But we’re back in action today! Lots of new products being added. Plus, I’ll post a few here that were really close but didn’t quite make the cut.

Check back in soon!

For every friend of yours that registers for a Curiobot account, you earn 500 prize points! Pretty swell, huh?

All your friends have to do is fill in your username under the “referrer” field on the registration form. Once they confirm their account, you’ll see the extra 500 points credited to your prize point total.

Earn prizes even faster! Spread the word!

So our Curiobot mascot is a little… well… pathetic. We never really put any thought into the poor guy…. Doesn’t even have eyes.

That’s where you come in.

We’ve decided to hold an aptly named “Draw a Robot - Win a Prize” contest, to create a new Curiobot mascot that will be used on our website and in our logo. The creator of the winning submission will receive two things:

• This amazing Terrorist Teapot by Jackie Piper.
• Credit at the bottom of each page of our website, with an optional link to your website or other URL.

In addition, anyone who submits a viable design will be awarded a cool 1,000 Curiobot prize points, tacked on to their account total.

Here are the details:

• You must submit a digital file in one of the following formats: .jpg, .gif, .psd, .pdf, or .ai. Vectorized formats (.ai, .pdf) would be great.
• The robot should be able to be scaled to a small size (like our current robot), but should also be resolved to a high enough resolution that it can be used in print. So let’s say 400px x 400px as a rough guideline for pixel-based artwork.
• The robot can be of any form: human-like or not. Keep it appropriate for small children. No bloody corpses in its mouth, no inappropriate robot anatomy, etc.
• You may submit as many entries as you want, but you only get the prize point reward once. So that’s a maximum of 1,000 points earned for entering this contest.
• We’d love it if your robot’s colors complemented our website, but that’s not totally necessary.
• Legal stuff: If your entry is not chosen, you have every right to use it however you want in the future. However, if we do choose your entry, the image becomes the property of Curiobot. We retain the future rights to its usage. For as long as the robot is used in our stationary or on our website, we guarantee to credit you for its creation. Similarly, Curiobot retains the right to modify the winning submission, but we’ll still credit its original creator.

Got some ideas? Ready to submit? Email your entries to don@curiobot.net!

We’re not sure how long the contest will last (maybe a few weeks? depending on the number of submissions), so get your entry to us as soon as possible for the best chance at winning! Tell your designer/artist friends! Make sure they register for a user account first if they want to earn the prize points!

Thanks to everyone for all the great suggestions! Keep them coming so we can keep sending out prizes!

Not for sale online, so it doesn’t make the archive, but I love this. Check it out.

Should be all better soon. Thanks for being patient.

• Sexy new bubble description interface. I think we were one of the first sites to grow tired of the Lightbox-type popup. So we’ve replaced it with a less obtrusive, more intuitive, Google Maps-style bubble. After clicking on a product to view its bubble description, you can quickly jump to the product’s comments, images, or full description… or even directly to its merchant’s site.
• Super slick inline tag and price filters. Rather than querying our database, simple price and category filtering is now achieved via Javascript and cookies… meaning that you can instantly see the results of your query, and combine filters in an intuitive way. Perfect for gift finding. You’ll get a big X through the gifts that don’t match your criteria. Try it!
• User accounts and prizes. We’re really excited to finally offer users the chance to register an account with us, and earn prize points for the products each user suggests! We’ve already received a ton of great suggestions… and are looking forward to seeing even more now! And we’re itching to mail out some prizes from our archive. Check out our Win Prizes! page for details. More user functions coming soon…
• Improved favorite lists. When you register a user account with Curiobot, you can now save your own list of favorites, and share your wishlist with your friends! No need for cookies anymore, your new favorites list is tied directly to your username.
• Curiobot Lite! The full-sized Curiobot is just swell… but trying to download 100kbs worth of thumbnails on a mobile device is painful. So we’ve gone ahead and created Curiobot Lite, a stripped-down version of Curiobot, tailored to your mobile phone’s screen size. You can access the site on the go at http://m.curiobot.net.
• Real-time currency conversion. This is my favorite of all the site improvements. You can now view any product’s price in 17 different currencies… from Euros to Yen to Rupiahs, all accurately converted in real time! We are very proud of this. Go to the Options tab on the main page, then choose your currency from the drop down menu.
• Consolidated social bookmarking. Some loyal Curiobot users will notice that our “Email this to a friend” tool has been combined with a more familiar “Share” button below each product’s showcase images. The new button includes quick links to many many social bookmarking tools. We thought it was a good way to clean up the page.
• RSS feed with images. We’ve spiced up our RSS and Atom feeds with inline images of the products. Add us to your feed reader!
• Improved Google Gadget. Our new and improved Google Gadget is cleaner and faster with bigger images. Add it to your iGoogle homepage today!
• And of course, we’ve created this blog, which will occasionally feature products, and keep you updated on user prizes and Curiobot updates.

That’s most of it. If you find a bug with the new site, or have comments or suggestions, feel free to share them with us!

We’ll be using our blog to keep you informed about changes to Curiobot, which we’ll post to the Changelog page. We’ll also be posting whenever a Curiobot user wins a prize! See Win Prizes! for more info.

And of course, we’ll be posting some links to general internet awesomeness as well.

So go ahead and subscribe to our blog RSS feed, as well as our new product RSS feed… and be the first on your block to know what’s going on at Curiobot.

Feel free to contact us with questions!