Geckoboard is pleased to announce that we have joined forces with IAdea, a pioneer and leader in digital signage appliances. The partnership means that Geckoboard is now available on IAdea's HTML5-enabled Digital Signage Web Appliances.

IAdea has been a leading maker of compact, low-power, fanless media players for the digital signage industry. With its latest HTML5-enabled Web Appliances (offering 3 player boxes with wired, wireless networking, and live TV-input functions, and 2 digital signboards of 18.5" and 24" in size), IAdea's products can play rich and live information pulled from the web using the HTML5 open standard and that includes Geckoboard.

To accompany this announcement, we are offering IAdea customers a 90 day free trial of Geckoboard, worth up to $597, until 31st March 2012. To claim this offer, just head over to IAdea and fill out the form.

 

A lot of European customers have been asking for detailed maps for their region so here it is. Not only has Europe been added to the list of supported maps (joining World and USA) but you can also zoom in on individual countries. Here's a shot showing a European and UK map.

We'll be rolling out to other regions in the coming weeks so let us know what you would like to see.

Right now it's only available in custom map widgets but we're going to enable it for Chartbeat and GoSquared map widgets soon also.

Extra: Resizable Widgets

The ability to resize widgets is here at last and we're looking for testers. We'll be announcing availability in tranches on Geckoboard's Facebook page so head over there and Like us to get the first glimpse and early access!

Use our RSS feed or our Twitter or Facebook profiles to keep up-to-date with news and future updates.

Push it!

Headquartered in New York, NY, Boxcar has sent over 700 million notifications to iPhones and Macs  around the world. Want to know the moment someone mentions you on Twitter or a friend checks in on Foursquare? Boxcar handles it all. With integrations to tons of services it allows you to read notifications where and when you want them.

Mission Critical Metrics
Needless to say, when you're growing fast tracking and communicating operational metrics is vitally important - this is where Geckoboard comes in.

"Being able to insightfully see where we're at for the day compared to the previous day or week is ultra important", says Jonathan George, CEO and founder.

"Geckoboard enables us to keep an eye on mission-critical metrics, as well as providing an early warning system for both positive and negative events."

Specifically they use Geckoboard to give a real-time breakdown of the overall state and health of Boxcar on a real-time basis including core operational metrics such as:

• New user signups
• New services
• Number of pushes

They're currently accessing Geckoboard from their laptops, iPhones and iPad and will soon have a big screen in the office dedicated to running Geckoboard to give everyone in the office access to their real-time operational stats.

We've just pushed out an update to the Pingdom widget which allows you to display trending data, for both uptime and response time.

Here's a screen shot of it in action:

 

The widget uses the Pingdom API to pull in historical data. You can set a time period of either 24 hours, 7 days or 30 days. The data displayed is configurable so you can show just the uptime, just the response time or both.

To add the new widget just add a new Pingdom widget and then select the "Trends" dropdown (the status widget is now available as "Current status"):

 

 

This widget allows you to quickly see a sites trending performance over a time period. 

Today is a very exciting day for us here at Geckoboard - I'd like to welcome the latest addition to the team, Rob Hudson!

Rob is joining us as co-founder and CTO and will instrumental in the continuing success of Geckoboard. He's already getting stuck in working on new features and enhancements and you can expect a lot more in the coming weeks and months.

Welcome to the family Rob. We couldn't be happier to have you on board; it's great news for Geckoboard and, ultimately, our customers.

We've been a little quiet on the product announcements recently. That's mainly because we're working on some big enhancements that are coming soon, but in the meantime, in addition to a ton of bug fixes and minor enhancements here are some changes that we think you're going to love.

Map Styling

Since we released the custom maps widget in June we've been bombarded with requests for enhancements. Top of the list was the ability to change the size and colour of map points. Well now you can!

