Hayden, Ryan, Ames, Baby J and Samantha, you’re the winners of SmartCanucks.ca Cutest Baby Contest 🙂

CONGRATULATIONS! I’ll contact you later on as regards to the prizes.

Last but not least, as this contest comes to an end, I would like to say that all the babies in the contest are cute and I trust that you know that. The judging in this contest was based solely on the photo of the baby, not the best way to judge someone, but it was only meant to be for fun…Thanks to all the contestants and to the people who voted.

Congratulations!

SmartCanuck’s Cutest Baby Contest poll is up! Please take a minute to vote for the cutest baby (by clicking here).

Thanks!

We just finished preparing the cutest baby contest gifts. Initially we had one large gift for the winner only but then we decided to have 5 nice little gifts instead. This way more people will benefit from the contest. Right now we have about 20 contestants which means that about quarter of them get to win a prize 🙂 Submissions are still open til the end of this month.
So this is how the prizes get handed out: the winner gets to be the first to choose one of the five gifts. 2nd place winner then chooses from the remaining 4 gifts and so on.
Here are the gifts (in no particular order)

This cute little backpack

$20 Indigo/Chapters Gift Card

Seba Med 100ml Children’s Shampoo and 100ml Baby lotion

Little handbag

$10 Sport Mart Gift Card

 You can find more information and enter the Cutest Baby Contest here

Thanks to my friend David, we moved SmartCanucks.ca to a better, faster and more reliable server yesterday. This will hopefully mean that Smart Canucks will always be available (less downtime) and should load much faster than it used to 🙂

Thanks David for your priceless help!

David runs a tiny hosting service. If you’re looking for a reliable and friendly host you’ll be totally satisfied with his outstanding service and professionalism. He offers very affordable hosting and can help you get your site or blog up and running in no time. If you’re interested in this more personal kind of hosting please leave a comment below or email me and I’ll forward your info on to him. I might also post his contact info here once I get his permission.

Over the past year I’ve subscribed to many Canadian blog feeds and I’ve found myself staying up past my bedtime reading blogs on the internet. I find some of these blogs fascinating and truly creative! (I’ll list my favourite blogs in a future post). About a month ago, while reading the comments on one these blogs, I came across this comment by Yvonne who said that their company was giving out a free Nokia 6682:

I work for a word of mouth marketing company called Matchstick and I’m looking to give away brand new multimedia smart phones to a number of qualified individuals [snip]. Please have a look at the criteria and feel free to contact me with any questions you may have.
I am looking for existing Rogers customers who meet the following criteria:
• Hosts a popular blog with 400+ hits a day
• A current Rogers cell phone subscriber (phone only supported with the Rogers network)
• Between the ages of 22-35
• Keeps his/ her blog updated on a regular basis with pictures and video
• Very socially active
We think you will thoroughly enjoy this product and its features, and if you do, we would encourage you to talk about it. If you or someone you know fits these criteria we would love to hear from you!
Thanks for your time, I hope to hear from you soon.

Yvonne
Matchstick Inc.
[email protected]

416-530-8000

To be honest, at first I thought this was spam. All bloggers get loads of spam messages everyday and after a while one becomes very suspicious of any unusual comment. However, this comment as you might notice, didn’t exactly feel like spam. So I gave Yvonne the benefit of the doubt and decided to dig more into her claim. I visited matchstick.ca and it seemed like a legitimate company. But it wasn’t until I checked around in the Canadian Blogosphere and found that a couple of bloggers had actually received their free cell phones, that I knew matchstick.ca were serious and legitimate.

The next step was to see if I met MatchStick’s requirements

Hosts a popular blog with 400+ hits a day

I get way over 400 unique Canadian visitors everyday so this wasn’t an issue

A current Rogers cell phone subscriber (phone only supported with the Rogers network)

Luckily I had a Rogers contract which I signed up over 2 years ago and I’m still stuck with until now.

Between the ages of 22-35

I’m 24… phew I barely made the cutoff

Keeps his/her blog updated on a regular basis with pictures and video

I believe I update my blog quite regularly with pictures. Not many no videos really… but hey, if I could figure out a way of adding deals related videos I wouldn’t mind posting videos.

