The 2008 Battle: Apps vs. Widgets
The Battle of 2008: App vs. Widget. We’ve heard the term “widget” more than we’d like to admit, especially working on the agency side of the business when the majority of the meetings are about widgets and distribution strategies.
There are over 130,000,000 results for widget in Google. There are 188,000,000 results for “apps.” As the iPhone release draws near, get ready for “apps” to battle to be the top buzzword for 2008.
As you can see by the above Google Trends data, ‘widgets’ became a hot entity in second quarter of 2005 when Yahoo! announced their widget initiative. The search volume around Apps has been steadily growing and should continue to grow, potentially at a faster pace, as the iPhone App Store roles out.
Venture Capitalists will be putting many small bets to work in the Apps space as they’ve done so in the widget space. Kleiner Perkins has announced $100 million to fund iPhone applications. My friends over at Union Square Ventures and First Round Capital have funded my friend Greg’s company, Pinch Media. Check out this video of Greg presenting at the first annual Media Kitchen Digital Media Venture Capital Conference. We’ve been talking quite a bit about iPhone apps but lets not forget about Facebook Apps and widgets… Federated Media has built a healthy business monetizing apps and widgets.
VC’s will help companies invest in an infrastructure where they can monetize this new world. It’s going to be rocky, it’s going to be all over the media, but it’s certainly going to be fascinating.
So in a world where we love [to hate] buzzwords, I think we may be retiring widgets soon for apps, but this is surely a battle to play out in 2008. I think 2009 may have buzzwords such as platforms, exchanges, data, and LBS, but lets concentrate on this year right now.