As we've been teasing on the Gear Live Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ pages (this is why you should be following us on those services!), we are teaming up with Monster and Newegg this week to give away two huge prize packs. In anticipation of the Big Game in Indianapolis, we are co-sponsoring the Newegg Monster HyperSpeed HDMI Fan Cave Sweepstakes this week.  Details on how you can win the Newegg Monster HyperSpeed HDMI Fan Cave (valued at $4,370) and the Monster Big Game Bundle (valued at $1,740) and what's included in each bundle are below. Enter once for a chance to win from January 27th through February 4th.

The HyperSpeed HDMI Fan Cave is a $4,370 value and includes:

• LG 47" 3D 1080p 240Hz LED HDTV (valued at $1900)
• 16' Monster M2000 HyperSpeed HDMI cable (valued at $350)
• Monster Clarity HD Model One speakers (valued at $750)
• Two Monster iSport In-Ear headphones (valued at $360)
• Monster HDP 1800 HD Power Center (valued at $350)
• Monster Flat Screen Articulating Wall Mount (valued at $400)
• Monster Digital Life PowerNet 300 (valued at $160)
• Newegg Gift Card (valued at $100)

The Big Game Bundle is a $1,740 value and includes:

• 8' Monster M2000 HyperSPeed HDMI Cable (valued at $250)
• Monster Clarity HD Model One speakers (valued at $750)
• Monster iSport In-Ear headphones (valued at $180)
• Monster HDP 1800 HD Power Center (valued at $350)
• Monster Digital Life PowerNet 300 (valued at $160)
• Newegg Gift Card (valued at $50)

So, how do you enter to win all this good stuff? To enter to win the Newegg Monster HyperSpeed HDMI Fan Cave, head on over to Monster's giveaway page on Newegg. You can enter there once for a change to win. To enter to win the Monster Big Game Bundle, you can enter using our widget below. We've got just one requirement for entry, but we are also offering you guys a bunch of extra ways to score bonus entries. Here's what's required:

• Follow the Gear Live Twitter account and post this tweet exactly as written: “Hey @GearLive hook me up with that @MonsterProducts Big Game Bundle! http://gear.lv/e-big-game” (Click here to tweet this now)

Let us know you did that, and grab your bonus entries, using the widget below!

EDIT: We are having trouble with the widget not loading - in the meantime, just head over to this page and enter using the widget at the bottom!

Okay, we get it - we suck. You read Gear Live daily, and constantly say to yourself “I could so have written that story better.” Okay hot shot, now’s your chance. Gear Live is looking to bring in a couple more writers who know their stuff as it pertains to gadgets, video games, and social networks (like Twitter and Facebook.) You need not be a professional journalist to apply, but you should be able to write like one. What do we mean? Well, for starters, you have to have a strong command of the written English language. You also need to be passionate about the subject matter at hand. If you think you fit the bill, we want to hear from you. We are looking for writers, as well as editors.

Drop us an email at gigs[at]gearlive.com, and provide three sample posts written in the Gear Live style. These need to be original and timely, not something you wrote for the school paper a few years back. Also let us know why we should pick you, and what you can commit to. This is a paid gig, so bring your A-game.

Okay, we get it - we suck. You read Gear Live daily, and constantly say to yourself “I could so have written that story better.” Okay hot shot, now’s your chance. Gear Live is looking to bring in a couple more writers who know their stuff as it pertains to gadgets, video games, and social networks (like Twitter and Facebook.) You need not be a professional journalist to apply, but you should be able to write like one. What do we mean? Well, for starters, you have to have a strong command of the written English language. You also need to be passionate about the subject matter at hand. If you think you fit the bill, we want to hear from you. We are looking for writers, as well as editors.

Drop us an email at gigs[at]gearlive.com, and provide three sample posts written in the Gear Live style. These need to be original and timely, not something you wrote for the school paper a few years back. Also let us know why we should pick you, and what you can commit to. This is a paid gig, so bring your A-game.

For CES, we'll be part of the Sears Blue Blogger Crew, and we'll be working as part of a team of other technology experts as we aim to give you an in-depth look at the sights and sounds of the event:

• Jenna Hatfield, lead blogger at Stop, Drop and Blog; newspaper photographer and BlogHer contributing editor.
• Kris Cain, Kris Cain, lead blogger for LittleTechGirl, Tech Editor on Mom Blog Magazine, Host of Tech Talk After Dark on MomTV, editor and writer for the National Apple Gear and Chicago Tech Gear sections on Examiner.com. 
• Andru Edwards, Editor-in-Chief of Gear Live (that's me!)
• Kelly Clay, a veteran blogger, works for Lockergnome, where she breaks news and analyzes trends in the tech industry. She currently lives in Seattle.
• Barbara Rozgonyi, founder of the Chicago chapter of the Social Media Club, reports on ways to grow business and build brands through her blog, WiredPRWorks.

