VOTING RECAP

The Last Gadget Standing and Mobile Apps Showdown are designed to showcase key trends at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in a fun and engaging way. We combine our expert judges, popular opinion, and a sense of showmanship to find 10 products worthy of highlighting at our two live CES events. Product display on the website stirs up anticipation and participation. As we’ve mentioned elsewhere, the 25 semi-finalists and 10 finalists are chosen by our judges, who evaluate the products, the user’s comments on the products, and the voting for the products. The judges also factor in the size of the company, its position in the product launch cycle, and its ability to present a compelling-relevant demonstration to a live audience at CES. We rely on our judges to put all this together, and make wise decisions in selecting finalists and semi-finalists. To choose winners from the ten finalists, the judges step aside and let the people rule. We choose one winner at the live CES event, and one winner by popular online vote.

As you have probably noticed, our websites have been unacceptably slow for the last ten days or so. The problem is a denial of service attack. We don’t know why we were targeted, we don’t even know if it’s related to the online voting we’ve been conducting. What we do know is that the attack has made voting extremely difficult, and we understand your frustrations. We are trying to block the source of the attack, but as with most things internet, the bad guys have the edge, and they keep moving to new addresses. We’ll keep the current voting for the ten finalists open till Monday the 26th, and we hope that our efforts to block the attack make our systems usable during that time.

The ten finalists will be announced on Monday the 26^th and then voting for finalists will start soon thereafter and will remain open to Jan 11^th. We plan to move the voting to a secure service that should prove much more reliable than the current site.