Want, now.

My pals at Mimobot partnered with the good guys at Infectious to come up with a plan to find the next design for a mimobot. Grand prize winner gets $1,000. This should be fun!

We live in the age of MP3s, that’s no surprise. I can’t remember the last time that I bought a CD, but I still love making mix CDs for friends. The only problem is that it immediately gets put into a computer and ripped to an iPod. Kind of makes the whole CD stage a little wasteful. That is until I came across StuckUK’s Mixtape USB stick. It does just what you might imagine: puts a mix tape on an USB drive that fits inside of a little cassette tape case. The price is set at £20, which seems a little high for a 64 MB USB stick and a case shaped like a cassette tape. But for those times that a mix tape needs to say a little more than just an emailed zip file, it works. Plus you could easily reuse the USB drive for another mix.

In addition to being a time for Hallmark’s profits to spike, Valentine’s Day is time for the lovelorn to come together and make magic. In the romantic tradition of the holiday, Meletta, a designer MIMOBOT fashioned by our friends at Tokidoki is quite the smitten kitten — or smitten girl with a monkey on her head as it were. The new and improved mimobot goes by the appropriate name of Pink Meletta, and makes for the perfect token of affection for that special tech geek in your life.

The Gift: It’s our Space-Race-On-Acid prize pack. If you missed Wayne Coyne and co. and their homemade holiday Martian movie, you have the chance to win one DVD copy of the Flaming Lips’ Christmas on Mars, bundled with a score/soundtrack CD and as a bonus, and we’ll throw in a Mimobot Cosmobot 2GB designer flash drive preloaded with the new MimoZine.

The Rules: Give us your best title and logline (that’s the part of the movie pitch where you go, it’s Beverly Hills Chihuahua meets Blade Runner) in the COMMENTS section. Only one entry per reader. Duplicate entries will be discarded.

The Deadline: The contest runs now through midnight on 12/7.

Sign up for the Mimoco newsletter here and for more information about the Flaming Lips here.

It may take a whole village to raise a child, but it took an entire community of creative minds to put together the precious new MIMOBOT bundles of joy. The VDC MIMOBOT Series offers Mimoco’s first fan-designed versions of their flagship character-driven USB drives. The collection is the result of the Vimobot Design Contest and was chosen by whittling down a field of hundreds of artistic submissions on over-sized blank Vimobot vinyl toys to a scant final count of six winners. The new drive designs range in style from the semi-abstract to characters that more closely resemble the traditional MIMOBOT fare. To get your hands on these truly unique file ferrying friends, head on over to the Mimoco website and pick one up as they debut today.

BIG changes are afoot at Mimoco.Their impossibly adorable, data hungry Mimobot creations just got a little data hungrier for your precious filing. Everyone’s favorite portable USB buddies are now available in 8GB incarnations. That’s twice the size as previously available! Whether you trust Boba Fett or prefer rayD8 to ferry around your files, you’ll be delighted by the sheer amount of info these drives can digest depending on what you want to feed it. The new Mimobots up the input ante by boasting the ability to stuff their faces with nearly 20,000 photos, 2,000 songs, or 2,500 minutes of video. All you have to do is find one you want to make your own.

As promised, here are the winning entries for our Tokidoki Mimobot contest:

Winner, Timothy Nakayama

This is my story, about what happened to my friends and I, the day when our island sunk into the realm of dreams and almost disappeared from reality.

This is my story, written by me, Pirate Nero.

READ MORE…

It was a tough decision, but after sifting through all of the sometimes serious, sometimes hilarious, and generally well-written entries, we have decided on our tokidoki mimobot winners. First, a few gems from contestants that didn’t make the final cut, but still kicked some serious flash drive tail:

“For ease, we’ll name them 1, 2, and 3. Now, 2 is stuck in a predicament. He has to choose between two sets of friends. One represents the good friend, yet is carrying a pineapple grenade. This can best be compared to your best friend who has recently started with a substance abuse problem and is trying to get you to join him.” (We’ve all been there, Dumplins!)

“The pirate captain was known as USB-lackbeard” (Witty, Adam, witty)

“ketchup on noodles
why Japan oh goodness why
must you ruin food”

(Gillian’s got a grudge, and we like it.)

Coming in first for sheer effort: Timothy Nakayama; Second place: Emi, for the best all-around haiku’s; and second second place (yes, we can): Kary, for making us laugh in the shortest amount of sentences.


Winners, send your addresses to feedback@joshspear.com and we’ll hook you up with some tokidoki love. Thanks for participating, everyone — and thanks for making it happen, Mimoco!

