iPod Giveaway #7: Design a Steve Jobs Movie Poster
Original photo by Norbert Ivanek.Ok, so it’s the day after Christmas and you didn’t get that iPod you wanted. Now’s your opportunity to take matters into your own hands and win one.
The theme of the final Mike Industries iPod Creativity Competition of 2005 is to design a movie poster featuring Steve Jobs. Like all competitions before it, the rules here are loose. Just feature the man we all know and love in a cinematic role, keep your image exactly 418 pixels wide, and insert your entry inline in the comments of this post. Please also give photo credit when appropriate.
There’s a decent chance The Steve will actually see this blog entry so please keep it clean and respectful. Anything overtly offensive will be removed.
This competition will remain open for exactly two weeks and will end at midnight, Sunday, January 8th. The winner will receive a 1GB iPod Shuffle from me, and so will Mike B., the genius who suggested this particular contest.
Remember to keep your images exactly 418 pixels wide (any height is fine) and under about 50k or so in file size. Insert your image into the comments below using code like so:
<img src="http://yoururl.jpg" />
UPDATE: We have a winner!
iPod Giveaway #7: Reader’s Choice
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First off, apologies for the lack of iPod creativity competitions around here for the last two months. I’ve been a bit busy. I didn’t want to close the year without one final competition though, so tonight I thumbed through all 400 contest suggestions and have come up with a list of six I’d like to do.
Since I can’t seem to decide on one, I’m putting the final six up for a one-day vote. The idea which receives the most votes will be the theme for this final iPod giveaway of 2005… and as always, the person who thought up the theme will win one Shuffle and the person who wins the competition will take home the other.
The Finalists
Steve Jobs Movie Poster
Design a movie poster featuring Steve Jobs and post it as a 418×418 image on this site.
Best Lyric
Post the best one sentence lyric from a song.
iPod Envy
Take a picture of yourself in an urban setting with another object, pretending that it is an iPod.
Best Cover Song
Post a link to the best cover ever performed. That is, one band singing the music of another.
Name That Tune
I post one note of a song and continue to reveal more notes until someone guesses it.
iKu
Best haiku remotely related to iPods wins.
Honorable Mention
This suggestion cannot be voted for but it is my favorite idea of the bunch. “Toban” writes in submission #378:
“Have people send digital video files of themselves eating a food product which is visibly expired. For example, a displayed expiry date on a container of cottage cheese, or mold on, well anything. The most extreme entry wins an ipod. What would you eat for a Free Ipod?”
I love the internet.
Please vote to the right. The polls close at midnight on Wednesday.
December Randoms
Some thoughts from December:
- Head on over to Mark Wubben’s site and get involved with sIFR 3. Mark will be handling primary sIFR 3 development, but I’ll remain involved as spiritual advisor. Also, check out Faruk’s new FACE CSS technique. I haven’t used it but it looks eyebrow-raising.
- If you use a Mac and do any amount of CSS design, you must check out XyleScope. I used it early on in its beta life, but upon downloading version 1.1.5, I can say that it’s one of the best pieces of web development/design software around. Inline, on-the-fly CSS editing. Ahhhhhhh.
- Intuit has apparently started mailing unsolicited CDs of TurboTax to people. I just got mine this week. You just enter a code when you install it and your card gets charged. Although this is obviously a bit wasteful from an environmental standpoint, it’s a pretty effective sales tactic. I now have a physical CD in my possession, I know I’m going to need it, so there is a 100% chance I will end up using it. I might even do my taxes early now. Hooray for unsolicited CDs in the mail!
- Mike Industries hit a new personal record on Wednesday with 70,000 page views thanks to this slashdotting of sIFR by “Commander Taco”. Honestly, I didn’t even want to read the thread because I figured that Flash plus Slashdot would equal total lunacy, but I have to hand it to the Slashdot community… it was pretty even-handed. Any moronic remarks were generally met with reason and RTFAs.
- The great Nokia N70 experiment has failed. I’m sticking with my Treo for now. I just can’t deal with keys made for hobbits.
- I went to a concert in Seattle this weekend and The Wrens were the last band to play. They were okay, but they did do something on stage I had never seen before. The singer picked up his cell phone between songs, dialed a number, and then sat down on stage. The rest of the band then began into a song and the rhythm guitarist held his own cell phone up to the pickup on his electric guitar. Then, the singer sang through his own phone, over to the guitarist’s phone, in through the guitar pickup, and out the speakers. Pretty interesting.
- Woohoo! Danni won Survivor. How many times has Hefner called already?
