If you’ve been reading this blog long enough, you’ve probably noticed by now that I just love to give stuff away. Unfortunately, getting the prizes to the winners seems to be the difficult part, and it’s not for a lack of trying on my part. This seems like the week of contests as I wrap a few things up and try to resolve old contest winners.
I had a winner for this contest, who I emailed and never heard from. I sent a follow-up email today, so we’ll see if I get to mail that out soon.
I had two winners for this contest, but neither responded to my DM tweets to collect, so I’m having a super fast 1-day contest again to give it away.
I held this contest last week and drew a winner who I’ve emailed today.
Finally, a previous contest winner who won a PS3 from a scam artist posing as a sponsor. After some time trying to get the “sponsor” to do anything close to forking over a prize, I went out and bought the prize winner a PS3 system myself. As it turns out, she’s looking to give that prize back out to a charity this summer, as she won’t need it.
It’s been a fun week for prizes, and I’ll have more prizes to give out soon, but I need to actually send some of these out first. Look for more contest announcements here and on Twitter as soon as I send one or two of these out.
PayPerPost is dropping a little cash on me for a paid review and they expressed that they want it to be honest, which is good because I’ve got some good things and some bad things to say about their new v4.0 Alpha launch.
A year or two ago, I didn’t like payperpost , but it wasn’t their fault. What I didn’t like was the back-handing that Google was doing to all the bloggers to tried to make a couple bucks for their opinions. Google dropped me from PR5 to PR0 overnight and with the frustration of trying to get my page rank back up came fear that it could vanish just as easily. Because of that, I stayed away from PPP and a couple other sites for a long time. To be fair, I shouldn’t even say I didn’t like PayPerPost, because that’s not really accurate. Regardless, I found myself sans that revenue stream until recently.
I got an Alpha key a few weeks ago so I could check out the new site before it officially launched and it was a nice change from the old PayPerPost I remembered. The first thing I noticed was the new elegant design. It’s simplified and they’ve cut it down to only the necessary goods.
It’s not as great as SocialSpark (another IZEA site), but It looks like it’ll be much better when they come out of alpha and have more opportunities available. It’s hard to tell where it can go from here and how some of the searching and sorting features will work out until there’s more available, but it’s off to a pretty good start. The only thing that really bothers me is the very limited time frame we get to complete an opportunity. Id love to see them open that up to at least a few days. In any case, after a long time away, I’ll likely be logging into PayPerPost every day to check opportunities like I do currently with SocialSpark. Welcome back, old friend.
This week, Amazon.com opened up it’s Kindle Publishing service to the rest of us. The service allows bloggers like me to list our blog content in the Amazon marketplace for people to purchase and read on their Kindle ebook readers. So guess what I did today.
The above is a modified version of an original photo by jblyberg
That’s right! You can now get your JoeTech.com fix anywhere on your Amazon Kindle by just purchasing a subscribtion. The current price (as set by Amazon) is only $1.99 per month. If you try it out, send me a photo and I’ll send you back something cool (maybe a gadget or a JoeTech.com shirt or something).
I try to be as objective as possible when doing product reviews, which is why I insist upon having a sample I can play with myself. This is also why I am currently carrying around and talking on three different cell phones. Sometimes, I find that I should follow up a product review with new information and this is definitely one of those times. In the past week, I’ve learned of two new bits of information that make the Peek that I reviewed even more attractive.
No monthly fee option
Even though you get unlimited email and texting for about $20 a month, for someone like me, that seemed like a waste to pay monthly for something I already get in my iPhone. For someone without email capabilities on their phone, it’s a decent deal. After trying out a new pricing model of $399 for the Peek plus lifetime service, they found that given the choice, 70 percent opted for the one-time price. Frankly, I would, too. On the Peek site, you’ll pay (at the time of this writing) about $50 for the device and $20 per month. That means you’ll have spent just over the $399 one-time price in 18 months. If you think you’ll want one for more than a year and a half, the one-time price is the better deal.
Update your blog from it
If you blog, this is a new selling point for the Peek. It seems that Dan over at GeekyPeek.com installed Postie in WordPress and was able to update his blog from the Peek. (source: CrunchGear).
