Announcements

Wow, what can we say, we’re totally honored. Your humble source for all things tech and gadgety has officially been nominated for three Bloggies this year — Best Computers or Technology Weblog, Best Group Weblog, and Best-Designed Weblog (go design team!) — the most nominations that we’ve ever received in this annual competition. Unlike the Weblog Awards, which allow you to vote once every 24 hours, the Bloggies have a strict one-vote-per-person rule, and actively discourage cheating by incorporating captchas and verification emails into the procedure. You have until 10:00PM Eastern on Thursday, January 31st to cast your ballot, but doing so earlier will help us all avoid these annoying reminder posts. Also, please remember: winners never cheat, and cheaters never win!

Two new bits fresh from the Greener Gadgets Conference going down in New York next week! First up, enter right here to win one of five tickets to the conference! The rules are after the break — you know the score, we only ask that you don’t enter unless you absolutely know you can attend the conference on February 1st, (which we’ll confirm before awarding the prizes).

The second bit will be a lot more interesting for the designers in the crowd. I’ll be one of the judges of the Greener Gadgets design competition at the conference, which will award the best green electronics design concepts with $4,500 in cash prizes. The deadline for that is Sunday, January 27th, and no, you can’t enter through Engadget, so be sure to check out the full rules and guidelines over at Core 77.

Good luck!

The rules on winning tickets (yeah, there are always rules):

• Leave a comment below. Let us know that you’ll be able to make it, otherwise we might give the ticket to someone else!
• You may only enter this specific giveaway once. If you enter this giveaway more than once you’ll be automatically disqualified, etc. (Yes, we have robots that thoroughly check to ensure fairness.) In other words, be careful when commenting and if you submit more than once, only activate one comment, ok?
• ONLY enter if you can make it to the conference. It’s all day February 1st in New York.
• If you enter more than once, only activate one comment. This is pretty self explanatory.
  
• Contest is open to anyone in the 50 States, 18 or older! Sorry, we don’t make this rule, be mad at our lawyers or US contest laws if you have to be mad at something.
• Winners will be chosen randomly. Five winners will be selected to receive a ticket ($350 value).
• Entries can be submitted until Sunday, January 27th, 11:59PM ET. After that we’re all done. Good luck!
• Full rules can be found here.

Oh sure, you love gadgets — but do you have the chops to write about them? We’d love to know if you think you do, because we’re looking to actually pay people to do this stuff. Professional writing experience isn’t necessary (though it doesn’t hurt), but what we really care about is that you can write about gadgets with wit, concision, and authority. And being obsessed with Engadget is good, too.

• East Coast editor (full-time, salary, benefits, the whole-nine — must be based on the East Coast, preferably NYC)
• European editor (full or part-time, must be based in Europe, preferably London)
• Engadget HD contributing editor (part time)
• Engadget Mobile contributing editor (part time)
• Columnists (wherever — just have good ideas to pitch!)
• Spanish language writers, too! Check here.

Want to apply? Read on.

Here’s what you need to send to apply:

Writing
• Three sample posts written in the Engadget style.
• Make sure these are germane to the site you want to write for.
• These sample posts can be about whatever you want, but they should seem like they could have been written by one of our writers (but without all the typos and gross inaccuracies).
• We won’t be using these on the site, we just want to get a sense of how well you can do this stuff.
• Don’t just send us stuff you wrote elsewhere, we’re not asking for clips.
• Your favorite related gadgets (and why).
• If you’re applying for Engadget classic, list your fave gadgets of all time.
• For Engadget HD, only list your three favorite HD-related products.
• For Engadget Mobile, only list your three favorite cellphones.
• Give us a few words about how you think Engadget differs from other technology pubs out there.

  About you

• A few words about yourself. (Please note, due to legalities we can’t hire minors.)
• Your contact info.
• How much time per week you can commit to blogging. If it’s less than ten then you probably shouldn’t bother. Be realistic, okay?
• Any other questions you may have about the gig.
• Oh, and no attachments or resumes.
  

Please note that we will only review fully complete applications, and remember to put the name of the position you’re applying for in the title of your email.

To apply to Engadget, please send us an email at jobsATengadgetDOTcom.
To apply to Engadget HD, please send us an email at jobsATengadgethdDOTcom.
To apply to Engadget Mobile, please send an email to us at jobsATengadgetmobileDOTcom.

We usually get a lot of applications, so please give us some time to look stuff over, cool? Sorry, but the sheer volume of applications makes it difficult to respond to everyone, but if we’re interested we’ll get in touch. Thanks!

Got your final Macworld predictions in? Excellent. Steve takes the stage and the show gets started in just a couple of hours now, so run off that DO NOT DISTURB sign on the office printer while you still have a chance.

