
Google Gadget Ventures: $5k grant with up to $100k seed funding - seiji
http://www.google.com/gadgetventures/
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zach
No purchase necessary. Many will play, few will win. Void where prohibited.

But seriously, although this sounds great, nearly all of the Gadgets I see are
content, not technology. Are they going to give someone $5,000 to take even
cuter pictures of kittens for Cute Kitten of the Day? Or are they trying to go
after the market Facebook is courting and get people to make more mini-apps?

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tx
Define "apps". Arent' majority "apps" online are nothing more than HTMLsed SQL
queries? (i.e. "content")

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zach
Good question. I'm kind of wondering what gadgets they have in mind and I
guess it's gadgets with a feature set. If you have features, they'll front you
some cash to improve or add features.

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kmt
It doesn't say what percent of the business that $100K would take.

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Tichy
On a related note, which "Widget" platform is most popular? I want to create a
widget for my content eventually. I guess one should just support them all,
but perhaps some make more sense than others? Guessing: OS X users are the
most avid widget users?

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dawie
This is really cool. Google is going into Venture funding in their own unique
way...

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lupin_sansei
Finally a company that wants to encourage people to build products on their
platform. Why didn't MS or Apple do this 15 years ago?

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lupin_sansei
More ranting! Why on earth must you pay for a copy of Visual Studio? Microsoft
should be giving it away free with all copies of Windows. Or at least making
it free to download.

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ced
"Through their Empower ISV program you can get five complete sets of MSDN
Universal (otherwise known as "basically every Microsoft product except Flight
Simulator") for about $375. Command line compilers for the .NET languages are
included with the free .NET runtime... also free. The C++ compiler is now
free. Anything to encourage developers to build for the .NET platform, and
holding just short of wiping out companies like Borland."

\- Joel (<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html)>

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lupin_sansei
Just trying to figure out how to get onto the Empower ISV program (plus the
$875 per year for us in Australia!) is just proving my point about how hard it
is to start developing for MS compared to Google now:
https://partner.microsoft.com/

Get a Microsoft Live ID, sign up for the partner program, then what do you do?
(Not supported in Firefox either)

How is this going to compete with the ease and speed of Google's offering or
even Ubuntu+Lamp/ROR etc. and el cheapo shared hosting?

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ced
Joel's point was that they _have_ to put at least some hurdle, otherwise, they
would crush Borland and co, which would be a bad thing, since they provide
devs useful tools.

I don't really know whether that's true or not, but it makes some sense.

Plus, MS has 99% control over the desktop, so it doesn't really make sense for
them to give the tools away. Or else what, Linux will steal market share from
them?

