iLounge

We’ve posted a large photo gallery from today’s “One more thing event” in San Jose, California. The gallery features 350 pictures from Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ presentation and numerous hands-on shots of the new iPod from after the keynote.

On November 1, 2005, iLounge will publish its Holiday 2005 Buyers’ Guide, and as always, we will be prominently featuring the art and photography of our incredible readers. Today we are announcing two new contests, one for artwork, one for photographs, with over $1,800 in prizes at stake.

The Ultimate iPod Accessory Design Contest gives you a chance to create a great new iPod accessory and win a prize for it. We’ll pick a total of three winners in three different categories - “creative,” “realistic/practical,” and “funny” - with the best overall winner receiving The Ultimate iPod Accessory Bundle from Belkin and Oregon Scientific.

The Black and White Photo Contest honors the release of the photo-ready, black- and white-bodied iPod nanos with a new photo contest. Two winners will each win a brand new iPod nano in the color of their choice.

For complete details, check out the new Contest pages. Winners will be shown in the new Buyers’ Guide on November 1. Good luck!

The three winners of iLounge’s Blog the Book Contest have been announced, and they are:

1st Place: Mugglenet.com (Winner, 10 iPod shuffles or $1000). To further thank Mugglenet, we will also donate one Harry Potter Audiobook Card for the site to do with as it wishes. Congrats!

2nd Place: Junk-Feud.com (Winner, 3 iPod shuffles or $300)
3rd Place: iPodmania.it (Random Winner/25 entries or more, 2 iPod shuffles or $200)

Congratulations to all of the winners and thanks to everyone who entered for your support and participation!

Congratulations to the winners of iLounge’s Search for iPod Trivia contest! Each of these three winners will receive a Klipsch iFi Speaker System for the iPod (value: $399), courtesy of Klipsch.

Michael Ollier of Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, Great Britain
Erica Hyman of Cranbury, New Jersey, United States
Vernon Tang of Kowloon, Hong Kong, China

Our other contest, Blog The Book, is now in its final 48 hours. For more information on the contest and its total of 15 iPod shuffles (or $1500) in prizes, please see the official contest page.

iLounge’s Dennis Lloyd and Jeremy Horwitz are on the scene at this week’s Apple Expo in Paris, France. They will be bringing you exclusive hands-on reports of all the iPod and iTunes products being shown at the event. While Apple has stated that Steve Jobs will not be delivering a keynote speech, the CEO and other Apple executives will reportedly be on hand for a Q&A session with the media.

As a reminder for potential entrants, two iLounge contests with roughly $2700 in prizes are ending this week - one tonight. Our Search for iPod Trivia Contest gives you the chance to win one of three Klipsch iFi Speaker Systems, each worth $399. You’ll find the contest on page 72 of The Free iPod Book and Back to School Guide. This contest ends at 11:59PM tonight.

Our separate Blog The Book Contest ends on September 23, 2005, so new bloggers still have a chance to win. A total of 15 iPod shuffles or cash prizes up to $1500 will be given away. Complete contest rules are available here.

Want easy access to our news stories, latest reviews, and FAQs at any time? Mac OS X Tiger users can now download the iLounge Dashboard Widget, a free tool that provides immediate desktop access to all of our latest updates. Three sets of pages can be accessed independently by clicking on links in the upper right corner, and individual updates scrolled through using the window below. Search buttons permit easy access to all of iLounge’s online content, and Discussion Forums. Thanks to Solspace.com for developing this handy new way to enjoy iLounge. The next project is Konfabulator widgets for Mac and PC.

Download: iLounge Dashboard Widget

As part of our just-launched Blog the Book Contest, we’re giving away a total of 15 iPod shuffles - or the cash equivalent - to selected winners who link to our new iPod Book and Back to School Guide. To enter, all you have to do is add one of our contest badges to your blog and point to the Book, which is available here.

The grand prize winner with the most referrals to the Free iPod Book download page will win 10 iPod shuffles or a cash-only prize of $1000. The second place winner with the second most referrals wins 3 iPod shuffles or $300 in cash. The third place winner will be chosen at random from those with at least 25 or more unique referrals to the iPod Book download page, and will get 2 iPod shuffles or a $200 cash-only prize. Full rules can be found inside.

First debuted as a section of The Free iPod Book, The iPod Directory is now available in fully searchable form on the iLounge web site.

The Directory was designed to help iPod owners quickly locate information on key iPod & iTunes hardware, software, accessory, and service providers. By using the Main Directory Page or its built-in search engine, you can look through the hundreds of listings to find names and contact details for any major product or service you could want.

If you are an authorized company representative and want to add or update company information, please contact info (at) ilounge.com with your details. Enjoy The Directory!

It’s here: The Free iPod Book & Back to School Guide, by iLounge.com. Covering all things iPod and iTunes, our first book includes exclusive sneak peeks at new iPod accessories from JBL, Belkin, Griffin, Oregon Scientific, Blumac and Sumo Cases, plus tutorials, contests, and more. Click on read more for the details and the download links. Two versions - printable and widescreen - are available; please download only one. We hope you enjoy!