- Firefox 1.5 continues to puzzle me. Aside from some unexplainable bugs related to its new handling of the
overflowproperty, I just found out that it spits out errors when encountering the underscore hack. The underscore hack is probably my all-time favorite CSS hack and I much prefer it to the valid-but-much-more-verbose “* HTML hack”. I’m pretty sure the W3C specs say to ignore any CSS properties that the browser doesn’t understand, but instead, Firefox 1.5 reports errors. Ugh.
Seeking Newsvine Engineer
Are you an Apache-loving’ fool who also dabbles in Linux, PHP, Java, or C++? Do you also live in Seattle? If so, we’d be interested in talking to you about possibly joining the Newsvine team as a Product Engineer. Newsvine is a five person news startup near downtown Seattle funded by Second Avenue Partners and in operation since the summer. We are about to launch to the public and are specifically looking for someone who doesn’t mind monitoring servers, databases, and other system resources 24/7 while also helping out with engineering tasks on a pretty regular basis.
The Newsvine headquarters are located right along beautiful Myrtle Edwards Park near downtown Seattle, and we have a big barbecue on the deck which we use to cook up various fine meats.
For more information on Newsvine, please check out my original articles here and here.
If this job sounds interesting to you and you possess the skills below, please send an e-mail to jobs at newsvine dot com (which will go directly to me) and we’ll see if there might be a good match:
- Experience with Apache
- Experience with Linux/Unix
- Experience with PHP (or other server side scripting language)
- Interest and capability in managing and monitoring a high-load production web site
- Understanding of object oriented concepts – preferably with Java or C++
- Ability to work quickly and efficiently
- Basic understanding of relational databases
Nokia E70 Lust
A few months ago, I made a concerted effort to eliminate all RSS feeds from my news aggregator which met at least one of the following conditions: 1) Signal-to-noise ratio was under 25%, 2) Feed was updated more than 10 times a day, or 3) A good percentage of the items were re-blogged from other sources.
Two of the first sites to walk the plank were unfortunately both Gizmodo and Engadget. While I’ve enjoyed both sites immensely over the past couple of years, they both match all three criteria above, and since eliminating them from my blogroll, I’ve been able to keep my “RSS lint” down to reasonable levels.
This week though, I may have paid the price for being out of touch with the gadget rumor mill. Thanks to Om and his damn persuasive writing style (not to mention Jason), I ordered a Nokia N70 phone over the interweb. I’ve been using a Treo 600 for the past two years and although I still love it, I’ve just had a new-phone-itch for the past couple of months and reading about the N70 was enough to get me to finally scratch it.
It seems like a whale of a phone, and although I’ve never liked Nokia’s interfaces in the past, this one looks pretty nice. For all the high-tech features on the N70, the kicker that got me to actually purchase it was a fairly low-tech one: an FM radio. FM radios in Seattle are a lot more useful than in most other cities because we are home to KEXP, the world’s greatest commercial-free radio station. Being able to listen to commercial-free live music on my phone is a huge plus.
The only huge downside of the N70 to me is the lack of a QWERTY keyboard. I’ve gotten so used to the Treo’s keyboard that it’s going to be hard to use T9 again.
So I ordered this thing for about $500 (which is probably too much) and it should arrive next week.
No sooner do I check the status of my delivery last night that I now find out about the Nokia E70, due in the first quarter of 2006. Oh my god! Look at this thing:
Not only does it have almost every feature of the N70, but it’s smaller, flips open to reveal a QWERTY keyboard, has 352×416 resolution, integrated WiFi with VOIP, built-in push email support, spoken Caller ID, and a million other features as well.
So I think with this N70 purchase, I have officially broken my own buyer’s remorse record. It’s supposed to arrive on the 14th and today is the 10th, so that’s negative four days. Oh well, at least the N70 gives me one thing the E70 doesn’t: an FM radio for KEXP.
Dear Comcast and/or Motorola and/or Microsoft
Dear Comcast and/or Motorola and/or Microsoft,
Last night, my college played Gonzaga in one of the biggest college basketball games of the year. I had dinner plans so I set your DVR up to record the game.
Being that this was a sporting event, I set the option to end the recording 30 minutes late, just in case the game took longer than the allotted two hours.
I got home, watched a crazy basketball game, and was preparing for the final four minutes when the recording stopped. The two hour mark had been reached.
And so thanks to your aforementioned worthless device, I missed a last second victory by my Washington Huskies. Oh, and 60 Minutes mysteriously didn’t get recorded last night either.
Get your damned device working already. It’s about to go out my window.
Newsvine: Next Steps
It’s been about a week since we took the first layer of secrecy off of Newsvine, and everybody over here couldn’t be happier at the reaction so far. Without a single dollar spent on PR, marketing, or really any organized effort to get the word out, Newsvine found itself on the front page of CBS News, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, GigaOm, TechCrunch, Russell Beattie, and hundreds of other places. Like David Hasselhoff, we’re even apparently big in Germany.