Very socially active

I wasn’t sure how socially active is “very socially active” but I do have a few activities and I’m a member in a few clubs/communities.

So I decided to contact Yvonne. She was very friendly and professional and we talked about their campaign and my blog. She asked a couple of questions (household income, how much I spend on electronics every year, etc.) and in less than 10 minutes she had my mailing addreess and said that I should receive my brand new Nokia 6682 Smartphone and a whole bunch of accessories before the end of the week. I received the package in less than 48 hours 🙂

Here are the contents of the package:
– Nokia 6682 Cell Phone with USB connector and charger, headset and 64MB MultiMedia Card (MMC)
– an additional 512MB MultiMedia Card for mp3s
– a Nokia Bluetooth Wireless Headset
– Extra set of white headphones that look like iPod headphones.
– a welcome letter
– a bunch of “Get the Buzz” cards to give out to family and friends.

It’s been about a month since I’ve received this package and I can confidently say that I’m enjoying my new cell phone. Before I got this cell phone I was using a Nokia N-Gage which I whole-heartedly loved. Changing to Nokia 6682 was very easy since the menus were very similar. Nokia 6682 has many cool features including a 1.3 Megapixel camera (pretty good for a cell phone), Bluetooth, mp3 player and other fascinating bells and whistles.

I’m personally very satisfied and thrilled by my new Nokia 6682 and I truly enjoyed dealing with Matchstick.ca.

If you want to find out what other Canadian bloggers thought of this cell phone or the promo in general here are the permalinks to other related posts. Just like everything else in life some reviews are positive and some are negative. But overall they’re very interesting.

Nokia 6682: The Best Nokia Phone You Can Get in Canada

viral marketing : nokia 6682

marmalade: now with more buzz!

Pssst! Wanna free cell phone?

New Nokia 6682 and a bunch of free toys

Nokia 6682 Mini Review

Photojunkie goes Nokia Squared

QotD: Can you hear me now?

Nokia ‘seeds’ bloggers with free camera phones

Word of Mouth Marketing with the Nokia 6682

I Won’t Be Nokia’s Bitch

Living with the Nokia 6682

Nokia 6682 Review Part 1 of 5: Initial opinion

Nokia 6682 Review Part 2 of 5: Software Applications

Part 3: Contacts, Camera, Headset

Nokia 6682 Review Part 4 of 5: Freeware Applications, Battery Life and Upgrading Firmware

matchstick.ca is giving away Nokia 6682 Phones in Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver

Matchstick – Give Canadian bloggers up to date phones like the N80 not last year’s phones like the 6682

I added a link that allows people to easily translate my blog from English to French using Google’s translation tool.

I was looking at the French translation and interestingly “Canadian Flyers” was translated to “Insectes canadiens” 😆

I apologize for SmartCanucks.ca’s very slow loading speed today. The host I use to run this blog is dreamhost.com and it currently has some unbearable technical problems. DreamHost.com is turning into NightmareHost

If the problems aren’t fixed by Monday I’ll change to a better high quality host. Sorry about that guys.

I got a couple of people asking me if they could submit their baby photo without a Canadian flag since they already have photos taken (with no flag)… so to make it simpler, no flag is needed, just a photo of your baby.

Join the cutest baby contest here.

Do you have a son, daughter, sibling, nephew, niece, cousin or friend, born in 2006, 2005 or 2004? If you do, they could win SmartCanucks’s Cutest Baby Contest and receive a FREE gift!

Here’s what you need:

– Your smartcanucks.ca forum username (you can register if you don’t have one)
– Baby name or nickname or initials (full name is not required for privacy etc)

– Gender

– Month and year of birth

– Relationship to user

– Photo of baby holding a Canadian flag. This is to reduce the number of invalid entries. Any type of flag will do the job (even a computer printed one!)

Send this information to rah at smartcanucks dot ca

Post your baby’s photo in the Cutest Baby Contest Thread here.

Last date to send post your baby’s photo is the 30th September.

After that, there will be a poll where all members vote for who they think is SmartCanuck’s Cutest Baby 🙂 The winner will also receive a free gift.

You could also check the forum – chit chat – for any questions/discussions on the contest and feel free to e-mail me!

