What does a Google trophy look like?

Google recently held the Google Gadget Awards as a way to stimulate developer interest in creating new and innovative gadgets. Although the gadget I personally submitted didn’t win an award, two USC students did win. Furthermore, USC was awarded “Top university for gadget submission,” which is really awesome.

Since I’m the Google Ambassador for USC, Google asked if they could use my mailing address to send over the trophy, and then have me get it into the right hands (or display). I accepted, and it arrived today (actually it was received 1/29, but the shipping room for my dorm misaddressed the package slip for a couple days).

What do you think a fresh, innovative company like Google would do for their trophies? What would you expect? (You can leave a comment.) Frankly, I’m surprised by the answer. To be honest, I didn’t like it at first (it doesn’t look super-interesting or impressive), but the elegance of it is quickly growing on me.

It was shipped FedEx Express, apparently from Portland, OR. It’s a really long and big box considering how small and solid the trophy is. It’s like a solid cube, really heavy and it feels unbreakable. Despit this, it was packaged in layers of bubble wrap and blue tissue paper. Overall, I like it. The text is a little clever: it has GOOGLE as an HTML comment. That is, <!– GOOGLE –>. Here it is from two other angles:

As a trophy, it doesn’t really have a practical purpose. However, it seems to me that it would make a good paperweight, considering its impressive mass. Just kidding. It does have a screwhole at the bottom, allowing it to be mounted on a tripod or something (the mounting hole looks similar to the one on the bottom of my digital camera).