We don’t generally post awards or kudos we’ve received on the main page of our site, but we wanted to thank Forbes today. They’ve named iLounge to their “Best of the Web” list, and also to the more exclusive “Forbes Favorites” list, calling iLounge “The ultimate in product reviews and tutorials on all things iPod.”

Thank you, Forbes, and thank you, loyal readers, for your support of the Lounge!

iLounge’s Editor-in-Chief Jeremy Horwitz will appear on tonight’s Your Mac Life radio program to discuss video iPods and other subjects of interest to iLounge readers. Jackie Martling, formerly of Howard Stern Show fame, will also be a guest. The broadcast begins at 5:30PM Pacific Standard Time, 8:30PM Eastern, and runs until 8PM Pacific, 11PM Eastern.

A Message from Dennis Lloyd, Publisher of iPodlounge

Back in 2001, I started iPodlounge as a place for iPod owners and admirers to learn about the world’s coolest invention. The idea was simple: create a friendly, relaxed lounge where good people could hang out and meet other good people.

In our first few months, hundreds of visitors checked out the site, telling their friends and families about both the iPod and iPodlounge. They kept coming back, so it’s no surprise that iPodlounge has grown. Now we have a community of over 65,000 forum members, over 3,000,000 visitors a month to our main site, comprehensive coverage of every iPod ever released (plus every major iPod accessory), and some of the most incredible photo galleries ever assembled. This past month, we had over 20,000,000 page views, and thanks to your readership, the numbers just keep going up.

Today I have some exciting news to share: iPodlounge is expanding. For years, we’ve been known around the world by our name and our famous tagline, “All Things iPod.â€? Now we’re changing the game. In the works for months, and effective today, we’re “All Things iPod, iTunes, and Beyondâ€? - the iLounge.

Obviously, we’re not losing our focus on the iPod - the world’s best portable music player - but we have been quietly broadening our coverage to include even more of what Loungers want and need. You may have noticed that we have substantially enhanced our coverage of iTunes, the world’s best digital media software, with many additional tutorials and even greater attention to its recently expanded features. Now we are gearing up for what is about to be an even more exciting future.

As iPod lovers, we are strongly dedicated to providing the world’s best coverage of our favorite portable music players, but we also believe that the next stage of this phenomenon will be bigger than any one product Apple may produce. We want to be ready to cover what happens next - something bigger than headphones, playlists, or our current concepts of “iPod” encompass. So, going forward, all of our coverage of iPods, iTunes, and related products will appear under our new iLounge.com name, as the world’s premiere destination for independent information on all of Apple’s digital media initiatives. The old iPodlounge URL will continue to work for years, but from now on, new pages and our popular Buyers’ Guides will appear under the iLounge name.

I hope you’ll find the new name easy to remember, easier to type, and easiest to tell your friends about. Since we’ve been planning and quietly phasing in this expansion of the Lounge for quite some time, you won’t see any major changes that haven’t already taken place… until the next big thing is ready to happen. When it does, we’ll be ready, and we look forward to having you with us for the ride. Thank you for your support!

iLounge is proud to announce our second iPod guide of 2005 — the iPod 101: Back to School Guide. In a twist on previous iLounge Buyers’ Guides, the new publication will include two major parts: a free iPod and iTunes guidebook for readers, plus a preview and review section focused on the top “Back to School” accessories for Fall. As with past Guides, two exciting reader contests with major prizes will be announced shortly. The new issue will be released on August 15, 2005.

Our last Guide, released at the end of March, has been directly downloaded more than 350,000 times from iLounge and affiliated sites, with numerous indirect downloads thereafter. iLounge remains committed to providing its Guides free of charge to its readers, and will again make the new Guide available in open PDF format for easy reading, downloading, and file-sharing.

For further editorial information on the new Guide, please contact iLounge Editor-in-Chief Jeremy Horwitz; for advertising/sponsorship information, please contact iLounge Publisher Dennis Lloyd.

Starting today, iLounge has launched the Lounge Poll, a way for readers to register their votes on issues of the week or month. We’ll be updating the Poll regularly and posting results whenever one concludes. You can find the Lounge Poll in our left hand column, below Ask iLounge. Feel free to suggest possible poll topics here, or use the iLounge Discussion Forums sub-forum, iPod Polls.

Three winners have been picked for iLounge’s Buyers’ Guide Bloggers’ Contest. Is your blog (or one of your favorites) one of the winners? Check out the official contest page to find out.

Thanks to everyone who entered!

If you liked last month’s giveaway, you’re going to love this one. Three lucky people are going to get awesome new in-ear phones courtesy of iLounge and its partners, with one winner taking home a $900 personally customized pair of UE-10 Pros from Ultimate Ears.

What you need to do: Submit a photograph of yourself with your iPod or iPod mini for the new “Me and my iPod” photo gallery. The photo can be funny, sexy, art inspired, or whatever you dream up, so long as you follow the photo and contest rules.