Rebecca has decided to start blogging at last 🙂

While I’ll continue to blog about deals and offers as usual, she’ll be blogging about different interesting topics from fashion to humour to daily life … and deals too of course. So one thing is for sure, you’ll be getting more interesting and dynamic content and many more deals 🙂

I updated the “About” section. I’ll add more to it later.

Welcome Rebecca 🙂

I updated the forum sections today. I grouped the electronics and non-electronics deals sections into a single section and I also added some new sections: “Canadian Flyers”, “Contests” and “Coupons”

You’ll usually find many deals and freebies in the forum and you can also chit chat with a nice small group of friendly Canucks 🙂

Here is the Smart Canucks forum.

I’d like to thank everyone who’s contributing to this nice friendly community 🙂

The top Blog commenter last month was JimmyCanuck

The top Candy earners on the SmartCanucks.ca Forum last month were:
LKB 793 candies
iced_faerie 466 candies
Shawnie 316 candies
julieonmymind 217 candies
cool-dudette 57 candies
Canadian Mark 55 candies
thilipan 55 candies

Each one of you gets 50 bonus Candies 🙂

JimmyCanuck, can you please create an account so that I can add your bonus candies.

Candies are redeemable for real gifts. You can find more info on the Candy Awards here.

If you’re looking for Canadian Freebies checkout SmartCanucks.ca Freebies Forum.

iced_faerie, julieonmymind, LKB and Shawnie have posted hundreds of awesome Canadian freebies on there. I receive free stuff in the mail almost every weekday now! This is just crazy! Maybe I should do one of these silly things where I live for 1 week only on the free stuff I get 😉

Thanks iced_faerie, julieonmymind, LKB and Shawnie 🙂

You can find the Canadian freebies forum here.

Happy Canada Day everyone 🙂

Just thought I’d let you know that the GST dropped by one percentage. GST has been reduced from 7% to 6%! Cheers to all Canadian shoppers out there 🙂

Harper promised to reduce GST to 5% so let’s see if he keeps his promise. We’re waiting for the second percentage drop Stephen. 😉

Update: this only applies to members who registered before September 10th, 2006

If you registered after September 10th, 2006 Candies will only be for fun

I’m very excited to announce that SmartCanucks.ca forum is back with some interesting additions. I’m also giving away the iPod Nano I got from TD bank 🙂

I’ve been working on this idea for a couple of days and hopefully you’ll like it. Remember when I mentioned last month that I would share my ad revenue with my visitors? I’ve been thinking of a way of rewarding visitors who post more and help out and therefore I came up with an idea…

Whenever you post a new topic on SmartCanucks.ca’s forum you get 2 candies (not real candies, just points). When you reply to any topic you get quarter of a candy. When you have specific number of candies you can redeem them for actual gifts from me. Here is what you can redeem your Candies for:

500 candies: a small surprise gift chosen by me (Boo Radley) or one of my friends
900 candies: skincare cream (Vichy, RoC, etc.) or $15 gift card
1800 candies: an elegant bag or purse or $35 gift card
50000 candies: the iPod Nano I won from TD (first person only)

I’ll also have candy events every now and then where many candies can be won. You can see the amount of candies you have under your name in the forum:

Note that this is not a means of paying you for helping out… this is just a way of having fun on SmartCanucks.ca and making use of the little revenue I make. Hopefully I’ll get more sponsors soon and add more items to the above candy list 😉

What is your opinion of this idea? Do you have any ideas or suggestions?
This will not affect my blog posts which I will continue as usual.
oh, one more thing…

I’d like to thank all of you who have been helping out, suggesting deals and providing feedback. Special thanks go to:

Thilipan and nolookingca for their contributions.
David Peralty for his constant support and advice.
Intelmic for constantly and frequently providing feedback and commenting on the deals I post. Thank you Intelmic… & btw do you play UT?
vangirl, Joel, Mithel, Bobo, dawn maher, Tammy, ceci and Christina for their regular feedback
Kelly, John and Sara for mentioning my blog on their blog. There might be other blogs that I don’t know of that mentioned my blog. If you did please let me know.
Canadian Mark and special k at work for their encouragement.

… and all of my visitors who pop in every now and then 🙂