Is it wrong that I’m not stressed out about all of this? I mean, CEOs of startups are supposed to be working 20 hour days, neglecting their families, and generally being pains in the ass, right? I guess so, but this is fun.
Let me repeat that: This. Is. Fun.
People are excited, and we’re excited about that.
Reaction
I’ve read probably a few hundred articles, posts, and comments about Newsvine since our announcement and while most have been positive, a couple of things I’ve read several times which seemed to lean towards skepticism a bit are comments like this:
“News with comments? That’s been done.”
“Sounds like Digg, Delicious, and Google News put together.”
To the first comment, I’d say this: When the cheeseburger was invented, there were plenty of people saying the hamburger had already “been done”. I bet cheeseburgers outsell hamburgers now.
To the second comment, I’d say this: Oh my god, if that’s what we have, then I’d say we’re in pretty good shape. I love Digg. I love Delicious. And I love Google News. All they are lacking is each other.
Competition
Is there competition in the populist news space? Sure there is. There’s probably competition we don’t even know about. But judging from all the calls and e-mails we’ve gotten from VCs over the last week, it’s not competition for funding or attention… the funding is already there. It’s competition to see who can create the most compelling community of breaking information. And that’s what makes it fun.
Of the small handful of companies looking to make this happen over the next few months and years, I know we’re not the oldest or the biggest. But when I see code like this on three separate companies’ web sites who purport to be in the same space as Newsvine, my inner geek can’t help but smile:
<font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular">
and
<!-- BEGIN UBER TABLE -->
and
"Please disable your popup blocker for our URL."
So in the off chance I somehow don’t have Arial installed, you’re going alternate all the way down to Swiss? Who has Swiss? And you’re going to use a font tag at all?
Anyway, enough geekspeak.
The fact is that every company entering this space will go in with their own strength. Digg has a great tech community and an impressively upstanding way of running the site. Open Source Media is strong in politics. Inform has 50-some people dedicated to finding and grouping related information. We have our roots in high-traffic news media, blogging, engineering, and design. That influence is hopefully apparent and beneficial in the Newsvine experience. I believe that in the end, several companies will be successful in creating positive news reading and news writing environments. Each will just have its own spin.
Note: The companies above are not necessarily competitors of ours. I am only mentioning them here because others have.
Beta Details
We’re well into the several thousands on the list so far, but I must admit that we plan on only letting a few hundred in for the first couple/few weeks. The reason for this (I swear) is not some sort of manufactured scarcity campaign, but rather the opportunity to take care of some obvious quick fixes and improvements that will only become apparent as people begin using the site.
The single hardest thing about building an ecosystem for participation is trying to predict user experience in the absence of it.
So if you signed up for the beta, the whole team thanks you, and you will definitely get in before everyone else does. But if it’s not in the first wave, just sit tight and your first experience on the site will be better because of it.
Unstealth! Get Ready For Newsvine…
This morning, news broke that our new company, Newsvine, is about to hatch. Remember that name.
Newsvine.
You’ll be hearing it a lot over the next year.
First things first. I apologize to all Mike Industries readers for keeping this a secret, but I’m a firm believer in the theory that you should never talk about anything until you have something to show. In the next week or so, we’ll be opening up the gates with a private beta, and shortly after that, Newsvine.com will launch free to the world.
So what is it, and why did four perfectly happy Disney/ESPN employees leave their jobs to build it?
Just like your favorite news site, only smarter
Newsvine is a large-scale news media site which gives you almost all the same stories you read on sites like MSNBC and CNN but presents them in a much more attractive package. Attractive not just in looks but in function as well. At Newsvine, we feel strongly that an article’s life only begins the second it is published. It is only when readers interact with it that it achieves its full impact.
You just read an Associated Press story about the fiery riots in France on a major news site. Why shouldn’t you be able to comment on it like you would on a blog entry? At Newsvine you can. Why shouldn’t you be able to chat about it with whoever else happens to be reading the story at the same time? At Newsvine you can… right within the story itself.
We believe in turning news into conversation, and every page on Newsvine.com is designed to do precisely that.
So even though at launch, Newsvine will have almost all the same stories the biggest news sites have, how can we possibly replace the great exclusive reporting that outfits like ESPN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post produce?
We can’t. And we don’t want to.
Seeding The Vine
Companies like ESPN are terrific at providing the sort of in-depth coverage of sporting events that no one else in the world can. They are experts and spectacular at what they do. For that reason, we want to point you to ESPN.com (and any other site for that matter) whenever there is a great article to be read over there.
