Google Adsense College

Posted by Sep Kamvar, Engineering Lead
for Personalization

Sometimes I think I know a lot. I can code like a champ and also
know the difference between a Monet and a Manet. But on closer
inspection, maybe I don't know very much at all. When it comes
to fine wines, for instance, I can't tell the difference
between Châteauneuf-du-Pape and Chateau-de-Cardboard, and if you
asked me who played in the Super Bowl last year, I'd probably
say the Dolphins. And lots of people at Google are like me: we know
some things, and have some good ideas, but we certainly don't
know everything or have all the good ideas.

So when we designed iGoogle, our personalized homepage, we baked
that recognition right in to the product by developing the

href="http://www.google.com/apis/gadgets/" >Google Gadgets API.
Google Gadgets are applications that developers can create and
anyone can embed into their iGoogle homepage or their own website.
In the year and a half since we launched Google Gadgets, we've
seen a lot of growth in this program. The developer community has
created thousands of gadgets, and the top gadgets get tens of
millions of pageviews per week. This is great for our developers,
as iGoogle gives the gadgets broad distribution, and it's great
for our iGoogle users, as they benefit from a richer variety of
options for their personalized homepage. There have been some
really interesting gadgets created, from href="http://www.google.com/ig/directory?source=gapi&num=24&url=http://www.google.com/ig/modules/todo.xml" >
to-do lists to href="http://www.google.com/ig/directory?source=gapi&num=24&q=zelda&btnG=Search Homepage Content" >
Zelda, from a href="http://www.google.com/ig/directory?source=gapi&num=24&url=http://www.google.com/ig/modules/eyes.xml" >
pair of eyes that follow your mouse around the screen to an
entire customer relationship management ( href="http://www.google.com/ig/directory?source=gapi&num=24&url=http://www.crmforgoogle.com/google/crm.html" >
CRM) application.

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. To that
end, we're happy to announce href="http://www.google.com/gadgetventures/" >Google Gadget
Ventures, a new pilot program that will help fund third-party
gadget development and gadget-related businesses. We plan to offer
two types of funding: $5,000 grants for gadget developers who want
to invest time making their already successful gadget even better,
and $100,000 seed investments for new gadget-related businesses.
For now, applications are restricted to gadget developers who have
more than 250,000 pageviews per week on their gadget.

Our hope with Google Gadget Ventures is to help create an ecosystem
where developers can spend more time doing what they love –
building great gadgets. You'll find more details on how to
apply on href="http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2007/06/google-gadget-ventures.html" >
Tom's post on the Google Code Blog and the href="http://www.google.com/gadgetventures/" >Google Gadget
Ventures web page. I'm extremely excited to see what you
all come up with! height="1" width="1" />

Tags: , Engineering, Kamvar, Lead, PersonalizationSometimes, Posted, Sep, think