It seems like there are widgets everywhere. Apple added widgets to Tiger through the cool Dashboard feature. Yahoo has a whole section of its site devoted to widgets.
I greet widgets with a mixture of emotions. In 1999, when I created my venture-funded startup, my world-changing idea was to bring the web to people in the form of mini-applications that provided identical functionality with a web browser, a mobile device or a telephone. Not only that, the mini-apps had collaboration built-in so you could decide who could view/edit your data etc.
Yes, the mini-applications were called “widgets” and my startup was iWidgets, Inc. Unfortunately, the world wasn’t ready for widgets at the time and I didn’t know as much about running a startup then as I do today, and so iWidgets joined thousands of other dot bombs when I turned the lights out in early 2001.
But seeing all the buzz about widgets today gives me a good feeling — I had the right world-changing idea, just at the wrong time and perhaps a little flawed in the execution. I felt nostalgic enough to go digging through the archive DVD’s to pull up some promos we had created. Here are four of them, each focused a specific target market.
