This is the slide deck from my talk at OpenForce Europe (Amsterdam).
Jul 012008
At the height of the dot-com boom, I founded a venture-funded startup
called iWidgets.com. My vision was to have mini-apps called “widgets”
that you could plug into web portals that were all the rage at the
time. Unfortunately, the market was not ready for widgets back in 1999,
and when the stock market took a dive a couple of years later, so did my
company.
Fast-forward to present day and there is a new iWidgets.com site created by someone else. Here’s how eHub describes it:
Create custom widgets for your website or your brand with iWidget.
Using their online wizard, you can easily create widgets that your
website visitors or customers can add to their iGoogle start page,
Facebook profile, or their own blog. Your widget is customizable by
your users so that it fits right in with their design.
It
felt very strange seeing the site…sort of like seeing someone else
wearing your favorite shirt. I spent some time on the site playing with
their tools and was very, very impressed. Great job iWidgets.com team,
wish you much success.
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.
