Hoping to pave a new path to its popular Web site, Yahoo Inc. has acquired Konfabulator, a tiny software maker that provides a computer platform for monitoring the weather, stock prices and a wealth of other customized information without opening a Web browser.
The deal, finalized late last week for an undisclosed price, gives Yahoo access to a toolbox of mini-applications — known as widgets — that have built a cult following since Palo Alto-based Konfabulator first introduced them for Apple Computer Inc.’s Macintosh in 2002.
The widgets are designed to make it easy for outsiders to develop and share new applications — a concept that Yahoo wants to encourage as it experiments with new ways to make the wealth of information on its Web site more useful, said Toni Schneider, vice president of the company’s developer network.
“We are lowering the bar and letting people do a lot more with our material,” Schneider said in the press release.
Online search engine leader Google Inc., one of Yahoo’s biggest rivals, recently began encouraging third-party developers to plug in new applications for its mapping service, which already is being tweaked to track crime and apartment vacancies in some cities.
Konfabulator’s widgets will be exposed to a much wider audience under its new ownership. Yahoo ended June with 181 million registered users.
The widgets will draw upon information and services already on Yahoo’s Web site without requiring a browser to see it. The material instead is displayed through an animated icon on the computer desktop.
To help popularize the widgets, Yahoo plans will give away the Konfabulator software that empowers the applications. Konfabulator had been charging $20 for the software. Anyone who bought version 2.0 of the software since mid-May will be given refunds, said Konfabulator CEO Arlo Rose.
Yahoo can afford to be generous, having made $755 million in its most recent quarter, including a $563 million profit from selling its remaining stake in Google.
The Sunnyvale-based company still expects to make money from Konfabulator.
Yahoo is counting on the widgets to make users more curious about certain topics, services or events, ultimately driving more traffic to its Web site so it can serve up more moneymaking ads and expand its current base of 10.1 million subscribers who pay for premium services, Schneider said in the release.
Konfabulator’s widgets can be programmed to perform a wide variety of tasks. The most popular applications are local weather and stock quotes, Rose said, but third-party developers have developed thousands of other uses.
For instance, there are widgets that monitor the local traffic or show the remaining power left on a laptop computer’s battery. Other more whimsical widgets serve up comic strips and horoscopes.
The Yahoo deal “gives us whole new buckets of content to grab stuff from.” Rose said in the release.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Amnesty Widget Browser 1.0 released; runs Dashboard Widgets on Mac OS X Panther, Tiger Desktops – July 05, 2005
MacDailyNews Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X Tiger released – May 07, 2005
Konfabulator 1.5 released; includes new JavaScript engine – July 23, 2003‘The Widget Man’ Konfabulator / Dashboard song parody posted – July 01, 2004
Konfabulator creator claims Apple is copying them with Mac OS X Tiger’s ‘Dashboard’ – June 28, 2004
MacDailyNews v1.0 Widget for Konfabulator now available – April 09, 2003
ugh whatever… as long as it makes Arlo Rose STFU. zzzzz Now that it’s free I’ll use it on my Dull at work to make it ever-so-slightly suck less.
Yawn…I got rid of this resource hog a long time ago. It’s cool that Yahoo is making it free though.
I can’t believe that Yahoo! sold its stake in Google. I hope they don’t think that Konfabulator is going to make up that difference…
I used Konfab for a while a couple years ago and liked it, but the widgets kept revving up my cpu at random times – got shed of it
Konfabulator is exactly what Windows needs to make it more Mac-like. Yahoo knows this, and the extra $$ people will pay to have a near-Mac experience is what is driving this latest Yahoo acquisition.
You’ll see more companies trying to profit from similar attempts at making the much weaker Windows look more like a Mac.
Yahoo! won’t dick Konfabulator like Apple did.
Konfabulator stole their idea from Apple’s “desk accessories”:
http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/dashboard_vs_konfabulator
Now we know who “stole” what.
