A Vodafone R&D Group (Betavine) launched a Widget Competition. The interesting think about this competition is that is launched by a global telecommunication operator and not by a mobile phone manufacture insuring a larger reach for the technology they are using (at this time it works in several Nokia phones and also in a Samsung model). Also a developer just needs to know client side languages like Javascript to build widgets.

See here how to create a widget (from thinkvitamin).