Mashable — a leading tech/gadget/internet news site — has take polls and given awards the last three years, and their 4th annual contest is currently in the running. This year a few categories that may interest TalkAndroid readers are:
Best location-based service (Waze, Foursquare, Hotlist, Gowalla, SCVNGR)
Best mobile app (DriveSafe.ly, eBuddy, ScoutMob, @GravityApp, Evernote)
Best Mobile Device (iPhone, HTC Desire, Blackberry Torch, Samsung Galaxy S, Droid X)
Best Mobile Game (Angry Birds, Fragger, @blocktacular, Colombo Ride 3D, Texting of the Bread)
Best Mobile Platform (Androi, WebOS, iOS, Pyxis Mobile, RIM)
Best Mobile User Experience (eBuddy, Nimbuzz, imo, @YouVersion, SugarSync)
So, if you love your Galaxy S phone, your Droid X, the Android platform, or Angry Birds, here’s a chance for you to make it known! Hit the source link to vote.
As you are no doubt aware, today is Election Day in the United States, and, considering the ideological controversies in the country, one of the most important congressional elections in years. We on GeekDad encourage all U.S. citizens who are registered to vote to make sure to go to the polls today, regardless of which candidates and ballot questions you plan to vote for (or against).
We also encourage all parents who are going to vote, if your kids are old enough to understand what you’re doing, to bring them to the polling place with you. It’s a unique opportunity for them to see citizens — and, more specifically, you — exercise their right to participate in government. It’s the sort of experience that can stick in their heads and help foster an interest in government and politics. I can speak from personal experience here: my parents took me with them to the voting booth pretty much every year when I was growing up. That, combined with other things they did, like simply talking about the news at the dinner table, definitely helped make me as fascinated by the political process as I am today.
I’m not suggesting that you take your kids out of school if they don’t have today off — as many districts do — but if you can manage to take them with you after school, it’s something to consider. But even if you choose not to bring your kids, go out and be a good citizen: vote!
If you’re of a certain age—read: you’re a college student—you likely already know all about Texts From Last Night, or TFLN for short. TFLN is a Webby Award-winning website, a popular Facebook group, a book, a soon-to-be TV series on the Fox network, and, now, an iPhone app.
The basics of the iPhone app are just like those of the full-featured website: Texts From Last Night is a stream of user-submitted text messages from, you guessed it, last night. Users may submit their own text message to the stream, and the texts are up-voted or down-voted by other users, Reddit style. The most popular part of the app/website is probably the “Top Nights” feature, which is a collection of the most up-voted texts, organized by day, week, month, or all time.
So, why should you care about anonymous, out-of-context, possibly made-up text messages? Bluntly, you should care because they are hilarious. These aren’t just any texts, but only the most debauched and embarrassing. The best entries are like short stories that imply the existence of entire worlds of filthy humor and regret, outside of the 160-character limit of the message. Texts From Last Night is like a Twitter feed from a teen sex comedy. Read the full story
We’re at Phandroid LIVE and while everyone here votes on their favorite T-Shirt – which will be put into production with the winning designer earning $200 - you can also vote at home! So check out the following designs, vote for your favorite, and by the end of the night we’ll have the plan for the first ever Phandroid T-Shirt!
We’re only 10 days away from the start of the 2010 BlackBerry Developer Conference, which means we’re only 12 days away from the CrackBerry App Awards party being hosted by Xobni and sponsored by the BlackBerry Partners Fund. The CrackBerry Awards party is being held from 7 to 10pm on Wednesday, September 29th at Xobni’s headquarters (Twitter’s original offices!) which are just a short five minute shuttle ride away from the Marriott where DevCon is being hosted. If you haven’t RSVPed yet, you can do so here. It’ll be a good ‘ole time!
CrackBerry App Award Nominees Announced – Voting Now Open: Before we can have a CrackBerry App Awards party, we need to have some winners to announce! Jump over to our CrackBerry App Awards 2010 page to see the nominees and place your vote. * Message to Nominees - if you’re going to be in attendance at the App Awards party, shoot Adam or myself an email and let us know! *
Entries are now closed for our design competition in association with Ponoko and Sparkfun, but the competition isn’t over yet! We’ve selected our favourite 10 entries from the GeekDad Flickr pool and the comments left on the post, and now it’s up to you, the readers, to pick the overall winner.
Have a look at the list below and choose who you think should receive all the parts they need to build their winning design!
A big thank you from all of us here at GeekDad to everyone who took the time to enter, we wish you could all win, but in the words of the immortals, “there can be only one!”
