Go Global Gadget ^™

We’ve put together a small project that shows the light map and the night lights of the earth. It can be found at Earth Light Map.

Here is a small sample:

The dot is an index of the Global Consciousness Project. It is the real time analysis of their data. This site downloads their data once a minute and runs sophisticated probability functions to find the coherency the random numbers are that are generated by the project. The theory is that global human thought changes the way the random numbers are generated and thus captures the unity of thought across the world. The new website can be found here at the GCP Dot. Here is the web enabled version of the dot:

This is the iGoogle gadget version and the Apple Dashboard Version:

We recently developed an Apple Dashboard widget for Worldlabel.Com. This was a fun one to make and is now available as an iGoogle gadget and a Dashboard widget. You can see them both below. The iGoogle gadget is a live version.

Install in iGoogle.

Download the Dashboard Widget.

To find out more info you can go to the gadget info page

The amazing thing about the Dashboard gadget is that it became the Featured Dashboard Widget in the Dashboard Downloads section of Apple.com. It was featured the day after it was listed. Here is a screenshot of the event:

This new image gadget is truly artful. We created it for Destination 360 to show of their beautiful image gallery. They’ve had a lot of success with their theme: Las Vegas. Their gadget is really interesting because it adapts to the size of the gadget. In nearly all other gadgets the image either doesn’t fit in the gadget or there is wasted space around the image. This technology dynamically resizes the image to fit in the gadget so there is no wasted space and no overhang. Here it is in action:

We created a new flash version of Ladybugs. These stay in a gadget. It’s possible to add this to MySpace or Facebook. (Version 1 Ladybugs are on the whole page and can’t be embedded on other websites.) Here is the gadget:

While there are other Astronomy Picture of the Day gadgets, we thought we could bring something unique to the table: The image that resizes to your gadget. There is no guessing or images that slide out of view with a smaller window.

One of the great product advertisements we put together was for Sharper Image. They wanted to show off some of their products over the 2007 Christmas season and we were there to help them with their advertisements.

Last year we here at Go Global Gadget LLC were privileged to create an advertisement for Netflix.

This Adobe Flash Google Gadget Ad was run on many high profile websites from Oct 11th 2007 to Oct 18th 2007 to promote the Netflix Promotion Campaign called Netflix Now Playing Featuring Dana Carvey. We converted the video from High Definition TV mp4 into the exact size seen in the gadget ad. This was to reduce the size (width, height, quality, and file size) of the video for accessibility and thus allow more users to view the ad. We also maintained the 16:9 aspect ratio while having space for all the other elements of ad. There is even a button in the ad for adding the gadget to the users’ homepages. This adds a viral nature to the ad itself.

To help reduce their company overhead we hosted the gadget, the gadget ad, and the video. 4,000,000 ad views were expected over the week.

The Google Gadget Ad platform was utilized to measure the interactions of users and the gadget to test its effectiveness. Also, the Google Proxy Caching was used to reduce bandwidth consumption on the hosting server.

Another of our popular gadgets is the Butterflies gadget. These little Monarch Butterflies fly around your page, even landing on your gadget title bars. (That’s a good place to rest).

Add Butterflies to your iGoogle homepage

Once again this is an inline gadget with that has been reduced in importance in the iGoogle gadget directory.

The sirgle most popular gadget is our inline gadget: Ladybugs. They crawl around ON your page. They can’t be shown here but you can click on the link and add it to your iGoogle page. As of this writing there are 329,074 users and growing every day. One of the latest features has been the various colors of the ladybugs.

Add Ladybugs to your iGoogle page

One of the major problems with iGoogle is that these “inline” gadgets aren’t the same priority as the regular gadgets. In fact, these gadgets are about 90% less important than regular gadgets. A great example of how Google downplays these gadgets is by not listing them in their “Most Users” category. It should be on page eight but, alas, it’s not there. Apparently not all gadgets are created equal.

We believe the problem Google introduced that affected inline gadgets is now fixed. The problem was that all users got the security warning text regardless if they already clicked yes. Many people, apparently, didn’t click anything and left the warning there. The user numbers for our inline gadgets is now back to where it was plus growth. We haven’t verified this happening except in our usage numbers. It took about 7 weeks for them to fix the problem.

Once again thank you Google!

We created Universal Search Tabs out of a need for a really cool multi-search tool. Just before Google locked down the ability of gadgets to “inline” (gadgets that work in the page instead of just a box) we created Universal Search Tabs.

This gadget adds various search tools as tabs above your iGoogle search box. There can be icons as well as text and there is a Universal tab that allows you to select which website you’d like the search box to search without configuring the gadget.

Universal Search Tabs

It should be noted that something at iGoogle has probably changed. Starting on Sunday there has been a notable jump in gadget activity. Each day has added 4-6% but yesterday there was a 10% jump in usage over all. We’re not sure what’s going on but we wanted to document this activity.

This is an adaptation of our Apple Dashboard Bedrock Biorhythm gadget. It was done in flash and renders your biorhythm. What’s great about this gadget is it’s interactivity. Click on the graph and move your mouse! You’ll see that you can zoom in and out and move across time with the click of a button.

The Apple Dashboard widget can be found here:

Download Bedrock Biorhythms for Mac

One of our more popular gadgets is the New Music Releases Gadget:

It has tabs so you may select between the various genres.