We do this via a process we call “Seeding Newsvine”.
Simply save our “Seed Newsvine” button (a bookmarklet) to your browser and click it whenever you read a great story anywhere on the web. Tag it with words to describe it (e.g. “alex-rodriguez, baseball, world-series”) and a link to the original story, along with your comment, will automatically appear at the following pages:
newsvine.com/alex-rodriguez
newsvine.com/baseball
newsvine.com/world-series
… which brings me to one of my favorite features of Newsvine: our URL structure. Anytime you want news on any subject, say “supreme-court”, simply go to newsvine.com/supreme-court and every story we have that is tagged as such will be there.
Oh and we also have local news available at urls like “seattle.newsvine.com” and “newyork.newsvine.com”.
How does it all stay organized?
Newsvine is five people, and we are all quite busy adding features to the site. There is no editor behind a desk deciding what stories are most important. You decide that. Whenever you see a story on Newsvine you think is important, simply click the “Vote” button next to the headline and you’ve just increased the importance score of that story. We feel that thousands of people are better at deciding what’s important than one, and that’s a major founding premise of Newsvine.
Oh, there’s just one more thing…
Since Newsvine is essentially produced by its readers, it is only fitting that its readers may also become writers. Anyone can sign up for a free Newsvine account and begin writing their column within minutes. Anytime you write an article or Seed Newsvine with a link to another article, it will appear in your column (at “yourname.newsvine.com”) and elsewhere around the site, depending on how it’s tagged.
Getting your own column on Newsvine isn’t only free but you’ll also keep advertising earnings associated with traffic to your pages. While other companies charge you for your own space to write or keep all the ad revenue themselves, we’re happy to help you make money whenever you add value to Newsvine.
Newsvine is a news company, not a Web 2.0 company
Our site doesn’t rely on Ajax, RSS, Wikis, or any of the other technologies you may be hearing about way too often these days. If you’d like to use some of the fancier aspects of our site like tagging or feeds, go ahead, but even with no knowledge beyond standard pointing and clicking, Newsvine is a best of breed news site. In other words, even your pappy can use it.
If you’d like to be in on the private beta or be notified when Newsvine launches, head on over and give us your deets!
Newsvine is funded by Seattle-based Second Avenue Partners with original ESPN.com CEO Mike Slade and Aquantive founder Nick Hanauer on the company’s Board of Directors.
UPDATE: To everyone who has asked, yes, Newsvine.com was the secret domain from this article I wrote several months ago. The story can now be told. :) Also, traffic seems to really be blowing up today. Here are just a few mentions of Newsvine from around the web:
November Randoms
Some random thoughts and diversions from this month:
- If webmail ever got around to looking this good, I would use it a lot more often.
- I have been getting way way way inundated with requests for design and coding work in the Seattle area lately. If you’re good, and you live around here, you should drop me a line. No need for a cover letter or anything… just drop me a link to your portfolio and I’ll keep you in mind when the next request comes up.
- Crest Lemon Ice Toothpaste: Come to where the flavor is. I know Vanilla Mint was the early star for Crest, but this Lemon Icey dealio is the new leader in the clubhouse.
- I don’t know what possessed me to buy “Calcium Enriched” milk at the store the other day, but let me pass some valuable information on to you: it’s awful. Don’t buy it.
- Four people got fired from The Apprentice this week, and two people got fired from The Marthapprentice. I know ratings are down on these two great shows, but does anyone know the back story behind the mass firings? I mean, that’s four fewer shows NBC can air now. To add to the confusion, this was all filmed before ratings numbers were even known. What’s going on here?
- I’m convinced that any cold-fighting effects of Airborne are psychosomatic. But since it tastes decent, I will continue to drink it.
- Dan Cederholm is right. Laced shoes are almost always overkill. I’ve been slip-on only for several months now and I may never go back. I suggest Eccos and Borns.
- Terrell Owens is a jackass and I pity the team that will inevitably decide to take him in next year. I don’t care how good you are… you don’t diss your teammates publicly and you don’t put yourself above your team. If you have him on your fantasy team right now, you should drop him on principle. And if you have Jamal Lewis on your team, by the way, you should drop him on incompetence.
- The motor on one of the windows of my Saab broke a few months ago and the dealership ordered a new part for me. Still no part, and now I just found out that there are apparently none of these parts available anywhere in the world. One woman has been waiting since May. What the hell? This is a 2001 car. Has anyone ever waited this long for a part?
- James Archer’s new Fruitcast site wins my Gradient-Of-The-Year award. Yum. The site was designed by Joseph Wain.
- Paul Mayne’s new “e-mail blender” is cool… the perfect diversion to plant subliminal thoughts of Mrs. Fields cookies in your head.