Google Gadgets are dynamic web content that can be placed on any page on the web. Gadgets can be games, mini applications, news feeds, maps or any content…

With Google Gadgets anyone who has a free Google account can create and publish them without having to pay for the cost of hosting them like you would with a traditional web page. Other users can add the Gadget to their iGoogle page or altenatively web designers can copy and modify the Gadget and put it on their web site. Gadgets can be hosted directly on the Google directory as well as on the user’s iGoogle home page. Google Gadgets do not need to be published to the public Google directory if the gadget creator doesn’t wish to.

And here is the next best part; you can host your Gadget in the Google cloud and put it on everyone of your displays for absolutely no cost. You don’t need to pay a thing to have that Gadget hosted.

Gadgets can be simple or complex, and anyone can make the simple version. You don’t need to be a programmer, you just need an idea and the Google Gadget Editor, which you can add to your iGoogle Page, preview all your Gadgets there and when you’re ready, save your Gadget to the Google cloud. The best introduction on how to do this that I have found is this one http://www.seoish.com/how-to-make-google-gadgets/. It will take about 20 minutes to go through all 7 steps and by the end of it you will know just about everything that you need to make or manage the development of Gadgets. For the more complex Gadgets, you may want to contract a Professional Gadget Developer, of which there are plenty. Just do a Google search for “Google Gadget Developers” to see what I mean.

To get your Presentations started we are creating what we call Seed Gadgets. These are generic Gadgets that we’re building that anyone can use to add content to their Presentations. The Gadgets have been built with the same Developer API that is available to you and we have released all of them as Open Source under an MIT License on a Google Project here. We want you to take them, use them, modify them, whatever you need to build the amazing content that you want to make. Some of the Gadgets that we have created so far include:

• Single Image and Text Gadget
• Google Presentation Gadget
• RSS Gadget
• Background Gadget
• Google Wave Gadget

• Video Player Gadget
• Veetle IPTV Gadget
• Sliderocket Presentation Gadget
• Picasa Image Slideshow Gadget

And now here is where you come in. I need ideas for more Gadgets. I would like to build and release one or two per month from this point on. Please keep in mind that we don’t want to build niche market specific Gadgets, that is where you, our Operators, come in, but we do want to build and seed an amazing set of core Gadgets. So, what Gadgets would you like me to build? If you have any ideas drop us a note to support@risevision.com.

Take a look at some of the features of Sliderocket:

• Import existing Powerpoint slideshows into Sliderocket
• Create polls that users can text in their responses to and it updates in real time
• Show quotes from famous or historical people.
• Stock prices that update in real time.
• Twitter feeds based on keywords that update in real time.
• Link to Google Spreadsheets and create graphs from those spreadsheets that update when any data is changed.
• Add Youtube videos directly into the presentation.

You can create a Sliderocket presentation and insert it into your existing RDN presentations using the “Share” link provided, and we are currently building a Gadget for the next release that supports Sliderocket presentations for which the specifications are here.

Thanks!

We’ve used and recommend TeamViewer for Linux and Windows, and LogMeIn for Mac and Windows. If anyone has any other suggestions for good remote control tools for one or more of these OS’s we would really like to hear about them.