Contests

Contest Two: Back in the day

June 3, 2009 by Julie

For today’s contest you’ll need to exercise your memory, dust off the old photo albums, and think back to the good old days. As you know, we’ve just turned 12, and we want to know what to expect of the next year. So that’s where you come in. All you need to do is answer the following question:

What were you like when you were twelve?

Simple, right? Everyone was 12 once, and it lasted a whole year, so you’ve got to have lots of great stories about it. Were you the president of the computer club, or maybe a jock-in-training, or perhaps you were like, totally, the cheerleading captain. Did you have one of those awesome, giant cell phones like Zack Morris on Saved by the Bell? Maybe you liked to take apart toasters and turn them into shortwave radios, build model cars, or put together little dance routines with your friends (yes, I admit it, that was me).

Spend a little time reminiscing and let us know in the comments below - we’ve only been 12 for a couple days now and we want to know what we have to look forward to! And I promise, no matter how big of a dork - or how “rad” - you were, we won’t laugh…at least, not to your face.

This is the second contest in our week-long 12-year anniversary celebration. We will pick four winners during each contest: the winners can choose between an iTunes or Amazon gift card as their prize. First place winners receive a $50 gift card, and runners-up will get $25. Enter as many times as you like, by submitting your entries as replies to this post. Employees and friends of Ilium Software aren’t eligible to win, but are welcome (and encouraged) to participate anyway. Today’s contest closes at 12:00 noon Eastern Time tomorrow. Winners will be announced during the day tomorrow.

And don’t forget, we’ve got more going on this week besides contests! Shop for anything in our online store and get a big $12 discount off your purchase! You can read more here and start shopping now.

Winners: MadLibs fun!

June 2, 2009 by Julie

The votes are in! There were a lot of strange, weird, and funny headlines from our MadLibs game yesterday, so it took us some time today to narrow down the list to four winners. But we’ve picked our favorites and now it’s time to let you know which headlines we liked best.

The first place winner of a $50 Amazon or iTunes gift card is Melvyn, for the crazy headline: “Today Microsoft announced its merger with Amazon and unveiled its plans to sell toenails to Bolivia.” Eww…gross. Can you even imagine a merger like that - or living in Bolivia and seeing toenails for sale at your local store?

Our three runners-up, who each receive a $25 Amazon or iTunes gift card, are: Paperjet, Shaun, and MikeCTZA. Well done, everyone! I’ll be contacting you via email to find out which store you’d like your gift card from. If you don’t get that email later today, reply to this post to let me know.

To everyone who played, thanks so much - the entries were great, and it was a tough decision. But don’t go far, because we’ll start a new contest tomorrow and you can try your luck at a prize again!

And just a reminder: we’ve got a big anniversary sale running on our site this week too. All of the software in our online store, and eWallet on the iPhone App Store, are discounted BIG right now. Check it out here!

Contest One: Say what?!

June 1, 2009 by Julie

We’re going to start off our week of anniversary contests with a blast from the past - er, a blast from one year ago, that is.

One of the best contests we ran for last year’s party was a fun-filled game of mobile-style MadLibs; we got a lot of hilarious responses. So, I decided we really should go for another round!

If you don’t know what MadLibs are, well, that’s just sad - they were a childhood staple where I grew up. I’ve got some fond memories of rainy afternoons sitting around laughing at the crazy MadLibs my friends and I used to make up. And that was just last week! Anyway, you can get a crash course on MadLibs here, then head on back to this post more details on our contest.

Ready? All right - here’s the deal: go get a pen and paper (you do still know what pen and paper are, right? If not, open a new “note” on your phone) and ask someone (preferably not a stranger on the bus, but you can if you’d like) for just the words in blue on the screenshot below. Don’t read them the whole sentences! Trust me, you’ll get better results if the person isn’t trying to think of words that really fit the headlines. Write down all their answers, put them together in each headline, read the results aloud, and have yourselves a nice big laugh!

Fill in as many of the headlines as you like (you don’t have to answer every one), and send us your entries as replies to this post. You’ll need to type the entire headline into the comments, not just your answers to the words in blue - otherwise it’s going to make even less sense. We’ll do the judging and announce the winners tomorrow.

