Widgetcon

Sneak Peaks: Nokia's Phone Widgets, FreeWebs' New page builder

At the WidgetCon conference in New York today, Nokia marketing executive Craig Cumberland privately showed us some not-yet-released widgets for Series 60 mobile phones.

Nokia announced in April that this phone was "widget-ready," and this fall the company plans to release fully functional widgets that will reside directly on the phone. With a little work, you can get widgets for your phone today, but you need the for-pay version of the Opera browser. You can also get some applications that are lighter versions of widgets, without all the functionality, at Widsets.

The widgets that Nokia promises are true … Read more

How to write widgets that work

Today in New York, about 150 advertising, media, finance, research, and coding professionals gathered for WidgetCon, claimed to be the first-ever conference devoted solely to Web widget applications. Some of the day was spent determining what a "widget" even is. For example, Chris Cunningham, VP of sales at FreeWebs, the Web page creation company that hosted the conference, emphatically said something is not a true widget if it's downloaded to a desktop. A short while later, a presenter from FIMlabs' Spring Widgets, part of Fox Interactive, talked proudly of the tens of thousands of downloads for one … Read more