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.

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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!

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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.

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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!

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Here at Gear Live, we love us some Slacker. If you don’t know, Slacker is a fantastic radio’s streaming music service. It has millions of songs in its catalogue, and real DJs actually control their channels, which means you get a great mix of songs that go well together. While Slacker is free, they also have a service called Slacker Radio Plus, which adds the following perks:

• 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 two 1-year subscriptions and three 3-month subscriptions to Slacker Radio Plus, 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. Next Friday we will select five random entrants and hit them with the goods.

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If you haven’t heard of Mass Effect 2, then you’re probably just waking up from cryogenic sleep. The sequel to one of the best selling Action RPGs hit the shelves this week and, for the most part, is bouncing right back off the shelves and into gamer’s 360’s and PCs.

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

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The Short Version: If you donate to Haiti relief by SMS by texting “HAITI” to the number 90999, or by texting “YELE” to 501501, we will match your donation multiple times. Just leave a comment telling us how much you donated, and we will take care of the rest. We are currently matching donations 14 times.

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Over the past couple of days, while trying to carry on with “business as usual,” I’ve personally found it hard to focus on tech, gadgets, and all of the CES 2010 goodness that we have yet to bring you, as the world is focused on the disastrous aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti. We’re sure you’ve seen the imagery, but if you haven’t, or if you aren’t quite sure, I encourage you to watch this AP report:

Gear Live & Friends Will Match Your Haiti SMS Donations!
We felt it was time to do our part to help, so with the support of a bunch of Gear Live friends, we are announcing that we will match SMS donations made by Gear Live readers and viewers. As many of you know, the Red Cross has made it super-simple to donate $10 to help out by simply texting the word HAITI to 90999. In fact, this has been so successful that it’s already earned $11 million in just a few days. That is fantastic - but the damage to the country is far greater than that, and every little bit helps. So here’s what we’re gonna do:

Starting now, if you send an SMS donation to either the Red Cross (by texting the word HAITI to 90999) or to YELE (by texting the word YELE to 501501) Gear Live will match it, up to $500. In addition, we have a bunch of our friends joining in as well:

• David Geller of Eyejot and WhatCounts will match up to $2500
• Leslie Camacho, President of EllisLab (which makes the fantastic ExpressionEngine CMS) and Roger Rustad (wondering network guru) will personally match up to $600 $1200
• Nate True of Tap Tap Revenge and iPhone hacking fame will match up to $500
• Jeremy, Adam, and the team at Stage Two will match up to $500
• Dave Taylor, the man behind AskDaveTaylor.com, will match up to $250
• Don McAllister of Screencasts Online will match up to $250
• Robert Scoble, the face behind Building43, will match up to $200
• Local Gear Live fan Shauna Causey will match up to $100
• Parnassus Ventures, the folks behind 140: The Twitter Conference, will match up to $100
• Jason Neudecker, a Gear Live Twitter follower, will match up to $100
• Hadley Stern and Apple Matters will match up to $100
• Xavier Lanier and Notebooks.com will match up to $100
• Amisha Gandhi-Lanier and Served Raw will match up to $100
• Kevin Urie from Social Media Club Seattle will match up to $100
• TechieDiva.com will match up to $50
• Eric Siegfriend and DanceHop will match up to $50

In total, so far, that’s

$4500 $5400 $5650 $6550 $6700 in pledged matching donations! For each donation you make, each entity above will match it, until their limit is reached. In other words, with our current eight eleven twelve contributors, your $10 donation will actually be matched six nine eleven twelve fifteen seventeen times, resulting in a $70 $100 $120 $130 $160

$180 payment. So, what do you need to do? This is the easy part. Just scroll down and leave us a comment letting us know that you made a donation, and whether it was a $5 or $10 contribution. If you do it multiple times, let us know that too. Even better, if you want to be on our list as a person or company that will match donations, let us know!

Now, what if you don’t have any money to donate? We will make it easy. Just comment with a link to an article on from any of the following websites that you found interesting or helpful, and we will donate $10 on your behalf:

Gear Live, Notebooks.com, AskDaveTaylor.com, Gear Diary, Mobility Minded, Technologizer, WindowsPhoneThoughts, Served Raw, SlashGear, or GeekRoom.

I have to give a big thank you to my pal Xavier over at Notebooks.com. He came up with the idea and invited me to donate. I then asked a few friends, and never thought we’d get the support that we did, so we kicked off our own campaign. Together with Notebooks.com, we have

$10,500 $11,400 $11,650 $12,550

$12,700 in matching donations for your SMS contributions!

The time is now! Leave a comment after donating, tell your friends, forward this around, and share this on Facebook and Twitter using the buttons at the top of the article. Make us spend every penny of the matching funds that are available.

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If you’re an aspiring author who’s been wanting to publish a book, or if you’ve got a blog that you think would be fantastic as a printed work, pay attention. FastPencil has hooked us up with 10 giveaway packages that will let you take your work and put it into a physical, published form, for free. In case you aren’t aware, FastPencil is a super-simple way for anyone to write, organize, sell, and distribute physical books, as well as ebooks. Ten of you will win:

• A free printed book
• A free eBook
• Free shipping and handling

In order to redeem, you’d just put in your original work in the FastPencil system, or if you have a blog, it can be automatically imported. Seriously, it’s very cool, and we’re gonna hook up 10 of you with the prize package. How do you enter? Simple. Just leave a comment here on this post, or over on the Gear Live Facebook page. We will choose ten people randomly a week from today!

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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

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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.

Click to continue reading Winner of our HP Envy 13 notebook

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