Update: Congratulations to Selena Benally. You have won 250 business cards from UPrinting.

By now, most of you probably recognize UPrinting. UPrinting is an online printer that supports many popular design sites in the community, including this one. I’ve used UPrinting before and can vouch for the quality of their work. If you’re looking to print some business cards quickly and cheaply, you should definitely look into UPrinting’s services.

To win 250 Die Cut Business Cards of your own, leave a comment below and tell us what you would do with some free cards.

Up for Grabs

• 250 Die Cut Business Cards for 1 reader.

Card Specifications

• 1.75" x 3.5", 2" x 3.5", or 2" x 2"; 2.5" Diameter (Circle) Rounded Corners, Leaf, Rounded Single-Corner, Half-Circle Side, or Circle.
• 14pt Cardstock Gloss / Matte / High Gloss (UV), or 13pt Cardstock Uncoated.

Rules

• Leave a comment to enter. Tell us what you would do with some free cards.
• Only comment once.
• Tweet This giveaway to your followers! (Optional)
• Like UPrinting on Facebook (Optional)
• Please leave a valid email address so that we can contact you.
• Entries will be accepted until Friday, November 4, 2011 at 11:59 PM EST.
• 6 Business Days Turnaround
• Limited to US residents 18 years old and above only

This giveaway was sponsored by UPrinting.

Update: Congratulations to Esz, Karen Hall, TRY! You have all won a free business account from BaseKit!

BaseKit is a website builder that allows you to create professional websites from within your browser. You don’t need any technical skills and there are loads of templates and widgets that you can use to create your own business website design. Simply choose how you want your site to look, add your content and publish.

Some of you may be wondering what makes BaseKit different from all the other website builders out there. In the past, other website builders relied on flash as a platform to build their sites. Those sites tended to be a bit clunky. BaseKit changes all that and is fully HTML which means they work on all devices – even mobile phones. To learn more about BaseKit, visit their website.

To enter to win a free Business Plan from BaseKit, all you have to do is leave a comment below and tell us what you would use BaseKit for.

Up For Grabs

• A Free Business Plan for 3 lucky readers.

Rules

• To enter, leave a comment below and tell us what you would use BaseKit for.
• You may only enter once.
• Make sure to enter a valid email address so that we can contact you.
• Entries will be accepted until Friday, September 23, 2011 at 11:59 PM, EST.

Screenshots

You can see some screenshots of BaseKit below.

On UCreative you can set up a profile, post things on your wall, add photos and images, browse for inspiration, chat in the forums, and even search for jobs. Basically, anything you’d expect from a design-related social network. To learn more about UCreative, visit their site or just sign up!

Screenshots

Take a look at some of the screenshots of the UCreative site below:

This post was sponsored by UCreative.

Next Day Flyers is an online printing company that delivers top-quality printed marketing materials with one of the fastest turnaround times in the industry. They specialize in full color printing of a ton of products including, business cards, rack card printing, and of course, sticker printing.  Naturally, all their printing is customized. You can upload your sticker designs directly to their site. They also have a tool where you can design your stickers online. There are a lot of templates you can use, or just have fun and start from scratch. To learn more about Next Day Flyers, visit their website.

Update

Congratulations to David Radovanovic and Andrew Ensley you have each won 100 stickers from Next Day Flyers. Some one should be in touch soon regarding how to redeem your winnings. Thanks everyone who participated.

Up for Grabs

• 100 2 x 4 Stickers (x2)

Rules

• Leave a comment to enter.
• Tell us what you would do with some free stickers.
• Only comment once.
• Tweet This message to your followers! (optional).
• Please leave a valid email address so that we can contact you.
• This is a 4-day contest. Entries will be accepted until Friday, May 21, 2011 at 11:59 PM EST.
• Free shipping to continental U.S. residents only.

Update: Congratulations Sarah Canieso! You have won a $100 Apple Gift Card from Pagelime! Enjoy!

Before we get started with the giveaway, I’m sure you have some questions about how Pagelime works. Integration with Pagelime is easy. All you have to do is add some simple CSS tags that define what on your website is editable. Your website can be hosted on any FTP accessible web host and Pagelime will connect and take care of the rest. When your clients log-in to Pagelime, all the editable areas reveal themselves and they can live-edit, preview, and draft their changes. The presentation is 100% AJAX and pretty slick.

But Pagelime is more than just basic image and text editing. You can use repeating regions, page cloning and templating for creating new pages, document and image libraries, Google analytics, SEO editing, and a full versioning system they call “Content History”. When you reach the Professional level you also get a dynamic navigation editor that allows for drop-in menu publishing. For the power users out there, Pagelime also works with all forms of includes (PHP, SSI, CFM, etc). If you have included content and edit it off of a page, Pagelime just figures everything out and publishes it into the appropriate file. You can also publish your content as XML to feed dynamic image galleries, sliders etc.

