WidSets Beta testing returns!

Last January-February we run a beta testing for WidSets new release for the first time. I believe it was a great experience for all of us. The active members got a chance to try out and provide some early feedback on new features and still affect the final version that went live in February. We got a possibility to see the first reactions how the WidSets community would feel about the new features. This was great co-operation between the Beta WidSeteers and WidSets and that’s something we hope to continue in the future, too.

WidSets service itself works nicely as a one way to collect feedback. The Beta WidSeteers have some additional reporting widgets on the dashboard of new WidSets client, which gives them an easy and mobile way to provide the feedback to us. Of course, the beta testing site’s Forum is always a good way to comment things as well as the public chat widget where Beta WidSeteers can chat about the new version or whatever.

Currently we are working on the next release which will have improvements to some old features and but also something totally new features, too. We’ll start the registration for beta testing very soon. If you are committed to use and test the new version of WidSets and eager to provide some feedback, tune in the WidSets Forum. There will be an announcement very shortly about beta testing and instructions, how to get involved.

Once again big thanks for all Beta WidSeteers that provided feedback last February. Soon it will be time to get busy again. I hope many of you will join this effort this time!

Tana

 

Widget developers get rewarded

We are constantly rewarding developers publishing popular widgets. Read about nomination of the second WidSets Developer Award and about launch of the new developer's reward prorgam we are now running until the 15th of June. There's again great opportunities available for developers to contribute and to get rewarded!

WidSets Developer Rewards 2008 launched

The new developer competition is now open! Until the 15th of June 2008 we run the competition in five categories: games, information, mashup, utility, and the open category. There are prizes in all the categories and we will also reward the most frequently used ones as in the advertisement based business the most popular ones will at the end get the best revenue. Read more about the competition at http://dev.widsets.com/forum/post/1449981/

Second WidSets Developer Award nominated

As a very special recognition we nominate the WidSets developer awards. You can read about the first one there http://blog.widsets.com/widsets/2007/11/widsets-develop.html. The second nomination goes for two talented Finnish programmers Rauli Laatikainen and Ari Hamara who won the second prize in our last coding competition with WJewls game (competition and the results are mentioned at http://blog.widsets.com/widsets/2008/02/good-vibes-with.html). Rauli and Ari visited us to pick their phone prizes and to have a chat. I was of course curious to hear their experiences on developing with WidSets. Read there how they describe their interest towards WidSets and experiences from the competition they made a success.

"We both share interest in computer games and graphics. We have previous experience on developing some games on various platforms, including mobile ones. We found WidSets through a friend telling us about the coding competition currently ongoing. At the same time there were also advertisements of WidSets in buses and metros in Helsinki. We checked the developers site and noticed there's a very good SDK and plenty of tutorials and examples available. After looking through the examples and API documentation we thought we could quite easily implement a game on the platform. The platform got our interest as it really improves certain issues in mobile development, for example delivering to big audiences without creating plenty of different versions for different phones. Firstly we browsed through all games available for WidSets at that time. We found lots of nice games and especially Bombus caught our attention. It's visually appealing and very fun to play. The online highscore concept used in the game seemed to be very nice way to attract to replay. We also decided to make the user interface of the game quite much like the one in Bombus. So with all that in mind we started thinking of the game itself and noticed several well known concepts not yet published for WidSets. We wanted to pick a concept that's fitting nicely for mobile phone keypad and would be somewhat fast to code. We decided to implement the match-three-game as the concept has proven itself to be very popular. To make our game stand out from the mass we implemented the online highscores and a few small tricks like the number effect and vibration on block match. We are really happy how the game finally appeared considering that we only spent quite a little time on it. We are at the moment by the way coming up with a new idea about another game for WidSets. Hope it will get as nice acceptance as WJewls did!"

I conclude by congratulating Rauli and Ari once again about the award and hoping you as well as all the developers success with the forthcoming widgets we are already looking for!

Tero-Markus

CTIA WIRELESS 2008: E-Tech Award to WidSets!

