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Peter Yared: iWidgets (cool and powerful stuff)

November 21st, 2008 · 1 Comment · Entrepreneurs

Peter Yared? I met him… arghh… almost twenty years ago. He was a 4D developer during his time at IDS. I lost track of him while he was Prograph and later at JRad Technologies, an enterprise Java tools company that he founded in 1995 and was acquired by NetDynamics where he stayed – until the company was in turn acquired by Sun. There, he occupied a number of positions (CTO, Application Sever Division, Researcher at SunLabs, CTO at Liberty). We reconnected through a common VC friend who had asked him to take a look at the platform of a company I was running. Our paths soon crossed again in a cryptic world for techno-freaks: he was in the “grid” genre and I was in the native implementation of XML Schemas. Maybe we always happened to do a number of cool, hair-raising stuffs at the same time after all – while webifying on separate tracks for over a decade.

His new venture is pretty neat – iWidgets. A great name too. The product enables publishers (even you and me, but also and much better for Peter’s company, large corporations) to distribute content to social networks. Yep, if you want to share that you are a fan of characters on CBS programming with your friends within your Facebook, MySpace or your iGoogle, you can. Or more generally speaking, if you want to add a third dimension to your two-dimensional Web space, iWidgets is the way to go. Think of it as a way to create stories inside stories and traverse viral channels.

iWidgets navigates in the same waters as two other companies, MuseStorm and Sprout, hotter ones, though. iWidgets is more than just cute “ready-to-use” stuff; it is also a development environment – I hate to use this expression these days, as it seems to imply that it is difficult, although it isn’t at all.  iWidgets allows you to create, customize and fully configure widgets to display content, text or media, the way you want (with the right look and feel within any given environment).  In short, you create native widgets, not strange in-laws slated to mar the family picture.

Peter is a “serial entrepreneur.” Sure, I agree with Guy Kawasaki in Reality Check that the label “serial entrepreneur” is double-edged. Yet, some of them are able to ward off the risks of self-serialization: when they do not hesitate to jump into new domains, are able to learn fast because talent is not so much to already know, as the ability to know what you don’t know, get up to speed quickly – and stumble upon the thing that not too have figured out. This creative adaptability may actually be Peter’s most permanent feature; he was born in Switzerland from a Lebanese Maronite father and a Jewish mother from Brooklyn, also lived in Turkey, Austria (speaks German), England. Incidentally he speaks French much better than what he says he does (this was his native tongue), and to end with his personal journey, he is anchored in San Francisco for good!

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

http://www.iwidgets.com/

Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition

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1 response so far ↓

  • 1 Julien // Nov 21, 2008 at 6:23 pm

    Great article! (Once again)… Widgets are definetely “hot” and I wish I could have attended this event!

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