MW = *Usually* I expect better trolling from Windoze fanboyz than this.
this is cool, as long as yahoo remembers that konfab got it’s start on the mac. i’d hate to see them stop supporting the mac platform because of dashboard.
It’s obvious that Konfabulator didn’t come up with the idea for widgets first, or else they would have been allowed to patent the software. Arlo Rose was just being a pissy brat over the whole thing, but now he can laugh all the way to the bank thanks to Yahoo. So there is no reason to dredge up this stupid BS about Apple stealing from him, because they definitely didn’t, and now he has his big check as well.
I *like* Konfabulator. I don’t care who came up with the idea first. I like their implementation and I find it useful, and I’ve now got a free copy running on my PC at work. Makes my daytimes (locked away from a rational operating system) just that much more bearable.
Good for Arlo Rose.
SJ should have done the decent thing and bought him out before releasing WIDGETS with 10.4.
Now he’s going to get competition from YAHOO and they may end up funding PC and Mac based developments that may work better, or in a different direction, than SJ would wish. With the cash mountain Apple are sitting on it wouldn’t have made a blip in the takings for a single day if he’d bought them out.
Apple need to be wary of being seen too often as the oppressor or stealer of innovation ( whether true or not, I must add) and less of the supporter of the ‘little guy’ – which has allowed Apple to retain a core support base for many years.
In true windoze fashion they are working hard to ” lowering the bar”
Nice to see a fella’s work rewarded. I hope they paid big.
Look, companies buy other companies for their technologies, not for their ideas. Konfabulator did have a great idea, one that went much further than previous “widget” or “accessory” kinds of ideas. It’s just that Apple’s implementation of the idea is more flexible, and less resource hungry. They saw no reason to buy a company when they could do BETTER themselves. Frankly, Konfabulator is a resource hog, and having each widget be its own little java process is kind of retarded.
But good for Konfabulator, and good for everyone who now gets to play with the wonderful variety of widgets available for it, Mac or Windows. It would be nice if someone made a nice easy way to port widgets from one system to the other, though.
Seems to me to be aimed primarily at Windows users. Do many Mac users use Yahoo?
“SJ should have done the decent thing and bought him out before releasing WIDGETS with 10.4.”
Why? It’s not like Arlo created them you know. Apple one upped Konfabulator by doing it better anyway, so they didn’t need to buy his resource hogging program. Read the article from Daring Fireball that was posted above and educate yourself on this topic…
This is good. I like Konfabulator better than Dashboard. That’s because I want to be able to have one or more widgets always displayed on my desktop. Apple thinks they figured out what is best for everyone and shoves that down our throats. I didn’t find it worth $20 to always have the weather displayed on my desktop. But it’s certainly worth “free.” I’ll keep an eye on the resource issue. I do tend to have very little patience for apps which slow down my Mac.
jhn:
1) Some Dashboard widgets are resource hogs as well.
2) Javascript is NOT Java.
3) Each widget as a separate WebKit process is somehow less retarded?
Obviates Beeblebrox’s lament, doesn’t it?
RTFS – as I said, whether he invented WIDGETs or not isn’t really the issue.
Konfabulator developed a very clever working idea for gathering information from net sources and dispalying it in a very easy to use way.
Apple introducing WIDGETs is a testimony to his success.
Successful business is not always about bottom line – if it is ( like M$) you will eventually fail or lose positive public support
whelp .. It’s ok by me. I downloaded Konfabulator early this morning. It’s very nice. I’ll turn it on when I want it and turn it off when I don’t. I even took their recent widget RSS feed. I’m happy.
I still use Konfabulator even tho I am on Tiger. There are certain widgets I want on the desktop all the time and as far as I know there is no way to do that with dashboard.
Nice to hear the Konfabulator guys got their just rewards. Great app. It was especially cool that they developed it for the Mac first.
Jack: you can use Amnesty to keep Dashboard widgets on your desktop at all times with Konfab-like options (opacity n window level).
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/17922