We have received great news from Las Vegas this week! CTIA WIRELESS 2008, the most important global technology events of the year, has just ended. Jan and Teemu from WidSets participated in the event and guess what – the guys are not coming home empty-handed!

CTIA WIRELESS 2008 announced the winners of the third annual Emerging Technology (E-Tech) Awards on Wednesday and WidSets won the second prize in Consumer Applications - Mobile Entertainment/Social Networking category Ontela's PicDeck being the winner and Yahoo! Go 3.0 taking the third place.

I hope that Jan and Teemu will give us a detailed report next week. While waiting for that check out the E-tech Award winners in each category. The panel evaluated each entry on innovation, functionality, wow factor, importance of technology and ease of use and implementation.

Tana

New version of WidSets is up and running!

So, how do you like it – new upgraded WidSets? The service update on 18 March went without bigger hiccups and by now, I believe that most of you have already updated the new version of WidSets.

We have received a warm reception on our new WidSets version. You have written many really positive comments to the Forum. You seem to be very happy about the new features that many of you have wished for. WidSets is now a little bit faster than before and that has been good news for many of you. The most of the improvement ideas in new WidSets have come directly from you, so I hope you’ll continue it in the future, too.

Before the new WidSets was released, the version was tested with the “Beta WidSeteers”. A bunch of volunteers had an opportunity to use the new version and provide some early feedback. It was great to collaborate with the Beta WidSeteers and the feedback proved to be really valuable for us. Based on those comments, we did some changes e.g. to new Email widget in the nick of time. But the WidSets beta testing is totally another story and you will hear more about that later on.

In the blogosphere the upgraded version of WidSets inspired many bloggers to write a line or two. All About Symbian, Symbian-Guru.com and Engadget were describing the new features such as rearranging the widgets on the mobile dashboard and opening the mobile browser via WidSets. Darla Mack stated: "Kudos to the Widset's team for the cool new features!". Thanks Darla! I would still add here kudos to the WidSets community! I feel that this is very much developing the service together with each and one of you :) Check out this link to read more what the bloggers have been writing on our new release:

http://del.icio.us/WidSets/comments

By the way, WidSets and our brilliant agency Valve won the “Best Infodesign” category with WidSets 1.0 in Grand One 2008, the main digital media industry awards in Finland.

If you are fluent in Finnish read the whole story here. We'd also like to congratulate Valve on their success with their several other works!

Feel free to write your thoughts and ideas to WidSets Forum!

Tana

New improvements in WidSets!

Dear WidSeteer!

New! Improved! Astonishing! Amazing! Wonderfull! And humbly at your service :)

Yes, you will be having an upgraded WidSets available shortly, with some great new features and capabilities!

My favorites:

- creating my own widgets on mobile! Yes, we will have a Mobile Studio.

- moving widgets around the dasboard on your device! Yes, full control of how your WidSets looks like.

- speed! Loads much faster than today.

- using the new Email widget: Yes, now there is a real push email widget to use your POP or IMAP email.

- sharing content and widgets with friends, with comments. And lots of other cool stuff and contents.

We are really proud of the work guys in the labs have been doing again, and of the results coming available in just a few days. We will again have a (short) service break, and then go live with the new release on March 18th. And by the way, we do know there were some problems the last time we did an upgrade in November. We have now been working really, really hard to make sure the service break will be shorter, and start with new release smoother. For example, you do not necessarily need to upgrade to the new client, but we do believe you will want to!

Many of the improvements now made have their origins on the great feedback and suggestions we have been receiving from you and our other users, via WidSets Forum comments and feedback. We are really grateful for your contribution and support! We have very strong commitment to you, our users, and we do our best to listen and act on your comments and requests.

So please keep the feedback and suggestions coming - you tell us what pleases and amuses you, and we do our best to provide you with that :)

Best regards

Jarmo

Good vibes with developers

Hello WidSets developers and all fans of great mobile widgets. Our second coding competition has recently closed and the time has come to announce the winners and to discuss about the next wave for WidSets developers.

