Gadget used in over 200 countries now !!

When I developed my Quick Stock Watch and Global Index Watch gadgets, my main motive was to reach a lot of people across the world. There were a bunch of finance gadgets at that time, but they all catered to US stock markets. I clearly saw the need for a gadget that works across the stock markets all over the world. I then figured out that Yahoo has the most comprehensive coverage on stock market data. I chose Yahoo and created the above gadgets. This morning I noticed that Quick Stock Watch gadget has been used in 202 countries across the world. I was so happy to see that my goal is accomplished. It is also supported by hundreds of emails I get from users from different parts of the world thanking for such a nice plug-in. According to Wikipedia, there are 203 countries (both recognized and unrecognized sovereign states) in the world.. I wonder what that one country is, that has no users for my gadget :)

If you would like to try them, just click on the links above and add them to your iGoogle homepage. Not into finance? Check these other gadgets that might interest you.

Image Resizing Software (Beta)

In today's world of modern technology, 5-megapixel is the starting point for someone to buy a digital camera. Anything less than that is something people look down upon. Even cellphones do come with over 2 Megapixel camera built in. The fact that taking lots of pictures using such a high resolution digital cameras cost nothing is so predominant fact in everybody's mind that we do forget at times how we could handle so many pictures. Each picture on an average comes to about 2.5 Megabytes, which are mostly JPG images, the widely used format in almost all the digital cameras that are in the market today. I was at my sister's wedding recently where I ended up with 2500 such pictures, taking over 5GB of space on my hard drive. I wanted to share a couple of hundred pictures with my friends and family, but the filesize was too big. Sharing via e-mail is out of question. Sharing via applications like Picasa or Flickr too takes quite a bit of time to upload and download(especially on dial-up speeds). It was then I decided to write a software application that does resize the images to lower resolutions, without much loss of information and clarity. I love this app and I feel there are lots of people out there who face the same problem I faced a few days ago. You can do bulk resizing and there are several options to choose before you resize. You can even change the file format. The file to download is extremely small(about 1KB). Double click on the file to start the application. Ofcourse, you need to accept a certificate to let the software access your hard drive, no need to get scared about. The software is pretty easy to use and is absolutely free. If you like the software, feel free to share it with your friends too..

Click here to download the software.

More info and screenshots can be found here.

Tenth Dimension

How many dimensions can we see around u? We all live in a 3-dimensional world, but we are all moving in this 3-dimensional world in the fourth dimension, which is time. So, as far as I am concerned, I see 4 dimensions - Length, Breadth, Height and Time. Here is a new approach that extends this concept to show that theoretically, there can be 10 dimensions possible. The following video explains it in detail. I found it awesome..

1 Million hits in under 3 months

Yesterday I had a look at the Quick Stock Watch analytics and I was surprised to see the all-time number of hits over 965K, I thought I'd wait one more day to see it cross a Million and that day is today.. In exactly 3 months(Jan 19th to Apr 18th), this module got a million hits and just under half a million views.. I know how Google calculates analytics and I understand that all these hits need not necessarily represent user's interest in this module, but that fact gets supplemented with the support/suggestion emails I get every now and then, comments that users put on my module etc.. I would like to thank all of those people whose suggestions made this module more useful than ever. I have been very busy lately and haven't touched this module in a month.

Here is a summary of this module's statistics(in 3 months):
Hits : 1,013,736
Visits : 496,890
Countries : 77
Unique locations : 5361
Number of visitors per day : 1596

And the most important thing - the numbers are growing in an accelerating pace week after week :)

50K page views in first week !! Sweet....

Hurray.. I am glad my Stock module got 23K visits and almost 50K pageviews in the first week since I started logging analytics on the gadget. Here is a geo-map overlay of the users accessing this module all over the world. I am glad someone is using my module, which I had started developing as a hobby. This picture shows dots at few locations on the map(only if a location has "atleast" certain number of views). Since I have added several features to this module(in other words more useful than ever), I can't wait to see where this stands after 6 months or so.

This module can now display stock prices and indices from Exchanges in over 30 countries.

Gadget# 2 uploaded today

I uploaded my second Google Personalized Gadget to Google's content directory today. Its a personalized news feed. You will be able to have real-time updates of the type of news you selected on your Google personalized page. If you prefer to search the news content with specific keyword(s), you will be presented with the news related to that keyword. You can also adjust the rate at which the news should get refreshed. I hope you take advantage of it.

My Stock Gadget on Google Personalized Homepage

I have been observing the robustness of the Google Personalized Homepage and the ability to add/delete/drag/drop gadgets on your personalized homepage and it was fascinating. That, I felt is going to be the next generation of Web. Well, Google, as different as always, allows users to write their own gadgets to be added to this page. I started writing my own little gadget that displays the change in stock prices on US Stock Markets and finally, today is the day I submitted it to Google's content directory but you can click on the following link to add it to your personalized homepage to try it out. It has very little features but it definitely doesn't hurt to take a look.. :)