Be sure to check Gear Live this week for all the latest CES news. In addition, you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or go old-school with our RSS feed.

Big thank you to Sears for covering our travel costs and expenses for this years Consumer Electronics Show.

Our HTC HD7 giveaway ended this week, and we've confirmed the details of our winner. jazboy left the winning comment, chosen randomly (using random.org) from all eligible comments. Nice job, and congrats! We hope you enjoy doing more with less with Windows Phone 7.

Have you heard of JackThreads? In case you haven’t, they’re a super cool clothing site offering discounts of at least 50% off some of the hottest brands in streetwear, surf, skate, and contemporary fashion. All sales are super limited, normally lasting just a couple days, and you’ve gotta have an invite to even join the site to get access to the goods. We’ve teamed up with JackThreads to bring invites to all our readers, and even better, you’ll get $5 in credit added to your account that you can spend right away if you so desire. That was cool and all, but then we thought we could take this a step further, and now we’ve got a full on contest going on. We are going to give away $150 in JackThreads credit to one of you entrants. Here’s how it’s going down:

Here’s how to enter:

• Join JackThreads if you aren’t already a member (it’s free - use our link and you get $5!)
• Follow the Gear Live Twitter account
• On Twitter, post this tweet about our contest: “Hey @gearlive hook me up with $150 for @JackThreads! http://gear.lv/e-jackthreads-150” (Click here to tweet this now)

That’s it! Remember, you’ve gotta be a JackThreads member, and you’ve gotta be following the Gear Live Twitter account so that we can send you a DM if you’re the winner. This one is only open to residents of the US and Canada. We will be announcing a winner on September 24, so you’ve got til Friday to qualify.

We’re giving away ten copies of Make My Day for iPhone and iPad, which just hit the App Store this morning. The easiest way to describe the app is to have you think about those old-school Choose Your Own Adventure books. Remember those? Turn to page 4 to turn the key, or turn to page 27 to run away crying? Yeah, those. Well, instead of reading, the Make My Day app is a live-action choose your own adventure movie. You choose the paths that the characters will take as you are watching. It’s got 26 different scenes and 13 different endings, depending on which story branches you choose.

Here’s how to enter:

• Follow the Gear Live Twitter account
• On Twitter, post this tweet about our contest: “Hey @gearlive hook me up with Make My Day for iPhone and iPad! http://gear.lv/e-make-my-day” (Click here to tweet this now)

That’s it! We’ll send out the download codes on Twitter over DM, so be sure you follow the Gear Live account, otherwise we won’t be able to get it to you. For more info on the app, you can check out Make My Day on the App Store.

Hey, wanna get in on the new Digg before it’s rolled out to the general public? Well, we’ve got 1,000 invites. All you need to do is click that image above, and you’re in (well, if you click it before 1,000 other people do!) We’ve been testing the new Digg site for a couple of months now, and they’ve made tremendous strides from the days of old. You’ll be able to follow us and the stories that we are publishing, and the things you end up liking get pushed to your friends on the site. Definitely a cool way to discover new stories. Let us know in the comments how you like it!

Read More | Join the new Digg! ]]> 2010-08-24T17:51:08+00:00 http://www.gearlive.com/news/article/win-bartlebys-book-buttons-ipad-q310/ Announcements, Apple, Features, Handhelds, Software

We’ve covered Bartleby’s Book of Buttons a few times here on the site, mostly because we think it’s a great app that has a lot of potential to set the stage for some truly interactive storytelling on the iPad and other gesture-based devices. Okay, enough of all that future talk, let’s talk about what we’ve got going on today. We will be giving away two copies of Bartleby’s Book of Buttons Vol. 1: The Far Away Land for iPad at the end of the day to two randomly chosen entrants.

Here’s how to enter:

• Follow the Gear Live Twitter account
• On Twitter, post this tweet about our contest: “Hey @gearlive hook me up with Bartleby for iPad! http://gear.lv/e-bartleby-ipad-i” (Click here to tweet this now)

That’s it! We’ll announce two winners later on, and get them download codes that’ll score you Bartleby from iTunes at no cost. You can check out our Bartleby photo gallery and our Bartleby video interview with Monster Costume for more - and you can also check it out on the App Store.