This is the first contest in our week-long 12-year anniversary celebration. We will pick four winners during each contest: the winners can choose between an iTunes or Amazon gift card as their prize. First place winners receive a $50 gift card, and runners-up will get $25. Enter as many times as you like, by submitting your entries as replies to this post. Employees and friends of Ilium Software aren’t eligible to win, but are welcome (and encouraged) to participate anyway. Today’s contest closes at 9:00 a.m. Eastern Time tomorrow morning. Winners will be announced during the day tomorrow.

And don’t forget, we’ve got more going on this week besides contests! Shop for anything in our online store and get a big $12 discount off your purchase! You can read more here and start shopping now.

May-be it's time for a new contest winner

May 5, 2009 by Julie

Well, May is here and it’s off to a nice start so far. Relatively warm weather: not too rainy, not too windy. And I think - I really think - I can safely pack my snow boots away without any negative consequences. But maybe I should hold off on that so as not to jinx things.

And best of all, May means it’s time to pick another blog contest winner! Last month Marc posted some good news about Mac eWallet, and that produced a lot of comments from happy readers - including our winner: Mark. Congrats, Mark! I’ve just sent you an email explaining how to get your prize. If you don’t receive it, reply to this post and let me know.

And to everyone else out there: thanks so much for reading and leaving your thoughts. Keep coming back, because I’ll pick another winner in June (and definitely have my snow boots away by then) and who knows - it could be you!

No joke: we have a winner

April 2, 2009 by Julie

Well, the contest is now officially over - the secret text on the secret page has been changed back to normal, and I have a winner to announce!

I got a lot of great entries - thanks to everyone for playing! There were only three correct guesses, so it’s interesting to find out that some of you took other “serious” text on our site as a joke!

I put the three correct guessers’ (is that a word?) names into my magic contest hat, and the winner is: Greg. Congrats, Greg! I’m going to reply to your entry email now to get the details I need to send your prize out.

If anyone is curious, before I fixed the website I took a screenshot of the fake text:

(What’s fake? We’re in Ann Arbor, MI - not Canada, and yeah… those aren’t our real names. Click the image to see it full size.)

Thanks again to everyone who played - be sure to keep coming back, and next month we’ll return to your regularly scheduled blog comment contest, so you’ll have another chance to win!

Ilium Software to give away millions in cash and prizes!

April 1, 2009 by Julie

As you may already know, the first day of the month is when we pick a winner from our ongoing blog comment contest. And as the headline of this post suggests, boy do we have a great contest today for one lucky winner! That’s right - cash and prizes totaling more than one million…more than two million…could it be more than three million? Read on after the jump to find out all the details about what may possibly be the coolest contest ever!

Are you still with me? Great! That can only mean one of two things: either you’re really hyped up and ready to find out how you can get a chance to win millions of dollars in prizes, or I didn’t fool you at all, you know exactly what day it is, but you’re such a good sport you decided you wanted to read the rest of my post anyway. I’m sure it’s the latter - I know you’re way too clever to be fooled by something like this on April 1st, right? Good for you. And as a reward, let me tell you about the contest I do have lined up today.

While I may not have millions of dollars in prizes to give away, there is a slight twist to this month’s blog contest. And we do have an extra-special prize to give away. Since I couldn’t fool you with my little lie about the gigantic prizes, I have a backup plan. Somewhere on our website, I’ve changed some text as a little April Fools Day joke. What could it be? Well, that’s for me to know and you to find out. I will say this: it’s more than just a couple of words. And I think you’ll know it when you see it. Or, at least, I sure hope you won’t read it, believe it, and keep on scrolling!

So, what do you do when you think you’ve found it? Well, first of all, DO NOT post it to the comments below. That will do nothing but get you disqualified and BOOed by the rest of the readers, and they might come to your house and throw rotten tomatoes at you. Seriously, we want everyone to have a chance to find our little joke! Please send your guesses via email to: julie at iliumsoft dot com. In your email, include a link to the page where you think you found the fake text, and be sure to quote the text you think is fake. I’ll pick a random winner from all the correct entries.

What do you stand to win? This time around we’ve got a different sort of software to give away: a brand-new, never-before-opened copy of Expression Media 2 by Microsoft. This is some pretty snazzy software that lets you store all of your media visually.

All right, hurry up and find the trick text! As soon as I get here tomorrow morning, I’m taking it back off the site. Because let’s face it - something that’s funny on April Fools Day looks just plain foolish if you read it the next day! I’ll update this post tomorrow after I pick the winner. So, off you go - good luck and happy hunting!