Wall Tetris gradion saw Sparkfun’s picture frame Tetris and wanted something bigger, so he came up with Wall Tetris:
“This is a 1.2m (4ft) wall mounted Tetris game board powered by 2 x AVR ATMega168’s (1 for main board, 1 for score) and a bunch of FET’s to turn on the 200 leds. The resolution is a mighty 0.25 pixels per inch (each square is 2×2in) Considering replacing most of the control circuitry with a mondomatrix led matrix or two. Game controller is Sparkfun Nordic FOB or mobile phone running Java program as it has a Sparkfun Blusmirf too.”
Minifridge Dispenser tinyenormous has prototyped a arduino-controlled minifridge beer dispenser:
“The idea behind this is that most college students buy a mini-fridge freshman year and then sell it sophomore or junior year. This way they can turn their freshman mini-fridge into a senior beer vending machine!”
BART Display
San Franciscan’s will love ptterb’s personal BART Transit Display box:
“Anyone who takes pubic transportation – even on occasion – KNOWS what it’s like to miss the train by just seconds! It happens all the time. I’d like to make a BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) display to sit at my cubicle (and one at home!) and show me when the next few trains are arriving.”
Micro CNC Mill cruz.m has mocked up a small and cheap CNC machine:
“This is a render in Solidworks of a Desktop-sized, low priced CNC machine, inspired by the Mantis 9. Except for the X and Y stepper motors, the footprint is a 1′ cube.
To be primarily used for milling out circuit boards, but could be also used for engraving other materials.”
Giant Crane Game marc.cryan built a whole room crane game for his daughters and now he wants to improve on it:
“A giant Crane Game style robot that will pick up toys and drop them in the toybin.I’ve built a one-axis version.
I used salvaged parts and I took the whole thing apart when I was done with it. Since then my girls have been asking “Daddy can we play with the robot arm?”
I would like to build a more permanent version with some improvements. Mainly – 3 Axis movement, Wireless control, position sensing, RF ID’d toys, and re-chargable batteries with a charging station in the ‘home’ position.”
Braille Embosser Wumpus McGrue’s entry is a very useful Braille embossing machine:
Giant Periscope marc.cryan gets a second place in the Top 10 with his solar-powered rooftop periscope:
“Roof mounted camera with pan and tilt, the display is inside the house…
Also it should have a button to turn down the volume on the TV…
Everything should have a button to turn down the volume on the TV…”
Train LED Nameplate dalucero wants to make a light up nameplate for his son’s bedroom:
“My son loves trains. I love making things. Inside this box are two engraved sheets of acrylic plexiglass. Around the edges of the glass (inside the box) are strips of LEDs. As the LEDs shine into the edge of the glass, the light passes through to the engraving and is reflected outward lighting it up.”
Pizza Leveller exastify needed away to keep his pizza level on the way back from the takeaway, and this is what he came up with:
“My brother and I love our local pizza place, Tony’s New York Pizza! We go there at least once a month, but there always has been a problem… sliding cheese.
You see, when you have great pizza like this, you can’t just throw it in the back seat where the pizza sit tilted, as all the cheese will smoosh to one side. That’s why I’m the official pizza-leveler, accompanying my brother to the pizza place, just to keep the pizza level on the drive home. Well now I have a solution!”
Wirewords patrickandrews came up with a simple way to make light up lettering:
“Units such as those on the left of the diagram can be attached to a pegboard-type background in a variety of layouts (including that of the seven-segment arrangement shown on the right).
A wire, light-up cable or tube is looped around these units, either through the hidden or visible side of each.”
Now you’ve seen the Top 10, it’s time to pick your favorite using the poll below, you’ve got until midnight on Sunday 22nd to vote and we’ll announce the winner shortly after that.
It’s time folks! Over the last two weeks you’ve witnessed ten in-depth BlackBerry accessory reviews from our ten Round 2 competitors in CrackBerry Idol. The judges gave their feedback on each review and now it is in YOUR HANDS to decide which FIVE competitors will continue on to the FINAL round. Below you will find the links to each of the accessory reviews, as well as the CrackBerry Idol voting poll where you can vote for which competitors (up to a max of five) you want to see advance. We’ll leave the poll running on this post right up until midnight PST, this Sunday August 15th. Voting is below. Think hard before you vote. Now go vote!
I was expecting it to be a fairly quiet week on the BlackBerry news front, but between the new official BlackBerry 6 video (which hopefully means its right around the corner), the BlackBerry Protect preview and the and the Apple antenna shannigans we had a lot of things to keep us entertained. And course CrackBerry Idol Round 1 voting is NOW OPEN. Click the link above to vote if you haven’t yet. Ten contestants will move on to Round 2. Check out the links below to see what you missed.