Pagelime is free but they also provide a professional, business, and enterprise plan that starts at just $19/month. They also have an iPhone app that will allow you to edit your sites directly from your phone. Pretty cool!

To learn more about Pagelime, visit their website and check out the demo video. Pagelime is very likely the most advanced, client friendly, simply CMS solution out there with a vibrant community of about 17,000 users. Definitely give it a look over and see if it is the right solution for you and your clients.

To help promote their product, our friends at Pagelime are giving away a $100 Apple gift card to 1 lucky Colorburned reader. To win, all you have to do is tell us what you think about Pagelime on Twitter. Feel free to say whatever you like but you must mention @pagelime in the Tweet. Once you’ve sent your tweet, make sure you post a link to the tweet as a comment below. This is important because otherwise your entry will not be counter.

Rules

• Tell us what you think of @pagelime on Twitter.
• Say whatever you like but you must mention @pagelime in your message.
• Post a link to the tweet below as a comment.
• You can only enter once.
• Please leave a valid email address so that we can contact you.
• Entries will be accepted until Friday, April 15, 2011 at 11:59 PM EST

This giveaway and review is sponsored by Pagelime.

This spamming technique is tough to identify and I will be the first to admit that I have been tricked as well. The problem is that the spammers often come up with provocative headlines that draw people in. Once you like something like this it can often be embarrassing when your friends see what you’ve been clicking on.

There is an easy way to get around this however. Just look at the URL (shown below) if it looks shady. Just mark post as spam.

I hope this helps you guys out. I’ve just seen too many of my friends get tricked by this and it was annoying me.

A cute web icons kit is a nice assistant while creating an interface for your website or application. Successfully selected web icons help to determine the whole design concept and emphasize the products offered by your company.

IconDemon.com will help to make your design process quicker and more efficient. It offers 20 popular categories and 10 styles of icons to any taste. Due to this categorization it’s easy to navigate through the website and find the needed icons.

5 gift packages will be given to 5 winners that will be selected randomly. Just comment to become a participant! See more details below.

IconDemon icons and Membership Packages

Every IconDemon icon is well thought and carefully designed by the team of the experienced designers. Each icon has a set to go with. So if you need several icons of the same style you will find the necessary ones easily, using the website navigation by styles and categories.

IconDemon presents  20 popular topics and 10 styles of icons such as business icons, 2d and 3d icons, system icons, glass icons, vintage icons etc. The icons are offered in .png format with the sizes of 64×64 pixels, 80×80 pixels, 100×100 pixels and 128×128 pixels.

You may get 2 types of access on IconDemon.com: the limited and unlimited packages.

Both packages are valid for 1 year and give you the access to the whole huge collection of 5300+ stock icons to choose from. The difference is the number of downloads you may have and, of course, the price. The unlimited package doesn’t limit the amount of icons you may download. So you may use the whole collection for your projects for the annual fee of $99. The limited package allows to download up to 500 icons for the price of $19 only.

How to Become a Winner

• The giveaway will last a week only: Starting from today, February, 15th and ending on February 22nd.
• Hurry up to get the prizes without extra efforts!

All you need is to leave a comment below the post. You are to write what you are going to do with the prize and will automatically become a participant. The winners will be chosen at random. So all of you have equal chances to win one of the icon package.

Just to remind you what we may need web icons for:

• Beautifying the layouts of your websites and blogs;
• Enhancing the visual quality of the projects interface;
• Making your websites and applications better structured and user-friendly;
• Decorating your OS style and folders;
• Allowing the beginning designers to learn how to design their own professional icons using IconDemon icons as a reference.

Be inspired to create brilliant interfaces – leave a comment and win great icons!

Update: Winners Selected!

The Congratulations to Denise and Bill Roberson who have both won Unlimited Packs and Jim Lung, Timothy Whalin, and Kyle Hyams who have all won Limited Packs! We have forwarded your information to the people at Icon Demon and they will be in touch soon!

My first impression of this HP EliteBook 8740w Workstation was about how heavy it was. It’s a beast. It was so heavy, in fact, that you can probably hear me grunting as I’m pulling it out of the box. This computer, however, is heavy for a reason. It’s packed with hardware. It includes:

• Intel Core i7-740QM (1.73ghz, 6mb L3 Cache)
• 8gb DDR3-1333
• 17? WUXGA (1920×1200) LED-backlight DREAMCOLOR display
• NVIDIA Quadro 5000m with dedicated 2gb DDR5 workstation-class GPU
• 500gb 7200RPM HD
• Full-sized backlit keyboard
• 230w external power adapter

In addition, it also includes a fingerprint scanner, ambient light sensor, dual microphones, a three button trackpad mouse as well as a three button point stick mouse, touch-sensitive media keys, a 2.0mp integrated webcam, and a LightScribe DVD +- RW burner. It’s also got a Bluetooth module and an Intel Centrino Ultimate N Wireless Adapter. All this hardware means that this computer is built for performance, not mobility. Sure, you can throw it in a backpack and take it somewhere, but don’t think you’ll want that backpack on your back for long. It’s simply too heavy.

