Say it. Do it. Show it. Just be you.
Enter the Imagination Challenge and you could win up to US$10,000

Here’s the deal: Our friends at Adobe are running a contest called the Imagination Challenge. All you have to do is show off the power and depth of your imagination using Adobe® Creative Suite 5.5 Student and Teacher Edition software. Don’t have it? No sweat, download the free 30 day trial.

Adobe is trying to find out what inspires you, what motivates you, what gets your imagination going, and how you express yourself. If you’re interested in entering, you can submit a picture, a video, a PDF document of a poem or story you wrote, a song…just about anything you could pull together using the Adobe Creative Suite. There are 5 chance to win the big $10,000. The first and second rounds are already done and there are a few days to still enter the third round. The fourth round of entries starts on Oct 1st.

To check out the current entries, find out the rest of the entry details and rules, or to vote on the current round, head over to the Adobe Imagination Challenge website.

Even if you do not want to enter the challenge, I highly suggest checking out the Creative Suite 5.5. Adobe has always had great products, and this suite is no different. Between Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and everything else the opportunities to create are endless.

If you like the free trial enough, then you’re going to love the discounted Student/Teacher rates for the programs. As a student or teacher, you receive 80% off on the different programs!! Check out the Adobe site for full pricing.

Full disclosure: Adobe supplied me with a copy of the Creative Suite for use and review. All opinions expressed here are mine. More reviews of the actual products including Photoshop will be forth coming. In the meantime, definitely check out the Imagination Challenge.

For the past few weeks Gillette has been challenging guys across North America to take the Gillette Fusion ProGlide Challenge.  Now that we’ve got some guys out there trying the razor, Gillette is upping the ante with the Gillette Fusion ProGlide “Ultimate Summer Job” contest.

Gillette is offering two guys – or girls – the chance for the Ultimate Summer Job.  The chosen pair will earn $50,000 road tripping across North America this summer in a custom van, attending the most exciting sports and entertainment events, while blogging and sharing their experiences along the way.  Their mission: Convince guys to take the Fusion ProGlide Challenge.

Here’s the deal for those who want to enter – go to www.ProGlideSummerJob.com and upload a one-minute video that includes both team members by May 31, 2010, 11:59 pm EDT.  Up to four teams will be selected to travel to NYC for a finalist event June 15, 2010, where a panel of celebrity judges will help select the grand prize winners.

To apply for the grants, you simply need to submit an online form telling them about your company and about your objectives for 2010. They will pick 100 winners and provide the following sweet prizes:

• British Airways airfare for 10 round-trip Club World business class flights.
• 5 free British Airways World Cargo freight shipments of up to 500 kilos to worldwide destinations
• $1000 toward accommodation at Courtyard by Marriott
• 5 Regus Businessworld Gold Cards providing access to business lounges worldwide
• Canon PIXMA MX860 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer

Now, with most of my readers out there being from the US, I’m sure you’re thinking “does British Airways even fly in America?” Well they do.

Check out the contest, submit your entry, and hope you’ve got great ideas to take your business to the next level in 2010! British Airways wants to help you out!

Business Opportunity Grant contest details.

With out further waiting, the winners are:

First Place: Bunny
Second Place: Sena

The entries totaled 21 (combined number of comments, rss subscribes, and blog posts).

I’ve emailed the winners about claiming their prizes. If they don’t claim within 3 days, I’ll pick a new winner for that prize.

Congrats to the winners!

First and foremost, the prizes!!

First place will receive 250 custom printed Postcards from the great folks at UPrinting.com. ON TOP OF THAT…you will also get a $20 online gift card to Amazon!

Second place will also receive 250 custom printed Postcards, however, no Amazon gift card. Sorry guys, only one to go around this time!

So, now you know what is at stake, heres how to enter:

• Post a comment on THIS post to tell me that you are in. This will be your main entry, and the only required.
• Blog about the contest in its own entry (meaning you can’t blog about it along with other news or updates or other contests, no mashup posts will be counted towards your entry). If you blog about it, you will get an additional 5 entries.
• Subscribe to the RSS feed for Dorm Room Biz and send me an email with the secret phrase at the end of the post within the feed. I’ll probably change it once or twice during the contest. Already subscribed? Great! Just email me and tell me what the phrase or word is! This will get you an additional 5 entries.

The contest will end on Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 at 12 Midnight EST. This only gives you two weeks!

Thank You UPrinting.com!

I want to say thank you to the great people over at UPrinting.com for offering to sponsor the contest! I’ve had a chance to talk with different people within the company as well as search their website. The prices are extremely competitive with the competition and their product quality looks great. This is an awesome prize for the small business or young entrepreneur out there looking to bootstrap their business. The prizes are incredible beneficial, so be sure to enter and you will be on the way to marketing your business much much better with these postcards!

I also need to note that the postcards are only completely free to U.S. residents. If you live outside of the United States, you are still more than welcome to join the contest, however, you will have to pay the shipping price for the post cards.

Thursday, November 27th I will add up all the entries and use a random number generator to pick the two winners.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me or leave a comment here.

Here is a great opportunity for you student/college bloggers. SPENDonLIFE.com is sponsoring a $2,000 college scholarship for a student blogger. For the full details, check out the website they set up for the contest.

The quick and dirty jist of the rules is that you need to be a student blogger and write a blog post about the importance of credit or the dangers of identity theft. The other requirements is that the entry be LESS THAN 400 words and that you link back to the details about the scholarship. Sounds pretty easy ‘eh? 400 words on a topic that you are most likely familiar with anyway? You better get to work doing some research and come up with a creative post – there are no restraints on how you discuss either topic!!

