Have you heard anything about software gadgets/widgets? These are small visually reach software pieces that are hosted by products like Google Desktop, Microsoft Vista Sidebar, Yahoo! Widgets, Apple Dashboard, and some other always-on-top ribbon-like applications. Looks like all the software giants really intend to use the extra screen space that is available now on our pretty large modern screens…

And you have definitely heard about RSS – the way Web news are transmitted from site to site or from site to desktop in our days, enabling to aggregate them and get nearly in real time.

What I would like to tell you about is how these two could make a corporate intranet ecosystem effective, easy-to-customize, and more attractive to the users (employees).

Nearly all companies now have their own intranet, an internal site that contains the information the employees need, we all saw it. But is it really friendly and attractive to make an employee visit these web-pages or regular basis while presenting all these boringly resembling each other pages? What if an employee needs/wants to check some information pretty frequently, 5 times a day, each hour, or closely to real time (say, it is a company quote)? Yes, RSS would help, but it still needs to be delivered. It is possible, as always, through a whole lot of existing RSS-reader applications, but this means that an employee still needs to switch to this application all the time.

So what looks to be really useful for such purposes is small elegant visually reach applications that can hang on the screen all the time while not taking a lot of screen room… yes gadgets/widgets for a standard gadget platform, like Google Desktop, that would enable a user to build his/her own information environment.

Our development team, Apexoft, has developed some Google Desktop RSS gadgets that can be used as a creeping line, teletype, picture rotator, or even to transform RSS feeds to speech. While mostly providing these to the individuals, we think they can be extremely valuable for corporate environment.