Sprout is based as I am in Hawaii. But wherever you happen to live, Sprout is a very good widget maker.

Their widget building tool allows you to create professional looking widgets without knowing Flash or other technologies, and even provides quick templates that get you started remarkably quickly. In fact one of their templates is the Hellboy II widget…

To create widgets is surprisingly simple. You basically can learn the whole thing in a few minutes to build a nice looking feed type gadget. It might take a little longer to create a good looking multi-feed type of gadget, but not much more effort is required.
One of my initial problems I have with these types of builders is that they often are heavily branded for their own purposes.
One of the reasons I am writing up Sprout right now is that they just announced that they will allow you to remove their branding and are currently offering their early adopters free “pro” accounts that remove all Sprout branding from their widgets. Is is a very smart and cool move. One that other widget platforms can learn from in my opinion.

These gadgets are spread via Gigya (“grabbable”) and are flash based.
To learn more, or to build a widget, head over to the Sprout website.