Today is Cinco de Mayo, and not only are we guzzling margaritas faster than Mexico smashed that French army, we are also gearing up to judge the entries of the Tokidoki Mimobot contest. If you’ve yet try your hand at winning some of Mimoco’s finest flash drives, now is the time to read up and get busy. A word of warning: If your short story, poem, etc. happens to closely mirror any of the themes present in the previous entries, you may be disqualified, so put some emphasis on keeping it fresh. Another word of warning: There’s a chance we may be terribly hungover and/or still drunk by the time we choose our champs this evening, so, y’know … no big words, please.

Do you like Mimobots? How about Tokidoki? How about winning free goods from Tokidoki, Mimoco, and JoshSpear.com? Thought so. All you need to do is submit a story in the comment section of our Tokidoki Mimobot Contest post telling us what you think these little buggers are up to together. A monkey boy, a pirate, and an Italian chef — they look like trouble to us. Haikus, stories, lyrics, epic poems — all accepted entries. We’re choosing winners on May 5. Go, go, go!

Ah, Mimobots. Nerdy enough to help us appear left-brained, arty enough to help us appear right-brained, and tiny enough to keep our top secret files close to our hearts at all times.

If you’ve yet to experience the flashiness of one of these flash drives, today is your lucky day, as our good pals at Mimoco have graciously unloaded some of their new tokidoki ‘bots into our wide open arms. These latest tech wonders are smothered in the classically kawaii artistry of Italian designer Simone Legno (who we interviewed not too far back), and combine cute and creepy to create some of the most hyped Mimobots to date. We know you want some, so here are your choices for retrieval: A) Battle off hoards of rabid tokidoki fans/throw down some significant dollar; or B) Get arty/nerdy with us.

Game plan: Study up here. Consider what those little ‘bots are up to (Satan pasta and pineapple bombs, oh my!). Write us a little creative short story explaining your theory (or haiku, or song, or algorithm — we don’t care, whatever). Cut and paste to the comment section. Cross your fingers and wait.

May 5th we’ll announce our first and second place winners — who will receive flashy prizes on an only slightly descending scale — and publish their entries. Okay….GO!

A couple of great stills from an animation of the King and Queen meeting on the Mimobot we just released for the 2007 artist series. Along with the super-sexy USB drives in many different capacities, the über-bot is full of tons of awesome Undoboy/Collective content like icons, wallpapers, graphics, and songs you can’t get anywhere else. Yes, I’m shamelessly promoting the Spear Collective, and the bot our beloved Undoboy (to the rescue) created. They’re great, you should have one, or two, or maybe even three. But there aren’t many, this puppy is limited edition! Maybe we should give away a couple right now. First person to tell me which member of the Royal Family who has a birthday that coincides with the first day of the Summer Olympics in Beijing wins a set of 2GB Mimobots. Tricky, I know, but let the Mimbots guide you. Go, Go, Go!

The brilliants over at Mimoco are kicking of their Artist Series 2007 with three more limited edition additions to their flash drive family. Meet Gloomy Bear, a precious teddy prone to midnight bloodbaths; Ripple, an ice-creamy heart melter; and One Love, a little guy perfect for storing all the gushy notes you might receive this Valentine’s Day. As usual, they’re all available in 512MB, 1GB, 2GB, and 4GB storage sizes, and will only be available until all 2000 (or 1000 in the case of Gloomy Bear– too dangerous for mass production, apparently) are sold. And for all of you desperate last-minute gift seekers, here’s an exclusive Spearland Goobery Co-Ed Love Tip: Fed-ex yourself a Mimobot (One Love’s perfect for this), pack it up with songs, notes, pictures, and anything else you can think of, stick it in a red envelope, and hand deliver it on the 14th to the boy/girl of your dreams. Easy, expiration date-less, and techie enough to balance out all of that lovey-dovey crap.

We have been listening to Beck’s newest album, ‘The Information‘ for about two months now, and we’re not sick of it yet. We have been given the opportunity to give you, our readers, a crack at some free Beck and Mimoco goodies, so it’s time for a good ol’ fashion giveaway. This time you don’t even have to answer trivia questions. All you have to do is subscribe to our mailing list before 5 P.M. E.S.T. on Friday, December 1st, and your name will automatically be thrown into ‘the hat’ to win a Beck-autographed poster and a 512 MB Mimobot Ghost flash drive. Not exactly the ‘Taj Mahal’ of prizes, but entry into the drawing is a piece of cake, these giveaways are fun, and of course we’ll never ever ever ever ever share your email addresses with anyone.