07:00AM - Hawaii
09:00AM - Pacific
10:00AM - Mountain
11:00AM - Central
12:00PM - Eastern
05:00PM - GMT / London
06:00PM - Paris
08:00PM - Moscow
02:00AM - Tokyo (January 16th)

Where you need to be:
Live Steve Jobs Macworld keynote
All Macworld 2008 coverage [RSS]

Our CES coverage is winding down and we’re dribble out the last of our stories from the biggest consumer tech trade show of the year, which must mean it’s time to get ready for Macworld Expo. It all goes down next week, so mark your calendars and warm up that F5 / Cmd R key.

Where you need to be:
Live Steve Jobs Macworld keynote
All Macworld 2008 coverage [RSS]

What time to post the GO AWAY note on your door on Tuesday, the 15th:
07:00AM - Hawaii
09:00AM - Pacific
10:00AM - Mountain
11:00AM - Central
12:00PM - Eastern
05:00PM - GMT / London
06:00PM - Paris
02:00AM - Tokyo (January 16th)

Leave more time zones in comments!

We don’t know if you’re ready for the deluge of gadget news that CES brings, but our whole crew is in Vegas ready to bring it to you. Things are kicking off tonight at CES Unveiled, but throughout the day tomorrow we’ll be banging out live coverage of all the majors’ press conferences. (That is, except the HD DVD group. Awkward.) And, of course, let us know if there’s anything you’re dying to see — we’re here for you.

The countdown to CES begins!
CES AV club: the Engadget podcast returns, video with Veronica Belmont!
Engadget: now faster, with better galleries, and fully ready for CES

Sunday, January 6th
All day - Almost all other press conferences. If it’s a major company, they’ll probably be holding their press conference on Sunday, so stick close by.
4:00PM PT / 7:00PM ET - Sony’s CES keynote.
6:30PM PT / 9:30PM ET - Bill Gates’s 12th and final CES keynote (probably). Not to be missed!
7:00PM PT / 10:00PM ET - Digital Experience. Tons to see here, you’ll want to stick around Sunday night.

We’ve been working extra hours over past few weeks making a number of enhancements to Engadget, both up front and behind the curtains. We’ve got three awesome bits for you:

• CES-optimized news page (ces.engadget.com). When you’re publishing as much as CES demands, you need to be able to zoom out a bit for ease of use. Many will recognize this from CES 2007, but we’ve made a few improvements (like a video content grid, better easier gallery access, and so on); we will have a default page-version selector soon, so watch out for that.
• New galleries! You asked for it, you got it. We aren’t by any means finished improving the design and usability of our galleries (in fact, we’ll be further tweaking them over the next couple of days), but for now the images should at least be easier to browse and select, and faster to load. If you’ve got further input, let us know..
• Further speed improvements. We know, Engadget has been sucking lately in terms of load-speed. A lot of this has to do with the way our ads are loaded, but we made a few tweaks to our setup and code that has the site jumping faster than ever — even despite the ridiculous amount of media we serve with every page. Go nuts on F5, the bandwidth is on us.

Engadget extends its highest of fives to our dedicated design team: Matt, Mark, and Erik! Here, check out their handiwork in those galleries.

Engadget podcast fans, good news! I’ll be bringing back the podcast for the duration of CES, with our editorial team and a special guest or two sitting in on the show to discuss the big news in Vegas. So fire up your podcast aggregator / iTunes / Zune Marketplace, or keep an eye on the Engadget podcast feed, because the show will be back on the air for next week and next week only!

And on the video front, we’re teaming up with CNET-expat and Engadget ladyfriend Veronica Belmont and her excellent team at Mahalo Daily, who will help round out Engadget’s up to the minute video coverage. We’re expecting great things, so be sure to check back for Engadget Mahalo Daily (and all the rest of our video) out at the Engadget video tag.

-Ryan

So yeah, if you haven’t already noticed by the slew of news today (and our liberal use of the CES category), we’re just days away from the biggest week of the year for consumer electronics (and, of course, Engadget).

Naturally, we’ll be swarming the joint bringing the freshest, most up to the second coverage on all the new 2008 gear — but to make things easier for everyone reading, we’re also rolling out a few improvements to the site. We’ll be back shortly with the details.

In the mean time, take a moment now to sit back and relax. Because once we really get started, things are going to get a little crazy. And geeky.

Saturday, January 5th
4:00PM PT / 7:00PM ET - CES unveiled. Plenty of new gadgets — and we’ll be reporting live!

Sunday, January 6th
All day - Almost all other press conferences. If it’s a major company, they’ll probably be holding their press conference on Sunday, so stick close by.
4:00PM PT / 7:00PM ET - Sony’s CES keynote.
6:30PM PT / 9:30PM ET - Bill Gates’s 12th and final CES keynote (probably). Not to be missed!
7:00PM PT / 10:00PM ET - Digital Experience. Tons to see here, you’ll want to stick around Sunday night.