So here are the best of the bests, the three winners. Games really rock this time, and generally speaking why not - fast and easy to grab just when in the mood, together with everyday use of mobile web. Fun and... damn, too addictive ;) All the winners are now owners of Nokia N810 internet tablet and they are contacted personally. On behalf of the WidSets team, warm thanks to all participants, and for the winners CONGRATULATIONS!!!

The first prize - BOOM! game What else could I say than Boom is the most impressive implementation seen so far. Will Bamford from MobileRadicals/UK did it again since he was the first awarded developer by us last year with the Bombus game being a great success. Boom! excellently continues demonstrating the capabilities and performance of the WidSets platform and Helium. Thanks Will! Btw, see also the demo clip http://youtube.com/watch?v=E5V3L_sVtF8

The second prize - WJewls game This game totally hooked me! I mean, aspects of the killer mobile game being very easy to start and learn but having complexity and challenge as you fight for the new records.. simply the most addictive thing right now and the implementation is excellent. Shared highscores add the icing on the cake. Thanks a lot from your great effort Ari and Rauli, as an additional recognition you will share an honour of being selected as the second Awarded Developer by WidSets, warm congratulations!

The third prize - Number game by the Russian student team from Saint-Petersburg state university of aerospace instrumentation (http://suai.ru/) positively surprised with the intellectual challenge it offers hence being perfectly suitable for mobile use. Again, very simple to learn but difficult to beat the records. Good work, we are happy to have you guys on board! Pick the winner widgets from the library and get hooked!

I am happy to announce we will have further competitions for developers during this spring already coming. Students and university teams, you should definitely take a look at amazing opportunities in the WidSets Challenge 2008 organized by Vodafone in their Betavine.com site. The competition is sponsored by Forum Nokia. Students, you really shouldn't miss this one, dive in at http://vodafonebetavine.net/web/guest/projects/students

In WidSets team we are really really happy and proud to see some great development as well as general Helium competence building happening already within WidSets developer community, as we are yet taking the first steps in that space. In WidSets we do believe both in openness and in the power of community having a concrete value proposition, namely revenue potential, in most of the cases. In this spirit, while WidSets is growing as a service and as a business, without any doubt we want to position developers as key players of the healthy ecosystem that is evolving and, having said that, I encourage developers and development companies stay tuned. We are working to come out with a proper developer's offering "WidSets for developers" essentially meaning not only mobile-optimized technology to develop great mobile web applications but in addition, unique channel to reach and manage the masses of mobile devices and customer base, as well as attractive means to monetize on top of that. As you may find the topic of WidSets for developers interesting, you should participate in the discussion and the renewal with us by sharing your thoughts here in blog or in the forums. Thanks!

Game developers, please also note our guys Marko and Dario will visit the GDC (www.gdconf.com) in San Francisco this month so you can catch them there to discuss WidSets development and the opportunities.

And now, let's continue developing the easier mobile web.

Tero-Markus

WidSets goes Kamping!

WidSets marketing team organized a promotion day in Kamppi Shopping Center in Helsinki. The day was organized in co-operation with YTV (Finnish public transport company) that also has a very useful widget in our WidSets library. We were happy to see so many people visiting our stand and getting excited about WidSets service and of all useful widgets we have, such as the YTV Journey Planner widget that allows people to plan their door-to-door route with public transport (bus, subway, tram) in the Helsinki Metropolitan area.                                                                                                          

During the day we had a lottery among people who visited our stand and installed WidSets client on their mobile phone. We will now announce two lucky winners of Nokia N95 multimedia computers, they are: Karoliina and Konsa both living in Helsinki capital area. They both installed WidSets client on their phone and have been very happy with the service, especially with the YTV Journey Planner and Wikipedia widgets. Congratulations to both winners!

Happy New Year!

Hello WidSeteers!

We hope you had a good start into the New Year! 2008 will bring lots of new, great widgets to our library, so let's start right away with the first one: The Wall Street Journal Online! Two great widgets give our WidSets users access to full-text articles and blogs from wsj.com. Pick both of them up right here.

With The Wall Street Journal Online widgets, you can now get the latest Wall Street Journal financial and business stories, technology news and opinions to your mobile device. Track news throughout the day, all optimized specifically for mobile users.