Just wanted to follow up and let you guys know that we’ve chosen a winner for our HP TouchSmart 600 giveaway. Her name is Julianna (@julianna2221 on Twitter), and all she had to do was tweet about the contest to enter. We wanna thank everyone who took the time to enter the contest, and stay tuned—we have more coming up shortly!

We’re always keeping our eyes open for free stuff. Especially free video games. It looks like the brand new gaming site L33tsauce.com is celebrating their open beta by giving away a copy of Mass Effect 2 (any platform) to the person who makes the best page about the game on their site.

For the full contest rules, check out the contest Dojo. And don’t miss the “bonus” offer at the bottom of the page. Submissions will be judged by yours truly, and iJustine.

Read More | L33tsauce ]]> 2010-02-02T21:20:34+00:00 http://www.gearlive.com/news/article/q409-follow-gear-live-ces-updates-twitter/ Announcements, CES, CES 2010, Features We’re on hand at CES 2010, capturing the sights and sounds as normal, and we figured we’d let you guys know that you can get instant updates from us over on the Gear Live Twitter account. We are posting live findings and images of some of the coolest gadgets that we find during events and from the show floor. Be sure to check it out!

Read More | Twitter: Gear Live ]]> 2010-01-09T00:32:44+00:00 http://www.gearlive.com/news/article/q409-winner-hp-envy-13-notebook/ Announcements, Features, PC / Laptop, Videos

When we announced our HP Envy 13 giveaway, we knew you guys would show up with some videos showing what it was that you wanted the Envy 13 to do for you (or in some cases, someone else, holiday season and all.) In all, 57 of you guys hit us with video responses on YouTube to enter. We figured it would mostly consist of people talking into a webcam (we were right,) which was fine with us. The winner was chosen by random, so there wasn’t really any reason to go all out anyway.

Imagine our surprise when we went in today and chose a random winner (hat tip to Random.org,) and it turned out to be a music video! We then started peeking around at some of the other entries, and there was definitely some creativity going on. The video at the top is done by YouTube user TheSumbiProject, and he is our random winner. We will reach out to him as soon as we hit publish on this post. That said, we wanted to share some of the other interesting entries we received, so you’ll find those after the break.

Over the past month we’ve been running our Pwnedface Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 Xbox 360 giveaway, asking you guys to use Shoot It! to send us postcards of your best pwnedface. What’s a pwnedface, you ask? That would be the face you make when you get pwned in a game, or when you are doing the pwning. We got a ton of entries, and finally selected our random winner - that’s his entry above.

We’ve chosen some of the shots that we thought were pretty funny, and put then into our pwnedface photo gallery - we definitely loved seeing all the entries come in, and a lot of laughter was had. A big thank you goes out to the folks at Shoot It! for sponsoring the giveaway. All the postcards you see? They were generated by our readers using the Shoot It! app on their iPhone or BlackBerry devices, right on their phone.

The giveaways aren’t done! Be sure to enter our HP Envy 13 notebook giveaway, which is currently ongoing!

• Unlimited Skips
• Unlimited Song Requests
• No Audio or Banner Ads
• Complete Lyrics
• Over 2 Million Songs

So here’s what we are going to do - we are going to give away a 3-month subscription to five readers, and we are going to make it ridiculously easy to enter. All you need to do if become a fan of Gear Live on Facebook, and leave a comment on our wall. That’s it. On Tuesday we will randomly select five people, and let them know that they’ve won.

Read More | Gear Live's Facebook Page ]]> 2009-07-31T01:01:38+00:00 http://www.gearlive.com/news/article/q309-gear-live-looking-for-bloggers/ Announcements

Okay, we get it - we suck. You read Gear Live daily, and constantly say to yourself “I could so have written that story better.” Okay hot shot, now’s your chance. Gear Live is looking to bring in a couple more writers who know their stuff as it pertains to gadgets, video games, and social networks (like Twitter and Facebook.) You need not be a professional journalist to apply, but you should be able to write like one. What do we mean? Well, for starters, you have to have a strong command of the written English language. You also need to be passionate about the subject matter at hand. If you think you fit the bill, we want to hear from you.

Drop us an email at gigs[at]gearlive.com, and provide three sample posts written in the Gear Live style. These need to be original and timely, not something you wrote for the school paper a few years back. Also let us know why we should pick you, and what you can commit to. This is a paid gig, so bring your A-game.

A few days ago we announced our His and Her Seagate FreeAgent Go Valentine’s Day giveaway, where we asked you guys to leave a comment answer the question: What’s one thing on your computer that you love so much, you never want to lose it? As it turned out, almost every response had to do with images, which we kind of figured, although we expected more people to be concerned about their music collection.

