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

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

The WidSets Developer site is now open

I just received an email from Antti saying that "I would like to announce that as of now, the http://developer.widsets.com Developer site is live and kicking!". These guys always surprise me, since the original schedule was "some time during summer 2007".

Anyway, there is much more information in the Forum, so go there and see what's available! And get started with discussions, meeting other fellow developers, and so on.

Reaction widget - dev tools usage

As some of you have heard, one of the things we will introduce later this year is a development toolkit to complement the existing widget templates in the Library. Using the toolkit, a programmer can create not only great-looking widgets, but also functionally complex and (hopefully :-) cool widgets.

We recently gave the existing rudimentary tools to some friends of ours, and one of the guys quickly created the Reaction widget, the first widget created using our scripting language, by someone outside of the team. I think this is pretty cool, especially considering that at this time we don't have too much documentation available for the guys, and the programming is really done "by hand".

We'll package all the tools and documentation in the upcoming months, and inform you about the availability of those later. Anyway, thank you, pacovu for the great widget!

WidSets is on the air!

Hopefully without any magic of numerology we opened the site and made 06.06.06 a unique day. We have run the site internally and with selected test groups for a while, and also already made first upgrades according to the feedback. The whole team feels excited in such a day and at the same time we commit to stay creative and fast in future as well. Please feel encouraged to contribute, and don't forget to tell your friends!

Another milestone approved

Taking a look at the entries in our blog so far, it seems that we mostly achieve some goals or milestones, and then celebrate that. Well, I guess there's nothing wrong with that, is it? The truth is of course that all kinds of other things happen in the daily work, and some things that aren't in our control (more about that later). Anyway, yesterday we hade a major milestone approved, so this is a typical entry in that sense. Almost. Why almost? Well, this time we didn't celebrate. And the only reason for that was of course that we would be able to report something a little different in this blog. At least once.

Lightning speed, small steps

When we put this team together we adopted a startup approach when it comes to flexibility and speed, and thanx to our investors and supporters, we were allowed to execute in that mode. We have now mixed that with light-weight processes, and the results look great.

Still, our philosophy is to start with a good architecture and a good set of features, and then gradually build upon that, learning from what we've done, receiving feedback from our users and partners, and then gradually improving and introducing new features. Tuomo visited Stockholm and the Vasa Museum, where the opposite approach is described. I think there's lots to learn from that story. Ship happens.