After firing up the machine and going through the initial setup. I started playing around with some of its features. One of my favorite features was the fingerprint scanner. I’ve never had one on any of my machines and I really enjoyed logging into the machine without having to enter my password.

Once logged in, the first thing that I noticed was the display. The 17 inch DreamColor display was beautiful. I opened up a couple of photos and could really tell the difference between the quality of the HP screen and my MacBook Pro. Next, I decided to install a copy of Starcraft 2 onto the machine. Starcraft 2 is a graphics intensive video game and requires quite a bit of power to play properly. After installing the game and setting it up, I set the game to the extreme graphics setting and started playing. The HP had no problems handling the game and it looked absolutely amazing!

With that said, this machine does put out quite a bit of heat. I mistakenly placed a bottle of water to the left of the machine about 6 inches away for a couple hours, while playing, only to find a super heated bottle of water waiting for me to drink later on.

Aside from gaming, this PC also includes some other features that I thought were cool. The QuickLook and QuickWeb features were a nice addition. They allow you to check your email or browse the web without actually booting up the machine. This is great because this machine is quite a power hog. Not having to boot up the machine means longer battery life. I didn’t have any issues working with Photoshop or any of the other Adobe products that I installed on it. With that said, it’s important to note that I had to install trial versions to test them out, as I didn’t have a Windows copy to install. So my experience with Photoshop on the machine was fairly limited. I wasn’t able to do any major Photoshop work like I do on my other machines but my instinct is to say that there wouldn’t be any issues, especially seeing how well it handles gaming.

I was also struck at how sturdy this machine was. I always thought that my MacBook Pro was well constructed. And while that may be true, I’m much more confident in how well the HP is constructed and I don’t feel like I have to baby it like I do with my MacBook Pro.

Overall, I would give this machine 5/5 stars. It’s a fantastic machine and I’d definitely recommend it to anyone who doesn’t want to work on a Mac.

Disclosure: This laptop was provided to me for free by HP to review on this blog.

With over 500 million members, and a market valuation of over 50 billion dollars, it seems that Facebook is here to stay. Over the years, corporations come and go. Most companies, even large ones don’t last much longer than 100 years, and no one knows if Facebook will be one of them. With that said however, it’s important to ask ourselves how it will affect the world if it does.

Facebook Babies

If you were one of Facebook’s original members, some one who joined while in college, using your .edu email address. You’re probably at the stage in life where all your friends are having children. Some of you probably already have children. If so, it’s likely that either you or your friends have already posted photos of your children on Facebook. In fact, a recent study says that 82% of kids under 2 years of age already have an online presence. This means that if Facebook were to make it to 100 years, this generation would be the first to have been Facebooked about their entire lives, from birth to death.

This is important because Facebook has not yet addressed some of these concerns. What happens when these children grow up? How can they take charge of their pre-existing online persona? What happens if they decide they don’t want to be on Facebook? While these decisions are still about 10 years away, these are all the privacy concerns that as parents and users, we should be concerned about.

As our children grow and start to become more and more interested in Facebook, how do we as parents interact with them? Do we really want them to see how we interact with our peers? To see how we interact with people that we have been friends with on Facebook for decades? Do we want our children to see updates from our youth? Will Facebook develop tools to not only protect our children from others, but to also protect us, as parents, from the prying eyes of our children?

The Virtual Gravestone

As our generation ages, it’s inevitable that many of us will pass away over the next few decades. During this time, the number of deceased members of Facebook will inevitably grow larger. How will Facebook handle death and what will Facebook look like when millions of its members are no longer with us?

Death on Facebook is a sad but interesting topic to talk about because in a way, it provides us with a way to live forever. Not it a physical sense, of course but when we die, our thoughts, photos, memories, and actions on Facebook will live on. For those of us who have been unfortunate enough to have a friend or family member on Facebook pass away, you may have noticed that those accounts come alive with activity on birthdays or special events, as friends stop by to pay their respects. In a way, Facebook becomes a virtual gravestone so to speak, where friends and family stop by to leave a message or just to reminisce.

In addition, Facebook can do more than just to help us mourn the passing of a loved one. It can even provide our children and grandchildren insight into who we were, what we did and thought, it will become a historical database of millions of people who were once members. This could become a resource that none of us had growing up and something our descendants might grow to treasure.

Most businesses that last the test of time start out doing one thing and ended up doing something else. AT&T started out providing telegraph service, now they are in the mobile phone business. While it’s too early to say what Facebook will look like in 100+ years, it’s safe to say that a company that started out connecting friends and family could end up not only connecting the world but also connecting generations.