That said let me add that this does look extremely cool and promising, and developers will inevitably be all over this. But also remember that developers are unlikely to make you any money because a) they don't like to spend money, b) they are insanely creative about ways to "do it themselves" to avoid having to pay you money.
In fact, I ended up building this because I didn't want to pay for the other mobile services platforms (there are a few of them) when attempting to add mobile features to another project I'm experimenting with.
But to your original point, I absolutely agree, pitching this as a "mobile" "platform" for "widgets" is probably hopeless. Quite simply, it must solve somebody's problem. And I believe that we can get it to do just that. One area that we think is promising is using email to invoke applications that do interesting things because
(1) everyone knows how to send email, and
(2) you can attach lots of useful things to email.
So, what if we added the ability to recognize a ton of different file formats and allowed you to query the data within an attached file to invoke other web services?
For example, lets say you have a site that does group payments, and you want to let your users send you an Excel spreadsheet with the names of your friends and how much they owe you for that trip you just took together and automatically create an invoice on your site, and then notify everyone that they owe money. That seems interesting, and our product could support that pretty easily.
Anyways, it is definitely our immediate burden to focus this technology on solving _real_ problems.
So, what if we added the ability to recognize a ton of different file formats and allowed you to query the data within an attached file to invoke other web services?
You're still talking in terms of solutions. "Hey, we could build this cool solution! Would that solve any problems?" I've never managed to find a worthwhile business idea that way (not that I'm an expert at it or anything).. in my experience the way to do that is to find the problem first and then figure out what solution you could build (using your technology) to help solve that problem. Then figure out if there really is a market for that solution, and then build it incrementally and evolve it to serve that market. Then at one point flick the switch and start charging.
