Google Apps and Virgin America invited the brave and the willing, the airborne and the earthbound to embark on the Day in the Cloud Challenge, the first online scavenger hunt played simultaneously in the air and, well, everywhere else.

Google chose Makalu to design, develop and operate the online game which anchored the ambitious campaign, and later won accolades from the advertisement industry.

In a recent interview with Kevin Rose, famed investor Chris Sacca said that what investors are looking for today, are those technologies which can identify the complex relationships in data that more deeply extend the understanding between ad-unit and purchase. With its cloud-delivered graph database, Dydra have developed the platform on which such technologies will be built.

In addition to being an angel investor, Makalu did the identity and website design for this New Orleans & Berlin-based start-up.

In the high-end segment of the American real estate market, over 60% of the transactions are brokered by the top 5% of agents. So if you’re buying or selling an exclusive property, it pays to work with the best. Highend Agents matches buyers and sellers of high-end properties with relevant members of their hand-picked network of top-tier realtors, taking the guesswork away from selecting an agent.

Given the value of a single transaction, Highend Agents worked with Makalu to improve the design of their home page, and optimize the conversion funnel on their region-specific landing pages. Through visual and interactive design iterations and extensive A/B testing, our efforts with Highend Agents resulted in a doubling of the conversion performance.

Working with the Ecology Center, National Wildlife Federation and the Natural Resources Defense Council, Makalu designed and developed the original Catalog Choice product, allowing American consumers to manage their mail preferences.

Featured on NBC, ABC Good Morning America, CNN, and The New York Times, the site was phenomenally successful. Our design helped it achieve one million members, with a 70% signup conversion rate, in its first year.