loreal netvibes

Netvibes, the service that lets users build customizable home page with widgets to track news feeds, social networks, and more, is now offering a premium version aimed at public relations and marketing agencies.

Freddy Mini, the San Francisco company’s chief executive, says Netvibes Premium Dashboards are a natural extension of the company’s tools. The proliferation of publishers and content on the web makes individuals want a single dashboard to aggregate all their online news and communication, and now agencies need similar tools to monitor the conversation around brands or products.

Premium customers can create a Netvibes dashboard for an entire company as well as specific clients, and will also receive additional features, including secure login, control over branding and monetization (the dashboards can include ads or charge for subscriptions), and use of upcoming Netvibes Wasabi technology, with an improved interface and feeds that update more quickly. They can also push their own updates and content to a company dashboard (though each user will have the option to accept or ignore those updates).

To get a better sense of what Netvibes is trying to do, you can check out a sample premium dashboard, which includes widgets for traffic data, Google blog search, Twitter search, and more. There’s a separate tab for monitoring competitors.  (To be clear, this isn’t a real customer dashboard, just one built by Netvibes as a showcase of the different features. Ditto the screenshot above.) Companies already using premium dashboards include Ogilvy PR, Tribal DDB, WeissComm Group, Rumeur Publique, CRM Company Group and The Advertising Research Foundation.

Mini emphasized that Netvibes isn’t trying to compete with services built specifically to track a company’s online reputation — in fact, it’s in talks to integrate some of those services. Instead, it wants to help reputation services reach a new audience, and to create a dashboard where a firm could use those reputation services in the context of lots more information.

“That’s exactly what we do we want to be — the uber dashboard, the dashboard of dashboards, the universal dashboard,” Mini said.

Netvibes has raised $16 million in venture capital from Index Ventures, Accel Partners and a handful of individual investors. In addition to the new premium dashboards, it also makes money from an enterprise version.