"When it comes to critical business news, there is no substitute for The Wall Street Journal Online. With WSJ.com, you will always be "in the know" with the continuous information that you need to succeed in business and in your personal life. WSJ.com’s blogs also provide up-to-the-minute analysis." (wsj.com)

Thanks to the guys at wsj.com for making this possible!

Cheers,

Sebastian

Happy holidays from WidSets!

When the holiday season is only few days away our little elves have been very busy with developing new widgets so everyone can get into the holiday mood. They came up with four new wicked widgets that you can start sharing the holiday spirit also with your friends and family!                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Oops, forgot to send your Christmas cards like I did? With our Christmas card widget you can send personalized Christmas greetings which can be photos taken by you or you can pick your favorite photos from our own collection. I just tried it and sent few funny cards to my friends, they were very surprised :)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

Send surprise presents to everyone! The present is a memory game where a photo taken by your or one of the pictures offered by WidSets will be revealed. Send the present to your friends and they can figure out the surprise behind the memory game. This one is very funny!                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

Good news. Now you don’t have to order Chinese food to get your future predicted with those cracking fortune cookies! Just pick the Fortune cookie widget. You can use the random fortunes or write your own. Share the fun and predict the future of your friends :)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Send some funny New Year’s wishes with the Picture Postcard widget! You get to choose from different layouts, pictures and greetings to personalize your post card. Then just add a message to your friend and send it to his WidSets inbox. Your friend will love it!                   

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

Choose your favorite widgets from here and start sharing the holiday spirit to your nearest and dearest!                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Happy holidays to everyone!

                                                                                                                                          

WidSets Developer Award

Terve

The Winners of the WidSets coding competition were announced on 3rd October. All of the winners have already been rewarded with a brand new Nokia multimedia computer (official announcement can be found here: http://dev.widsets.com/forum/topic/1/29875/1/). Once again thank you for all who participated on our contest.

We were very excited and delighted to see all those cool widgets developed with our SDK. Inspired by the hard development work involved, the enthusiasm and devoteness of our community members, we now want to start a practise of regulary bringing out - elevating - a developer, who has caught our eyes and whos work has really impressed us.

We are pleased and honoured to announce that the first WidSets Developer Award goes to... Will Bamford, Lancaster,UK. Congratulations!

Will is one of the four winners in our first coding competition. He won a prize with his retro-arcade style game widget, Bombus. It has been very popular, having been picked a several thousand times.

We are going to announce one more WidSets Developer Award by the end of this year, alongside with our second coding contest, to be announced during this week. So, be active, make an interesting and appealing widget, and it just may be you who gets our aspired award.

We asked Will to tell more about his thoughts and himself as a developer who has discovered WidSets. Enough said, let the man himself speak!

"I'm a PhD student at Lancaster University in the UK studying new mobile technologies. In particular, my interests lie in the development of innovative mobile phone games.

When I first heard about WidSets, I was intrigued at the possibilities offered by this new way of developing and accessing mobile widgets. It was the means of distribution that excited me most - having your widget easily and effortlessly available to millions of users is a prospect independent developers could previously only dream of.

However, I assumed the platform would only be suitable for developing simple widgets with static screens and content that was based on internet feeds. Then I actually installed WidSets and noticed that a few decent games were available; "Sudoku", "MemoryGame (Fruitsets)" and a few sliding tile games. Whilst most widgets are understandably oriented toward accessing web services (RSS feeds etc.), the discovery of simple puzzle games on WidSets began to pique my interests as a game developer. After a few days spent happily playing with WidSets, I stumbled upon a new game in the library called "Breakout", a simple clone of the Atari classic of the same name - cool! Now this game demonstrated that dynamic, arcade-style games were also possible. It was no coincidence that this was when I decided to get involved in WidSets development for myself.

