8 Things You Didn’t Know About Me

Blog, Internet, Personal No Responses »
Jan 042008

Dennis McDonald tagged me in the “8 Things You Didn’t Know About Me” game so here goes:

  1. I love Chai and drink a lot of it (not the Starbucks kind…the regular Indian kind which is way better).

  2. I am a digitalmediaholic. I have over 6 terabytes of ripped movies and 100 GB of music.
  3. I am a dot com bubble survivor. I founded a venture-funded startup called iWidgets.com that created widgets for web pages. Unfortunately, the technology was six years ahead of its time.
  4. My un-Americanized name is Nikunj, pronounced nick-ooonj.
  5. I have never had any alcoholic beverage…none.
  6. I became a vegetarian in 2001…did it cold turkey (pun intended).
  7. I grew up in Bombay and came to the U.S. in 1987 for my undergrad education. Never went back, and became a U.S. citizen a few years ago.
  8. I enjoy the creative aspects of brand development, especially logo development, tag line creation and messaging.
Posted by nik at 8:00 am

A world of widgets

Blog, Internet, Personal No Responses »
Aug 082005

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.

Janet |  Hannah |  Johnsons |  Rob

Posted by nik at 8:00 am Tagged with:
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