Google Gadget Ventures Announced at Searchnomics

Google's Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience, officially announced yesterday at the Searchnomics 2007 Conference the launch of Google Gadget Ventures. Members of the press including ABC7 News were on hand to get the breaking news scoop. Marissa introduced the program during her closing Keynote address. If you are familiar with the personalized Google homepage, iGoogle, where users can add widgets/gadgets created by others or better yet create your own personalized gadgets, then this program is a spinoff of this. If your Google gadget generates a quarter of a million page views weekly, you are eligible for a $5K grant to build it out further and once you have received the grant you can then apply for an additional $100K seed capital to build a business around the Google gadgets platform. A program such as this facilitates among other things innovation and from a business perspective, even more reasons to stay on the Google site. For more information, see the Official Google Blog post on this program. (See as well my previous blog post on iGoogle.)