Google offers cash for gadget developers
Inspired by the success of iGoogle, which has been driven by the availability of a broad range of gadgets created by third-party developers, Google has launched the Google Gadgets Venture, a pilot program that will hand out $5,000 grants and $100,000 seed investments to worthy gadget developers to build even richer and more useful gadgets.
“We’ve seen lots of people develop great applications for gadgets that we wouldn’t have thought of or developed ourselves,” Sep Kamvar, who leads personalization engineering at Google, told Searchengineland. “We wanted to incent developers, and one of the things we had been thinking about was to create an ecosystem so people would invest in their gadgets because it was profitable.”
“Our main goal here is to bootstrap an ecosystem where lots of gadget developers can spend time doing what they love, doing great things with their gadgets and make money from them,” Kamvar said.
The $5,000 no-strings-attached grants are for developers who’ve built gadgets in Google’s directory that receive at least 250,000 page views weekly, and which the developers are interested in improving. To be considered for a grant, gadget developers need to submit a one page gadget enhancement proposal.
The $100,000 seed investments are for the previous Google Gadget Venture grant recipients who want to build a business on the Google platform. To apply for a seed investment, gadget developers need to submit a business plan outlining the details for making the gadget financially sustainable.
The developer community is an extremely important part of our development ecosystem. Our hope for Google Gadget Ventures is to enable developers to grow and diversify the universe of gadgets in a profitable and sustainable way. Ultimately this will result in a wider variety of engaging and useful online content, which is a win for our users.
Given the money grant and seed investment from Google Gadget Venture program, it will be very interesting to see the rangeof gadgets that will be develop in the coming months.
For more information, please see visit Google Gadget Ventures.
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