Now, as a warning, you might want to take a look at the site first and decide if you like the content as this will automatically sign you up for a copy of their email newsletter.  That’s a fairly negligible issue, however, since in the same announcement telling entrants about that, they make clear that you can unsubscribe right away should such be your preference.

I had never heard about this site previously(Excellent draw for your site, guys!), so it’s hard to make an informed recommendation, but the front page story listing led me to a few fairly interesting things I also had not run into before. Early developments in wireless energy transfer just plain interest me.  Coverage on the developing privately funded space flight industry is similarly cool.  Where they caught me, however, was the vat-grown human liver.  I’ll be honest, I’m not much of a news guy.  I follow what interests me in as narrow a way as possible on most occasions because I don’t want to be bombarded with information on what famous person leaked a sex tape with what other famous person and so on.  Finding a site that covers the interesting stuff on a broader scope without that sort of inanity is at least potential, in my book.  Worth a shot, especially when I might get a new Kindle in the process.

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Amazon declared earlier last week that Canada is now amongst the countries that they officially ship to. While Amazon’s delay to support a nation so close to the US has raised a few eyebrows, it has to be understood that international trade laws can be pretty stringent. So finalizing business deals sometimes takes an unnaturally long time, which is lamentable but unavoidable in certain situations.

Now the wait is finally over for Canadians and Kindles have already started being shipped up North. If there was ever an eBook reader that a large number of international customers wanted, it has to be the Kindle. And this fact is not lost on Kindle’s competition.

Sony has followed Amazon to Canada and has started shipping their own eBook readers there. But till date Sony lacks the kind of content that Kindle readers have easy access to with each and every Kindle. So it doesn’t look like Amazon will be threatened by Sony’s readers anytime soon. But that does not mean that Sony will not do anything about it.

As it turns out, Sony is planning its own online store, called Sony Online Service. Their primary target is iTunes but it is likely that they would want to provide content for all their devices and that logically should include Sony’s eBooks readers. However, if their content is as limited as their eBook reader and as unimaginative as their online service name, Amazon will have the last laugh on this one.

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For those of you who aren’t Twitter users, “trending topics” are the most popular subjects being tweeted at any given time.  These topics show up in a side panel that all Twitter users see, so if the contest becomes popular enough it will mean a lot of free advertising for Perseverance.

The whole concept of the promotion banks on the idea that enough people want a free Kindle to dominate twitter.  So far, it doesn’t seem like the contest has been quite the success Rubenstein was hoping.  I wouldn’t blame this on a lack of demand for the Kindle.  I have no doubt that people would be interested in this contest, but that there hasn’t been enough promotion of the contest itself.  If you are looking to get a Kindle, I would recommend taking advantage of this contest before more people hop on board.

Now would also be a good time to remind you of BlogKindle’s Twitter account.  Also, don’t forget that you can keep up to date with the latest tweets on the Kindle itself.

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All-in-all, it looks like a collection of bugfixes. It’s possible that TTS change is there.

First thing after the official patch – I’ve reinstalled the Unicode Font Hack and it installed just fine.

Kindle Software Update 2.0.3

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• Kindle 2 went to Jeff from USA (this is as much information as I can share). According to the UPS tracking it was delivered. I hope that Jeff is enjoying it and putting it to good use.
• I received total 279 entries of which 240 were valid. Remaining 14% didn’t have the date in proper format in the subject field.
• Of those those 240 10 (4.2%) have guessed correctly so I had to flip my favorite 10 sided coin to decide who wins.
• Dates ranged from 3/20/2008 to 10/9/2009… Since first one is most likely a typo along with some other dates before the contest start, earliest really valid date was 3/14/2009 – the next day after the rules were published.
• Most people (17) guessed 4/1/2009 and were off by 1 day.
• Here is a full distribution graph for entries ranging from 3/14/2009 to 4/28/2009. There were several for much later dates that I omitted from the graph.

Thank to everyone for participating and spreading the word and good luck next time! :)

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It means that the winning date is March 31st, 2009 (03/31/2009)!

Now I’ll go and scan all e-mails I received for the competition to find a winner. It may take me some time but I expect to notify Kindle 2 winner within next 2-3 days.

Thanks everyone for participation and I’ll keep you posted!

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At the time of this posting the count is 252,758. This means that pretty soon we’ll have a winner who will receive a brand new Kindle 2.

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This also means that unless some books are pulled back (which did happen several times before), today would be your last day for submitting entries to win a free Kindle 2 contest. So hurry up. You have until 11:59PM PST 3/19/2009 to submit your entries. 235 entries has been submitted so far. Good luck!

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As of 00:01 PST 03/14/2009 there were 248,081 books in Amazon Kindle Store, so it’s almost 3K books before I’ll stop accepting entries. There were 43 entries submitted so far so chances of winning are still pretty high given you’ll guess close enough to the correct date.

Before emailing your entry please make sure that I’t correctly formatted as per contest rules. The answer should be in the subject line (not in the body) and be exactly 10 characters long (no more no less): MM/DD/YYYY, month and day number should have a leading zero if they are less then 10, year should be 4 digit – 2009, not 09 or 9.