I told you all about the Make My App contest that Nokia is holding a few weeks ago and I am finally getting time to sit down and put some ideas I have up on the site. If you like my ideas and would like to help me get some votes for the possibility of getting a trip to Nokia World then please feel free to vote for them. I have many more ideas that I am working on and will keep entering them into this contest in hopes that I get selected. I can then cover the event for you all here on Nokia Experts in September.
Here are my submitted ideas and links to the page for you to vote if you desire:
This first one was a direct result of my recent vacation when it was virtually impossible to find a place to use a public restroom in foreign cities and the other is related to my frustration with spending long hours managing photos. I will be adding to this list above with more app ideas soon.
When I did my HTC Incredible Review I was debating whether or not to discuss signal strength. Driving around town, I continually noticed that when my Motorola Droid had 3 or 4 bars, the Incredible only had 1 or 2 bars. What the heck?
That did make me quite curious and I DID plan on covering that in my Motorola Droid vs. HTC Incredible video… but somehow I left it out. What I would have said if I didn’t suffer for short-term memory loss?
One quirk of the HTC Incredible seems to be a signal strength flaw. I continually noticed my Motorola Droid had more bars in more places than my HTC Incredible. Oddly enough, call quality was never an issue and I never dropped calls – in fact I often got flawless reception with ZERO bars.
The number of bars shown on the front-end UI isn’t always the best indicator of actual/realized signal strength – there is a lot going on behind the scenes. Rather than be alarmed, I’d consider this a glitch in display rather than a manufacturing flaw. Of course this is a story that I’m sure will develop.
And develop it has. So now I ask you, dear Incredible-owning readers, what has YOUR experience been with the HTC Incredible Signal Strength?
HTC has taken to their Facebook page and is currently running a poll to name their next device. As you can see, they’re trying to project an image of youth and playfulness. Want to make sure your next phone isn’t the HTC Festi? Head over to HTC’s Facebook page to cast your vote. As of this post, Wildfire is in the lead with roughly 1,000 votes over Zeal.
I’m sure a lot of you have heard about the Wirefly Blog Awards. I’m sure you guys love Phandroid. And I would hope that a lot of you are down for helping a good cause! We were recently nominated for Wirefly’s Best Android Blog award and we want to do something really special with the prize money.
If you guys can help us win the poll, we’ll donate every cent of the winnings to a charity that you guys will help decide. All you have to do is head over to WireFly.com now and submit your vote for Phandroid! Once the polls close on April 30th – and if we’ve been dubbed the winner – we’ll open our own personal poll so you guys can decide which charity the money will go to.
So how about it? Let’s hear it for Phandroid and good causes!
WireFly has announced the start of it’s first annual Wirefly Blog Awards. We’ve tried our hardest to give you a little more than others as a community run blog / news / mod your android site and hope you see the benefit we have given the community. We are not just your typical blog as we also deal with ROM releases and all the details you need to enhance your phone, I hope you’ll agree that we provide a lot more than just your typical blog.
Finalists will be selected by Wirefly staff on April 15, 2010, and the blog with the most nominations will be given extra weight. We will announce the finalists in each category on the 16th, and open user voting to determine the winning blogs.
Categories include:
Best Android Blog
Best BlackBerry Blog
Best Cell Phone News Blog
Best Cell Phone Review Blog
Best Windows Mobile Blog
Thanks for all your support. All we need is a little more
Are your government leaders paying attention to you? They should be – and now you can pay more attention to them with Visible Vote Mobile. Visible Vote gives you quick access to your representatives in Washington, shows their real-time approval rating based on other users, and shows you how they are voting on the issues that matter to you. Anyone with a political conscience will see the value in Visible Vote Mobile.
If you have ever thought of expressing your opinion on an important issue to your representative, but by the time you got home to your computer to look up a contact number or email address, had all but forgotten, then Visible Vote Mobile is a must have. With a simple tap of a button, you can call or email your state senator or representative and tell them your opinion.
Visible Vote Mobile also gives you access to the bills in congress as well as links to news and to view the bill in its entirety. If you don’t have the time or interest for reading all the details, you can scroll down and read the highlights. Then (…) Read the rest of Increase Your Political Awareness with Visible Vote Mobile
If you’re of a certain age—read: you’re a college student—you likely already know all about Texts From Last Night, or TFLN for short. TFLN is a 
Are your government leaders paying attention to you? They should be – and now you can pay more attention to them with 
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