Yahoo Acquisition Opens Door for Yahoo Widgets
Over the past year the major search engines, Google and Yahoo, have made acquisitions to expand their offerings and technological horizons. Yahoo added to its big name acqusitions of Overture, Altavista, Flickr, Blo.gs, and DialPad with the takeover of a widget company yesterday. Yahoo’s latest acquisition is that of Konfabulator, a product that allows users to create simple applets. What are widgets and applets and what is this odd company with an odder name?
Konfabulator defines itself as “a JavaScript runtime engine for Windows and Mac OS X that lets you run little files called Widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to. Widgets can be alarm clocks, calculators, can tell you your WiFi signal strength, will fetch the latest stock quotes for your preferred symbols, and even give your current local weather.”
The Konfabulator folks seem quite happy about being acquired by Yahoo. They’ve been able to offer their software for free since the acquisition, in part due to the money they’ll be saving by drinking free coffee at Yahoo : “We’re really excited about this, and here’s the big reason why… they have free espresso on campus! That’s right, no more $80 a week Starbucks bills!”
Another reason we’re excited about it, is the very cool big picture. See, when we first thought of Konfabulator, one of the key pieces was accessing internet content. Well guess what Yahoo has boat-loads of? Yup. And what’s really great is that they’re starting to open it up to everyone in a format that’s useable outside the traditional browser, as XML feeds. Guess how they’re going to provide real-world examples of how to use this stuff. Yup… Konfabulator. So really, depending on how you look at it, we’re taking over Yahoo! We’re going to make it so the best way to access their data is via slick little Widgets.
Additionally it seems that the name of the overall offering will be changing to one umbrella brand : Yahoo! Widgets.
