John Kolbert, Simply-Basic.com: Let’s start with a few personal questions. I know the story has been told before, but what started JS-Kit, and why did you decide to form a whole team and service around widgets?

Khris Loux, CEO, JS-Kit: The wife of Lev Valkin, CTO for JS-Kit, wanted to add a Comment service to her web site. Seeing only “heavy to install” and “difficult to customize” solutions on the internet, Lev wrote his own. His effort produced an extremely easy to install Comment service that was highly customizable and required no registration/fees/logins/or any other headache — the solution simply worked. Within 90 days over 1,000 sites had downloaded Lev’s code (including his wife!) and JS-Kit was born.

Kolbert: And on another personal note, is JS-Kit a full time job for your team or do you maintain employment elsewhere?

Loux: Lev [and I]…joined together to take this basic concept and expand it to a suite of complimentary services. JS-Kit is now a team of 10 people working full time to bring easy to use & easy to customize features to any web site or blog. They are making it easy for sites to compete with features that before now were only found on Amazon[.com].

Kolbert: JS-Kit has quickly become a very popular service. With over 8,000 accounts in service and users from HBO and Experian, to small blogs and websites, you have a very diverse range of users. What do you think it is about JS-Kit that is appealing to both large, commercial websites and smaller ones alike?

Loux: *All* publishers are in competition for visitors. To attract and keep these visitors they constantly need to improve the experience on their sites. With JS-Kit, sites no longer need expensive programmers or big software budgets to add rich interactive features to their sites. JS-Kit also does the heavy lifting by providing SPAM protection, moderation controls, etc. Sites, now free from the worry of becoming obsolete, can concentrate on improving their unique content.

Kolbert: One common criticism of JS-Kit, from myself included, was the lack of back end control over the commenting system. But I was very excited to see that you recently made some improvements to your commenting widget. What can you tell me about those improvements?

Loux: JS-Kit listens to its customers. Last quarter we heard that our partners wanted three things 1) Moderation Controls, 2) SEO, 3) Data Access, and JS-Kit delivered:

Moderation:

SEO:

Data Access:

Kolbert: I’ve read that you secured a large amount in seed funding from an entrepreneurs’ fund, but the only paid or advertisement-based service I’ve noticed is the Top Rated widget. What plans do you have for expanding the income base of JS-Kit, or is the Top Rated widget enough?

Loux: JS-Kit philosophy of providing high value service with little or no work from the site is extended into our revenue model. JS-Kit will *pay* it’s partners to use it’s services! JS-Kit will be incorporating high dollar ads into each of it’s services. The revenue generated from these ads will be split 50/50 with our partners. For sites that do no wish to serve ads they can buy the ad space for a modest fee. All sites that have adopted JS-Kit services prior to our Revenue Sharing model will have the choice to opt-in or remain ad-free.

Kolbert: Any plans to implement a full membership system with usernames, passwords, and back end administrative control, or are you happy with the current cookie-based system?

Loux: Our approach is simplification for the site and for the visitor. In short order you will see an optional administrator and visitor logins. The visitor login may be site specific depending on the publisher or an open platform, such as, Open Social or OpenID.

Kolbert: Where do you see JS-Kit a year from now? Any new services or widgets in the making that you can tell us about?

Loux: Yes, we will be releasing a series of new service that will all bear the same hallmarks: ease to add and customize, modular yet fully inter-operable with our existing services, and support the needs of both publishers and visitors. Look for the first of these to be released in November :)