The inspiration for my first WidSets widget was a popular online Flash game called "Helicopter Game" (unfortunately the original link for this doesn't seem to work anymore). This game was very simple; to avoid crashing into barriers or cave walls, the player had hold down the mouse button the make the helicopter fly upwards, let go and gravity would take hold. Even though the player was presented with only one button to press and simple graphics, the game was great fun and surprisingly difficult to master (I remember losing a few days of my life to it a several years ago). I decided a similar game would be perfect for WidSets, so I started work on "Bombus".

I found all the information (SDK, API, examples etc.) I needed to create my own widget on the developer Wiki. I have quite a lot of experience with mobile Java, so it didn't take me long to get to grips with Helium script, WidSets' scripting language. Due to the nature of the WidSets development environment, I found my time to be extremely productive - changes to widgets are reflected immediately in the emulator, and testing on real phone is simply a matter of issuing an update request to the widget server (this only takes a few seconds). I was also very pleased with the support I received on the developer forum - questions were promptly answered by people closely involved with the development of WidSets and other community members.

I'm very happy with the way Bombus turned out although some people have said it's a bit too difficult - feel free to try it for yourself and make up your own mind. However, don't expect to reach the top of the leaderboard anytime soon.

By happy coincidence, I was just finishing my game as the WidSets team introduced a widget competition. Bombus was one of four widgets that won the competition, and right now I'm awaiting the arrival of a shiny new Nokia N95.

I'm now working on another WidSets game in my spare time which I'm looking forward to releasing soon. I would also recommend others spend a few hours experimenting with WidSets to see how easy it is to create cool widgets."

Thanks again Will !

Improve your image - be awarded by WidSets ;o)

Cheers,

Dev.WidSets.com team

Welcome to relaunched WidSets!

The new WidSets service has finally been launched and we have now come out of Beta. The migration was huge and we have been having some hiccups with the service. Our guys are working very hard to stabilize the system so we are very sorry about any inconveniences it may cause!  Thank you all for your patience and understanding!                                           

                                                                                                                                                         

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Here are some snapshots of our latest additions to WidSets. We have now made it possible for you to meet other WidSeteers and see which widgets they are using. You can upload your profile by adding your own picture, slogan and location and share your own dashboard content with other users. Show to others what you are all about!   

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

Launching the revamped service has hyped up our users to create own widgets and that’s no wonder, it is so simple now :-) Just type in the feed or web site URL and we will add the rest of the spices. If you want to fine tune your own widgets, we have added some nice icons and other stuff that you can choose from to make your own masterpiece.                                                                                                                                             

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

We have added a new way to explore the WidSets library that we call the “squid”. It is cool and exciting way to find and pick new content. Click on Explore on the main site and try it out.  Now you can also rank the widgets that you use and show to others which ones suck and which rock!                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

Visit our expanding library and try out the new widgets! We added AccuWeather widget to help you to stay one step ahead of Mother Nature. You can just type in the location where you are and it will show you the current weather conditions. Our WidSets community has been very active lately and as a result of our developer contest we got very cool new game called Bombus, you can pick it from the library and start playing!             

                                                                                                                                                             

Finally, also the mobile client got new makeover. First time users can now get easy instructions how to use WidSets from “Start here” widget. You'll find your inbox messages and traffic monitor in your profile (your picture will be there too if you have uploaded it on the web site!). And the mobile library is now faster and easier to use! You can easily search for your favorite widgets and see how many other users are using the same widgets. Simple as that! Log in to WidSets and try it all out :)

WidSets in the Mobile Internet World Conference in Boston

Terve

We are going to be in Boston during November 13-15 in the Mobile Internet World 2007 Conference. In case you would be there, come and see us on Booth 310. You'd get also a chance to visit our collegues from Nokia S60 team in the next Booth 308.  I'll be one of the panelist in the "Building Business Models for the Mobile Internet" taking place Wednesday 2:30pm onwards. We'll also have a 20 minute session in the Mobile Internet Solution Theater Thursday 1:45pm onwards. Before our session there is session about Nokia's S60 by Ganesh Sivaraman starting at 1:15pm.

Come to see and talk with us !

Cheers,

Tuomo 

Achtung, baby: The Web 2.0 circus is moving again!