In any event, we’ve chosen our random winner. Gear Live reader netgeek won, leaving this comment:

Without a doubt it would have to be pictures of my wife and kids.  My wife would hate to lose those pictures and her MP3 collection. Excellent giveaway, btw!

Congrats! And for everyone else, stay tuned, we’ve got another contest starting shortly.

Okay, we know we are already giving away five $70 ProFlowers gift certificates for Valentine’s Day, but hey, this is a tech site, and we had to keep it real, right? That’s why we are happy to announce that, in addition to the flowers (which you know will score you some points with the lady,) we are also giving away three pairs of Seagate FreeAgent Go hard drives. What’s so special about that, and what does that have to do with Valentine’s Day, you ask? Well, in case you missed the image up there, these drives go together like a couple of passionate lovers. We’ve got a red one for the guys, and a pink one for the ladies (but you two can swap, if that’s your thing, we won’t judge.) Each drive can hold 320 GB of information, so you know, these are solid.

How do you win? We are keeping it simple. All you need to do is the following:

• Log in to the site with your Gear Live account. Don’t have one? Register here.
• Leave a comment on this post answering this question:
  
  What’s one thing on your computer that you love so much, you never want to lose it?

That’s it! The contest ends at 11:59 PM on February 9th, go ahead and leave your comments until then!

Our friends at Notebooks.com and GottaBeMobile are helping to give away these drives, so you actually get three seperate chances to win. Head on over to those two respective sites for details on how to increase your chances to win - that is three pairs of his and her drives.

We’ll pick a winner on Tuesday Feb. 10th, and try our best to get you and your sweetheart/mom the drives by Valentine’s Day. A big “thank you” to Seagate for providing the drives for this giveaway. As is usual for these kinds of things,  US and Canadian residents only, and the contest is void where prohibited by local laws and regulations. You may enter once on Notebooks.com, GottaBeMobile and Gear Live. Duplicate entries will be discarded. All decisions by the respective sites are final. Please be sure to enter your email in the email field, and not in the comment itself, so that it’s protected.

We are giving away five $70 ProFlowers gift certificates to five Gear Live readers. That’s enough for you to pick out something nice for your wife / girlfriend / mother / sister / teacher / friend / confidant / self. Obviously, the gift certificate can be used for anything available from ProFlowers, so if that means you send yourself $70 in chocolate to make yourself feel better about your current situation, so be it.

Anyhow, here’s how to enter to win one of the five gift certificates. All you need to do is on over to our ProFlowers Contest forum thread, and let us know about either your best or worst Valentine’s Day memory. Once you do that, you are in the contest.

Oh, you want the opportunity for bonus entries? Fine. You can get one additional entry into the contest by letting people know about it on Twitter. Something as simple as:

“Gear Live is giving away five $70 ProFlowers gift certificates http://1wu.qlnk.net/”

Then just come back here and leave us a link to that Twitter update in the comments.

Now, the rules. The contest starts now, and ends at 11:59 PM PST on February 8th. We will then choose five random winners, and send them each their coupon codes so they can place their orders. The flowers can only be sent to addresses within the United States.

Now, if you can’t wait, or just would rather make a purchase right now, we’ve also been able to get a fantastic deal from ProFlowers. Here’s a coupon for 20% off any ProFlowers order + a free vase.

Read More | ProFlowers ]]> 2009-02-02T19:39:57+00:00 http://www.gearlive.com/news/article/q109-tonight-xbox-360-community-playdate-with-gear-live/ Announcements, Microsoft, Video Games

Hey, Xbox 360 owners, you ready to go head-to-head with the Gear Live crew? If you’d been wondering when you would have the opportunity to obliterate us (yeah right!) in a fighting game, then look no further than this tonight’s Xbox Live Community Playdate. Why’s that, you ask? Because for the first time, Gear Live hosts the Community Playdate, and we aren’t messing around. We are bringing our A-game and challenging the community to one-on-one competition in Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix. Download the game, and then send an invite to any of the following Gamertags this evening between the hours of 8-11 PM EST (5-8PM PST):

• GearLiveDotcom
• YoBabyMama
• Squidelf
• Mojotronica
• NateTrue
• jose juicer
• Ubuntero

There’s our army. Please, go easy on us. You can also find all this information at the official Community Playdate page, or in your Xbox 360 dashboard, under the Events area.

Who’s in?

Read More | Gear Live Community Playdate ]]> 2009-01-25T21:20:42+00:00