Google Seeks to Jump-start Gadget Industry with Grants

In an attempt to invigorate developers large and small around Google's XML-based runtime Desktop platform, it announced this morning it will give $5,000 grants to individuals, and invest as much as $100,000 in companies, willing to produce popular "Google Gadgets."

Google calls it the "gadget ecosystem" - the segment of software development centered around the production of small accessory programs typically referred to as "gadgets" that usually run in the background and perform some useful (or not) function.

Apple's Mac OS X is already quite adept with widgets; and Stardock Systems pioneered for the Windows platform with its DesktopX runtime environment. Since then, Microsoft has followed suit with its Sidebar docking location for Windows Vista, though Google famously preceded Vista by several months with its own Google Desktop, for running its own XML-based, Web-distributed gadgets from a central location, or from customized Google home pages.

This morning, the company finally added Linux as a gadget-supporting platform. Although there has been no pre-eminent gadgets/widgets platform for Linux thus far, an open source project called Jackfield runs Mac widgets on Linux, and has the goal of running gadgets for Yahoo's Widget Engine (formerly Konfabulator) and Microsoft's Sidebar, among others.

It's in this fast developing market for functionality (and other stuff) where Google is trying to find an edge. An ecosystem is supposed to be self-sustaining; but in the software industry, in order to remain competitive, self-sustaining segments can't sustain themselves for long without sustenance...in a sense.

So this morning, Google has announced it will invest seed money into businesses and individual initiatives that result in the development of popular gadgets for its own platform. Individuals who enroll in the company's platform may be awarded as much as $5,000 for creating gadgets whose page views in Google's directory top the 250,000 mark. And companies who approach Google with a solid business plan may receive as much as $100,000 in equity investment.

Google rarely makes any kind of investment whatsoever in a venture that doesn't advance the company's core business. So it's worth noting that just last month, the Gadgets project was moved under the purview of the AdSense division.

"In the year and a half since we launched Google Gadgets, we've seen a lot of growth in this program," writes Google engineer Sep Kavmar on his company's corporate blog this morning. "The developer community has created thousands of gadgets, and the top gadgets get tens of millions of page views per week...We've been hearing from a lot of gadget developers that they'd like to spend more time developing if they could, and we've been thinking about ways to help them do that."

The company says it plans to make between 20 and 40 such grants, and between 2 and 5 equity investments, during the next 12 months.

It probably goes without saying that a company part-owned by Google may not be producing gadgets or widgets for other platforms, though the company did say its equity investments will be in companies, not gadgets, and did not mention exclusivity.

San Francisco technologist and Om Malik podcast partner Niall Kennedy has been tracking the progress of Google's construction of this "ecosystem." During the month of March, Kennedy reported, the company added 622 gadgets to its directory, bringing the total number by the start of April to 4,848. Windows Live, by contrast, grew at a similar rate, but only had 640 gadgets available by the same time.

Of Google's "fastest growing" gadgets -- those whose page views shot up by the greatest amount over March -- #5, quite ironically, was a gadget for Windows Live Mail. (Google Desktop already handles Gmail.) This placed Windows Live in a coveted spot between a helicopter barricade-avoidance game and "Bowling Master."

A daily fortune cookie gadget was Google's biggest popularity gainer that month.