All entries should be posted and submitted by December 1st. You can find out how to submit your scholarship blogging entry on the SPENDonLIFE website.

So, you interested in lowering your student loans or having to work a few less hours at your part time job? Then enter this contest! If you need help with blogging or are a beginner blogger, than they even point you to ProBlogger.net’s Blogging Tips for Beginners.

Now, here are a few quick ideas I had on how you could spin your blog posts:

• Write about how credit as a college student is the worse thing ever because you spend too much money on booze and at the bar when you should be saving and doing your school work
• Write about how credit is great because it allows you to have the time of your life with your friends and you do not care if you come out of college with $500+ in credit card debt from your last semester
• Blog about problems with identity theft on a college campus – or are there not any? Do some research and find out!
• Tell a personal story about your credit history, when you got a credit card, and how you manage your credit effectively
• Know someone who has had their identity stolen? See if they will let you blog about them. Maybe even interview them!

The topics that could evolve around credit and identity theft are endless. What are you waiting for? Get writing and submit your post!

**Please note that Dorm Room Biz is not actually sponsoring this contest nor do we have any part in it. Please direct all questions about entering and qualifying for the contest to SPENDonLIFE.

Along that note, Shoemoney posted a bunch of tips for running successful contests the other day. Many of these I followed, but a couple I hadn’t thought about – like what the local laws say about running a contest. Anyway, if you are thinking about running a contest on your blog or website, check out the tips that Jeremy put together!

So after about a week of being open, the contest post only had a few comments and I was getting worried. I didnt want to have 7 prizes to give away to 3 people. So I was pointed in the direction of a site called HelpAReporter.com. Basically, the site is AWESOME! If you want a down and dirty, no bull shit method to get your information out in front of a lot of people, then you need to check out HARO. BTW, people seem to use HARO…which I assume stands for Help A Reporter Out (I could be totally off on that though).

Anyway, you fill in a form with some basic information (name, email, website, etc) and then describe the content that you want me to check out. For me, I described my contest and the details about how I wanted to find more people to participate. I talked about the prizes and how they were great resources for entrepreneurs, students, and small business owners.

Within 5 hours of submitting my information on the HARO website, I had responses coming in and comments on the site. People started entering and it was a HUGE snowball effect. All of the sudden within the 12 hours of the submission 20 new comments were left, with a bunch of trackbacks to postings the people had written.

All of the sudden, things exploded and when finished, the contest had more than 300 entries (combined from comments, subscribing via email, and posting about it). Not too bad right? So, if you want to get your article, website, or post out to a lot of people quickly who can then pass it along to others and share it, HARO is a great way to go.

Besides the benefits of getting more people to the site and entering the contest, HelpAReporter brought some other unexpected advantages. Through HARO, I was able to make some new connections to young entrepreneurs that are interested in guest posting on Dorm Room Biz, that are interesting in doing podcasts and interviews, and also found more sponsors for the contest. I’ll definitely be using the site again in the future to help promote other articles, contests, and projects – I suggest you do the same. It is the best FREE direct email to a targeted audience you can get!

By the way, I did want to say that this post is completely my own opinion and is not paid for or sponsored in anyway…although that would have been super cool. If you’re interested in a sponsored post or paid review, feel free to contact me.

Real quick though, there were over 85 comments on the post and collectively there were more than 300 entries from comments, posting about the contest, and people subscribing to the blog via email and RSS.

And, again, here are the prizes that are about to be given away:

• $50 via PayPal – 1st place
• The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur book by Mike Michalowicz, signed copy – 1st place
• 1 Month of advertising on Blogtrepreneur, 125×125 ad spot ($50 value) – 1st place
• 1,000 EntreCard Credits – 2nd place
• You Call The Shots book by Cameron Johnson, signed copy – 2nd place
• 1 Month of advertising on Young Entrepreneur Blog, 125×125 ad spot – 3rd place
• The Student Success Manifesto book by Michael Simmons, signed copy – 4th place
• Zero to One Million book by Ryan Allis – 5th place
• Great Failures of the Extremely Successful by Steve Young – 6th place
• Ten Minutes To The Job Interview by Rachel Ingegneri – 7th place

Here are the winners and their places:

1. Monica
2. Shebado
3. David
4. Natalia
5. TheContestBlogger
6. Wiehanna
7. Mrs. Accountability

I have emailed all the winners and once they reply, I will get their prizes sent off to them. If for some reason I do not hear back from any of the winners within 48 hours, The next in line will be bumped up.

To draw the winning numbers, I used the random generator at www.random.org and I recommend it if you are doing anything like this in the future!

Thanks again to everyone who entered and made this such a great and successful contest. I look forward to running another one soon and will have to start generating a list of prizes/sponsors! If you’d be interested in sponsoring a prize, please contact me!

• You have until Midnight Eastern Time tomorrow, September 19th, to enter. You can enter either through comments, blogging about it, or by subscribing via email.
• The prize pool is well stacked and there should be lots of winners!
• The original post has gotten almost 80 comments! That is the most I have had on any post yet, so I am pretty excited about that!
• We have over 50 people entered in the contest and most of them have more than one entry.

Now, here is the important update.

I will be away this weekend so the winners will not be announced until Sunday evening, unlike originally planned. I will be in West Virginia for the largest whitewater festival and have a vendor booth set up. I hope to have a lot of pictures, videos, and posts about my experiences next week.

So, although all entries must be in by Friday Sept. 19th at Midnight EST, the winners will not be announced until Sunday the 21st. I moderate all the comments, so if you get one in before the deadline and do not see it until Sunday on the site, it is just because I didn’t have an internet connection to be able to approve it, but it will count.

Any questions??!!?? I’m looking forward to giving away all the great prizes!