iPod Giveaway #3: We Have a Winner

July 8th, 2005

Competitor “joshua” was right when he questioned whether most entries in the third monthly iPod-A-Month Creativity Competition correctly followed the instructions of exploring alternative uses of iPods. Luckily, however, we applaud the breaking of rules here at Mike Industries, and that is why I’m happy to announce this month’s winner and a new honor roll of the top 30 entries… some following the rules more closely than others.

So without further ado, congratulations to Charlie D., whose crudely assembled infomercial about sending iPod Shuffles full of music into space is available for viewing here. It’s an interesting concept for sure, and one which holds special significance after seeing NASA ram a spacecraft with thousands of names on it into a comet earlier this week.

Charlie will receive an iPod Shuffle from me, and a pair of $150 Etymolic earbuds from the nice folks over at iPodLounge.com.

Below is a slideshow of the top 30 non-video entries with the first 10 being the runners-up, in order of greatness. The last 20 are in random order:

Sweet slideshow component made with SlideShowPro

Stay tuned for the next installment of the Mike Industries iPod-A-Month Creativity Competition slated to begin around the middle of this month. And as always, the submission pool remains open.

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9 Responses:

hink says:

Woohoo! #10 right under the wire! :P Thanks for running such a great contest, Mr. Davidson. You’re a mensch, to be sure.

Congrats to Charlie D. and all the other entries, some of which made Dr. Pepper shoot from my nose.

#1 - July 8th, 2005 at 1:31 pm
AkaXakA says:

iScrape, uScrape, we all scrape for iScrape!

Love that entry :)

#2 - July 8th, 2005 at 2:15 pm
Charlie D. says:

Many thanks to Mike Davidson (and iPodlounge) for the prizes and for an innovative contest that allows for a lot of creativity!

Congratulations to all of the other entries as well! There are a lot of extremely artistic and inventive people frequenting this site!

Funny you should mention Deep Impact as my name was one of the names on that impactor :)

#3 - July 8th, 2005 at 2:40 pm
James says:

Number 8? Me? Sweet…

Well done to Charlie, that is hilarious and certainly a worthy winner.

#4 - July 8th, 2005 at 2:47 pm
John says:

Noticed mine came in at number #12 but that was probably under the randomiser, all entries were awesome, well done everyone :) – congrats on winning the shuffle and headphones Charlie D. !

#5 - July 8th, 2005 at 3:37 pm
Mike B. says:

i made the #11 spot with my good idea that i did a crappy job on……oh well i guess i’m impatient but hey its only my first attempt…..

congratulations to Charlie for winning

#6 - July 8th, 2005 at 4:09 pm
Thomas says:

Charlie: congratulations! Nicely done idea :)

Mike, thanks for this continuing competition (since this was my first go) and I hope to do better next time (maybe crack the top ten)… I don’t envy your task at choosing, since I’ve seen some fantastic work for each competition!

#7 - July 9th, 2005 at 6:38 am
John D. says:

1st runner up? Wow. I’m honored.

#8 - July 9th, 2005 at 10:31 am
Nathan says:

Thanks For the opportunity Mike and Congrats to Charlie, I’m happy to have two entries in the top 30 and I’m looking forward to the next challenge.

Cheers.

#9 - July 9th, 2005 at 6:36 pm

Shared

Hundreds of headlines wash over us every day. And part of why many of us engage in this flow is because we have faith that over time, this torrent of episodic knowledge is going to cohere into something more significant: a framework for genuinely understanding an issue. And we live with it ’cause it sort of works. Eventually you hear enough buzzwords like “single-payer” and “public option” and you start to feel like you can play along.

But mounting evidence indicates that this approach to information is actually totally debilitating. Faced with a flood of headlines on an ever-increasing variety of topics, we shut off. We turn to news that doesn’t require much understanding – crime, traffic, weather – or we turn off the news altogether.

- Matt Thompson on why the way we report and consume news is precisely wrong. Matt is, of course, precisely right. If you’re at SXSW next week, I don’t know how you could justify missing this talk.

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Jon Stewart Skewers Media’s Obsession with Chat Roulette: Funniest Wii Craps reference ever, as well. It’s really interesting to me that Chat Roulette is getting this much “attention” when TinyChat has been around so much longer, essentially does the same thing and more, and is much more useful to the average person. Just goes to show how viral public sex acts can be.

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The 2005 email that spawned Picnik, Google’s latest buy. If you’re thinking about launching a startup, you should study this e-mail carefully. It’s a perfect example of exactly how a crazy little thought becomes a big idea, and even on its own, it’s better than most “official company business plans” people present to VCs. I gave a talk at Webstock in New Zealand a couple of weeks ago about creating a startup and I wish I had this to dissect at the time. Really good stuff.

50 Useful Coding Techniques (CSS Layouts, Visual Effects and Forms):

(via doug)

Tumblr Finally Rolls Out Comments. Sort Of. Trolls Not Welcome. :

I actually really like how clubby it is. Unfortunately it means I won’t be commenting on any Tumblrs since I don’t officially “follow” anyone besides via RSS, but that’s probably ok. Maybe the answer to the world’s wide-open commenting problem is something like this.

Episode 2 of Dan Benjamin's "The Conversation" is Live:

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LESS - Leaner CSS:

Given that pre-compiling CSS is an official “best practice” these days, why not use that compile step to extend CSS in powerful ways? LESS lets you use variables, nested rules, and other niceties at author-time to clean up your rules and keep everything tidy. I believe The Wolf made something like this a few years ago, but I haven’t heard about it since.

How 3D works, and why it's back:

Great article on the ins and outs of three dimensional imagery. Still doesn’t change my opinion that well-shot conventional cinematography is more impressive than the novelty that is Avatar.

The Importance of Removing Features:

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Newly released video of the space shuttle Challenger disaster: It was 24 years ago, I was in 5th grade, but I remember it like it was yesterday. School was stopped immediately and they wheeled out televisions in every classroom for us to watch the news footage. It’s great that this video has been released, but holy crap, how do you tuck something that away for two decades???

A nicely done british parody of 60 Minutes style video journalism. It’s easy to miss how formulaic our news is sometimes. (via B-Tizzle, originally via E-Chizzle)

Colosseo: This is why Cameron is a king and we are all just pawns in his world. I can’t wait to get my hands on this poster. I will point out, however, that the outro credits on the video need some kerning. Someone is going to lose their right hand for that.

Spezify:

New ways of searching are almost never as useful as old ways of searching. Spezify is pretty awesome though. It’s a visually interesting, never-ending, horizontally and vertically scrollable, topic explorer. I don’t think I’d use it for digging deep on anything, but to get a quick visually rich sampling of a topic, it’s quite fun (via tiff, a long time ago actually, over email).

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Overshared

At the first Doughty show of the night at the Triple Door. If you're in Seattle you should come down for the 2nd at 10. Excellent!