Audun Wilhelmsen (skyfex), a jQuery user who lives in Norway, recently attended The Gathering, one of the largest computer events in the world. While there, he competed in an Opera-sponsored widget development contest. The new Opera 9 Beta has a whole widget framework, that’s sure to challenge Yahoo! Widgets and OSX Dashboard.

Once the final analysis was done by the judges, they decided that Audun was the winner. Not only is this great news for him (he won a $6000 mega gaming machine), but it just goes to show how effective jQuery is for fast Javascript development.

Audun’s winning application is called KnowledgeMate. You enter your search into a single field, and it searches a number of search engines simultaneously (including image search engines), and returns the relevant results. It’s very fast, looks sharp, and is quite handy. I definitely recommend downloading the new Opera beta to give this widget a try, if for nothing else. Congrats Audun!