I’m writing this beacuse around 10% of the entries fail to follow this format and stince I’ll use semi-automated means for choosing the winner – invalid entries will not win. Please review your entry and if it’s wrong – please resend it, I will not count it as double entry or cheating as long as the date is the same.

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When Amazon Kindle 2 was released Kindle Store had 240,000+ books for sale. This number is growing daily and it’s about to hit 250,000 which is pretty impressive. In order to win brand new Amazon Kindle 2 Wireless eInk reading device all you need to do is email me your best guess about when number of books in Amazon Kindle Store is going to top 256,000 (one thousand books for each megabyte of flash memory in Kindle 1 :) )

You can visit Amazon Kindle Store daily to get a feel for how fast eBooks are piling up. Count as of 03/13/2009 was 248,429 when I checked. I will accept entries until the day number of books will be more than 250,999. I check book counts every 00:01 PST and that would be the cutting line. Once I see 251,000 books or more – no more entries are going to be accepted. I will announce the cut-off date once it happens. After that it’s waiting time: once I see 256,000 books or more at 00:01 that would be the winning date. I’ll announce it in the morning. Of all persons who submitted entries with this date I’ll randomly pick 1 winner.

To submit your entry just send an e-mail to contest@blogkindle.com with your chosen date in the subject in the following form: MM/DD/YYYY, where MM is two digit zero-padded month number, DD is two digit zero-padded day number and YYYY is 4 digit year. So 03/21/2009 would be 21st of March 2009, 04/03/2009 would be 3rd of April, 2009. Please don’t put anything else in the subject line. Any content in the message body is going to be ignored. I will use email address the letter was sent from to contact the winner and arrange for shipping the prize. Any entries that don’t follow the format described above will be discarded. If I don’t receive a response from the winner within 72 hours from sending the letter a new winner will be chosen.

One entry per person for the entire duration of the contest. Cheaters WILL BE disqualified! Amazon employees are on their honor not to participate :)

I will not use your email address for any other reason then to contact your if you are a winner. I’ll not give them to spammers, spam them myself or randomly send out my rants when I feel lonely and sad. In fact once this contest is settled I’m going to delete all of them.

I will not disclose winners identity even partially without winners consent. Though it would be nice to receive this consent for posting at least winner’s city. If you provide a photograph of the Kindle 2 once you receive it (with you if you would like to) I promise to post it here.

OK. Once again the rules in a nutshell:

1. Figure out a date on which at 01:00 PST Amazon Kindle Store would have 256,000 books or more
2. Send email to contest@blogkindle.com with this date date in the subject line in the following format: MM/DD/YYYY (see details and examples above)
3. Email should be sent on a day on which at 01:00 PST book count in Amazon Kindle Store was 250,999 or lower. I’ll post when it happens (though not immediately)
4. There is a limit of one entry per person for the entire duration of the contest.
5. Out of the  people who submitted correct date properly 1 winner will be chosen randomly.
6. Winner will be contacted on the winning day described in (1) using email that entry was submitted from.
7. If I don’t receive any response from the winner within 72 hours of sending the email a new winner would be chosen randomly.
8. In the unlikely case that (6) would be repeated enough times that no winner could be chosen, I’ll randomly choose a winner from people who were off by 1 day either way. I’ll keep expanding the date range and repeating (6) until winner can be found.

That means that as long as there are valid entries somebody is pretty much guaranteed to win.

Why am I doing this? Honestly I would like to see more comments to my posts, I would like readers to get more involved with the blog. I believe that an easy way of achieving that would be to attract more subscribers by holding this contest. So if you like this blog and what I write here please spread the word on other blogs and forums. The more people I would see enjoying the content that I provide here the more time I’ll spend creating more better content.

If you have any questions – please leave a comment. I’ll try to respond as fast as possible.

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I’m going to announce the rules this Friday (March 13th, 2009) so if you are not subscribed to this blog, you’ll have a better chance of not missing out on your chance to win if you do subscribe :) Also please take a minute to spread the word about this contest on other Kindle related blogs and forums. The more people will participate, the more fun it’s going to be!

Stay tuned!

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• R. W. Ridley Blog – entries accepted until March 15h, 2009. “To Qualify – Identify the type of primate in the video (chimpanzee, gorilla or orangutan). If you respond with the correct answer, you will be entered into the drawing. Please send me an email with the subject line “I know the primate.”“
• Julie Stratford Blog – “My main idea about the contest is for bloggers to go wild and write a post about how this Kindle 2 would improve their lives, their kid’s lives or something like that.“
• Marketing Pilgrim – contest ends on April 6th, 2009. “Well, if you’re already subscribed to Marketing Pilgrim’s RSS feed or email updates, you’re half-way to being qualified for the April 6th drawing… Then, all you have to do is look for a secret message that will appear at the bottom of the posts for one day only–sometime between now and April 5th“

Since I already have Kindle 2 I’ll leave it up to you to participate.

If you know of any other Kindle related contests, please let me know and I’ll update the post.

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