This time the crème de la crème of the new Web will reside in Berlin, Germany. Come and see designers and developers, product managers, entrepreneurs, VCs, marketers, business strategists and many other crazy people. And guess what? WidSets will be there as well!

Make sure you come check us out in Hall D, right inside the Nokia booth, from Tuesday, Nov. 6 to 8, 2007, every day from 9am-6pm.

Hey, wanna see something cool? We quickly whipped up two widgets for the event: One for the Web 2.0 Expo Blog, addresses practical questions, news&updates and a lot of good hints for afterparties and networking events. Pick it up here. The other one is a mobile chat widget: You can easily share your thoughts and pictures about Web 2.0 Expo Berlin 2007 – Visit us at the Expo to get your password! You can of course already pick the widget here. Can’t make it to Berlin? No problem, just check out all chat messages and pictures of people at the Expo in real time here.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
We hope to meet you all in Berlin!

Cheers, Sebastian

WidSets upgrading from Beta to the real, real service!

Hi friends.

You may have been wondering why we have not been bringing up so many new features into WidSets for a few months. The reason is simple - we have been redoing the whole thing: database, software, web pages, mobile client, hairdos - those of us who still have some hair left…, you name it. And next week we will be bringing it all alive for you!

There will be major enhancements for you as a user. Creating your own widgets will be a lot easier, finding content on the web page is more fun than ever with our new spidery Explore, and you can now rank widgets on the mobile - and see rankings by others. And this is only the beginning! Come in next week and take a look for yourself. Or take a sneak peak at:

http://mashable.com/2007/10/16/widsets-relaunch/

What has changed even more are the things under the hood: The cluster of servers bringing you the great service has now grown to a large farm, and there are a lot of enhancements to support the new millions and millions of new users who are signing up. Our labs in their dungeon have done a great job, and now that the work is almost done, we will be allowing for some fresh air and daylight down there! Maybe even some pizzas.

But as they say: content is king. We have added a lot of exciting new widgets over the last weeks, and even enhanced the language coding, to make it easier to find local and non-english-language content. Widsets is now a truly global service, but with more and more user-generated local content! Someone has even added Chinese widgets with Chinese characters. Cool - even if I thought that was a new Mahhjong - game...

Anyway - next week will be the most exciting week of our lives. A big migration, everything changes, how will it go - anxiety, eating fingernails, migraines, cubic tons of coffee… On Tuesday, we will close the old system, and start cranking up the new one.  The migration of all user data, widgets and contents will take some time, but if all goes well, we will be back online late Tuesday, Samoa and Midway Islands timezone…

You will get an upgrade of your WidSets client on your phone when you log in the first time. Sorry, no backward compatibility this time :( But your username, cool personal widgets etc will naturally remain.

If you then have problems, please tune into our Forum, where we will be posting helpful hints and advice. If all goes really, really badly, we will even post the phone number of the guy responsible for the migration! Only joking, only joking :=)

For now, thumbs up, and all the best to the guys in the lab doing the real work!

WidSets goes Finland!

Check out our latest developments in Finland and take our new useful widgets to a test drive. Don’t worry, we are continuously developing new widgets in other countries too but we are so proud of these  widgets that we want to introduce them to you.

YTV journey planner will show you the easiest way to find your destination with public transportation in the capital area of Finland. Simply save time and enjoy its easiness! Just in case you get bored on the way, why don’t you create a chat circle with your friends and send messages as well as images. Time flies when you are having fun! :-)

Driving to the cottage over the weekend? Get up-to-date traffic reports and traffic cameras directly to your phone and ensure that you will have a fast and safe journey to your destination. Foreca widget shows you the latest weather reports and forecasts to make sure you have packed your rubber boots in case it will rain.

WidSets will now bring TV in your pocket too. Download YLE uutiset and text-tv in your phone and check out the latest news on the go. Sit down and relax and Telkku.com shows you what is on TV today. If there is nothing interesting on TV, you can always go to the movies. Finnkino widget will give you information about day´s shows and seating availability.

But as you know, this is just a tiny view on our growing library, so remember to check it out frequently!

Enjoy Finns!