The Widget Economy is Booming

Facebook applications are getting acquired, everyone seems to be launching a widget, and Google has decided to join in on the widget economy. Yesterday, Marisa Mayer of Google announced Google Gadget Ventures. According to the site, “Google Gadget Ventures is a new Google pilot program dedicated to helping developers create richer, more useful Google Gadgets.” According to Read/Write/Web, the purpose of Google Gadget Ventures is to bootstrap “an economic ecosystem around gadgets.” For those developers that have already developed successful Google Gadgets (those that generate at least 250,000 weekly page views), there are seed investment grants of $100,000 available.