support for iPhone development and it offers users the option to deliver their content through a Web browser to iPhones. These Web applications can be downloaded through Apple or other means, and when iPhone users receive a widget built using the MuseStorm platform, they point the browser to a location on the Web where a video, slideshow, or an RSS feed can be accessed. MuseStorm widgets are specifically designed to take advantage of the iPhone interface. The widgets mirror the look and feel of the iPhone, and also use the popular iPhone touch-screen navigation system.

One company already using the MuseStorm platform to create their own iPhone widget is Enthiosys Consulting. The company's Innovation Games Web site is what they call a "serious game" that is designed for marketers to better collaborate with customers in determining the right features to build into their products. Using the MuseStorm Engagement Platform, Enthiosys Consulting created an iPhone widget to bring their Innovation Games brand to the attention of iPhone users.

Interestingly enough,  Innovation Games believes that some of the most innovative thinkers out there are also iPhone users, so here they are using their iPhone widget to target a broad audience base they believe fit the Innovation Games interest base. Those interested in seeing a widget in action that was developed using MindStorm, can view Enthiosys Consulting's iPhone widget on the Innovation Games Web site.

MuseStorm pricing is based on a CPM rate where you pay only the cost of serving the widget. For small businesses on a budget this means your cost depends on the size of the campaign you plan to run. Also, there is no actual monetary cost incurred to create the widget or social application using MuseStorm's platform, only your own development time investment.

Story courtesy of ecommerce-guide.