Updated documentation can be found here but, in short, you can either add the size (1=tiny 10=large) and colour attributes next to the coordinates of each point or, for greater control over appearance, simply add a CSS class to each map point and upload a CSS file with the required attributes for that class to define the point's colour and opacity and it's stoke attributes.

Look out for country and region map zooming in the next couple of weeks.

Chartbeat & GoSquared Maps

If you're using real-time web analytics services chartbeat or GoSquared you can now see the location of your most recent visitors on a beautiful Geckoboard map. WARNING: Watching this update can get very addictive, but if you're a real-time map junkie like me then you're going to love it!

Private RSS & Atom Feeds

In addition to regular, public RSS and Atom feeds that you've been able to display on your dashboard for some time, from today you can also display private feeds that require a username and password. This is great news for customers of tons of services out there that offer protected feeds and getting them on to your board is a snap. You can find the RSS and Atom widget under the "Notifications" category.

That's all for now but we're looking forward to hearing what you think in the comments below.

You can use our RSS feed or our Twitter or Facebook profiles to keep up-to-date with news and future updates.

 

A few weeks ago one of our customers asked for the ability to filter data returned from Google Analytics, they wanted to see pageviews for specific URLs on their Geckoboard status board. Yesterday we quietly rolled out that feature to all customers and I wanted to show you how you can use it to filter both dimensions and metrics from Google Analytics.

You can find lots of in-depth information on how to write Google Analytics filters on Google's documentation page but for now I want to run through a couple of practical examples.

To start, let's create a new Google Analytics widget: New widget >> Web Analytics >> Google Analytics. You'll notice a new (optional) field called "Filters" on the widget configuration screen. Entering filter parameters in here allows you to filter by almost anything including multiple dimension and metric filters together.

Let's start by adding a filter to show only pageviews by Firefox users from the United States. Use the following settings in the widget configuration

• Metric Category: Visitors
• Metric: Pageviews
• Filters: ga:country==United States;ga:browser==Firefox

Breaking that down, we're using ga:country to restrict pageviews that came from the country "United States". We used the operator == here which ensures it's an exact match, but there are other operators we can use including =~ which matches based on a regular expression. An example of this might be to add a filter to restrict pageview numbers where the URL matched a regular expression.

If you want to restrict the pageview metric to only URL matching ^foo (i.e. your URL starts with foo), add the following filter

ga:pagePath=~^foo

To match ^foo OR bar$ (url starts with foo OR ends with bar) you need to use a comma to separate terms: 

ga:pagePath=~^foo,ga:pagePath=~bar$ 

To match ^foo AND bar$ (url starts with foo AND ends with bar) you use a semicolon to separate terms: 

ga:pagePath=~^foo;ga:pagePath=~bar$

This doesn't scratch the surface of what's possible with Google Analytics filters but a look at the documentation and some experimentation should get open up a ton of possibilities.

Don’t forget, use our RSS feed or our Twitter or Facebook profiles to keep up-to-date with news and future updates.

 

This is something I've been looking forward to announcing for some time now. Welcome the latest addition to our custom widget types -- the custom map widget!

Many of you have been asking for a way to visualise anything with a geographic element including the location of current site visitors or dispatch addresses for recent orders on your dashboard, and now you can.

If you're feeling creative you can knock out a script to connect to the increasing number of location aware web services with APIs and see location data side-by-side with your key business metrics on your Geckoboard status board.

We're starting with a custom widget only but many existing integrations will have a map widget added soon, stay tuned for further updates.

Check out a live map widget here.

Version 1 of the map widget accepts:

• Lat, long coordinates
• IP addresses
• Host names 

It renders the location of each point on a beautiful map which updates frequently. We even have some new widget sizes for these maps so you can really show it off.

We're currently testing further input types such as city and postal codes and I expect these to drop very shortly. In the meantime, check out the documentation in our support forum and get started on your own geo-feed!

Don’t forget, use our RSS feed or our Twitter or Facebook profiles to find out about all our updates and news.