Google offers seed funding for widget startups

Google is directly investing in small companies to expand the popularity of its iGoogle product. Google Gadget Ventures grants popular Google gadgets $5,000 for further development. Popular widget businesses are eligible for $100,000 in seed capital with Google taking an equity stake in each company. Google expects to invest $700,000 or more in third-party widget development over the next year. About 9% of Google’s gadget directory would be eligible for the grant consideration based on the Google Gadget pageview analysis I last conducted in April. How it works A gadget must have at least 250,000 gadget views per week to…

Widgets on your iPhone

Steve Jobs announced the iPhone development platform at last week’s Worldwide Developer Conference to sighs of disappointments. Mac developers were anxious to develop new applications for the the most anticipated consumer electronics device in years, only to be told they should code fancy websites instead. The 9-minute iPhone development demonstration during the WWDC keynote was a bit confusing for anyone new to Apple widget development. In this post I’ll break down a few Apple widget components, transport you to the iPhone development world, and explain a few restrictions and lock-downs common in the mobile phone industry. Dashboard under the…

Windows Live Gallery partners program

Microsoft will offer three tiers of partner support for Windows Live Gallery according to a podcast with Chris Butler this week posted on LiveSide. Companies and brands may partner with Microsoft to highlight their Windows Live Gadget offerings for preferred inclusion in the Live.com personal homepage, Windows Live Spaces sidebar, and the Windows Vista sidebar. Windows Live Gallery partners receive visual differentiation in the customization listings and programmatic access to the Gallery serves to add and update new Microsoft gadget content. Microsoft plans to offer external developers three tiers of support: Gold partner A premium offering associated with an…

Google Gadgets are now an AdSense unit

Webmasters will soon be able to auction off widget space on their sites and blogs managed and marketed by advertising powerhouse Google. Advertisers will produce a Google Gadget in standard IAB unit sizes for distribution across the Google network at CPC or CPM billing rates. Google will bolster its current Google Analytics package to support better tracking paid and free widget campaigns in this sub-page and asynchronous pageload environment. The Google Gadget advertising beta program was publicly announced during a marketing summit for the automotive industry according to Online Media Daily. By the end of 2007 Google will offer its…

Nokia Widgets for Series 60

Widgets are coming to Series 60 handsets this Fall, bringing tiny pieces of content onto the application menu of the world’s best-selling smartphone OS. The S60 Web Run-Time builds upon the existing open source technologies in the S60 browser and provides a development experience very close to Apple’s Dashboard widget environment. The widget software will be available in version 3.2 of Nokia’s operating system due out this Fall. The Series 60 operating system is currently installed on over 85 million mobile devices produced by Lenovo, LG, Nokia, and Samsung. S60 widgets are marked up using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript…

Google Gadget ecosystem statistics for March

The Google gadget ecosystem received 960 million pagevieiws last week, a 36% jump from numbers reported by the search giant just one month ago. Users are adding themes, videos, games, and even a few productivity tools to their personalized homepages and blog sidebars, creating new content for fun and business. In this post I’ll provide some new statistics about Google gadget growth over the past month, building upon my larger statistical overview of Google Gadgets in early March. March saw the rebirth of two widget brands, and spring cleaning on a few others. On March 8 Yahoo! launched a major…

State of the Google Gadget ecosystem: gadget features

Gadget platforms have many levels of integration and customization beyond a metadata wrapper and some markup. Beginners and tinkerers might stick to the basics, but some gadget authors go beyond the plain essentials and add support for multiple languages, tabbed views, and specify any requirements a gadget may expect. In yesterday’s post I provided an overview of the Google Gadgets ecosystem, detailing the types of content and authors producing Google universal gadgets. Today I’ll dive into developer features and observed implementations. Language support Content types Gadget height Top built-in libraries Gadgets produced by Google Extra requirements Summary Language support Google…

State of the Google Gadget ecosystem

Last week the Google Gadgets team released page view numbers for gadgets in its directory, giving outsiders their glimpse of gadget activity across Google Personalized Homepage, Google Desktop, and syndicated throughout the web through Google Gadgets For Your Page. Over the weekend I crawled the entire Google Gadget directory, collecting information about every listed gadget to create a better and more complete understanding of a widget/gadget ecosystem including its level of health, geographic diversity of authors and supported users, popular categories, and some of the most popular gadget programming methods (just to name a few). In this post I’ll share…

Six Apart widget podcast with Byrne Reese

Last Friday I visited Six Apart’s headquarters in San Francisco to talk about widgets with Byrne Reese. Byrne is the former product manager of TypePad, currently a product manager of Movable Type, and a developer of plugins and widgets used in both products. Byrne and I talked about the current state of widgets in Six Apart’s four blogging products: TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, and Vox. Our 25-minute conversation about Six Apart widgets is available as a 11 MB audio download. I will summarize a few highlights from our conversation below. Listen to Niall Kennedy interview Byrne Reese of Six Apart…

Universality of the web widget

Netvibes announced a “Universal Widget API” at last week’s Future of Web Apps conference in London, promising a write-once run anywhere widget environment using an open-source widget runtime. The new widget system encourages publishers to author widgets using the Netvibes API and extend the reach of their content beyond the Netvibes user base through an adaptable wrapper. In this post I’ll walk through some of the differences between widget deployment endpoints from the publisher’s point of view, explaining just a few ways a widget must adjust its dialect and structure to adapt and optimize in different widget environments. Manifests Inline…