Here is a mail from the Poken S.A. Team:

This is a very exciting opportunity to be recognized as one of the most exciting start-ups in Europe by the world’s most-read technology blog and news source. So let’s get ALL our friends & family, and their friends and family to vote for us!

It will only take a few minutes of your time but could get us a lot of great press – especially as the main competitor seems to be between us and HellomynameisE . On that note – it’s fine to say why Poken is awesome (especially f your friends say it) but please don’t engage in public debate about our product versus theirs. Let’s just *win* to show them who is boss.

If you have questions let me know. Let’s kick ass!

THE GAME PLAN:

This link takes you directly to the voting page: http://bit.ly/PokenRules
And here’s my song about why Poken should win: http://bit.ly/PokenFaith

Now, what we’re all gonna to make sure we win….

1. Post this as your Facebook/Linkedin/Twitter status:

YAY, we’ve been nominated for a TechCrunch award! Please vote & help us win, only take two clicks >> http://bit.ly/PokenRules

2. Invite your friends to the ‘Vote for Poken’ event:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=95131907636 (just click the ’share’ button (top right) to post it to your profile and send it to friends)

3. Email or message your contacts with something like this:

Subject: Vote for Poken – just two clicks!

Body:

Hello!

Would you Vote for Poken , please? Just two clicks >> http://bit.ly/PokenRules

We’ve been nominated for a TechCrunch award! We’re up against amazing companies… Would mean so much for us to win

And please feel free to forward this email! You rock

I was lucky to meet the German Affiliate of Poken S.A. in Cologne and get some facts about the new business Pokens:

• Might be available as soon as August
• No more limit to 64 contacts in one session
• 2 GB USB on-board Flash memory
• Extended battery life
• 4 basic designs
• Special limited artist editions

No information about the price except that they will be “affordable”. So it seems the “little black Pokens” will really be available pretty soon. And furthermore Poken S.A. seems to have lots of other things in the pipeline, so I’m pretty psyched about the things to come.

We launched Pokendesign in Germany, together with the nice people from Mission Poken. Last week, we also offered an English version and we’re still in the process to polish everything up.

So, what is Pokendesign?

After the last competition we were very pleased with the results. But we were not so sure what to do with the nice card designs. So we built a platform where users can upload and share their card designs for Poken card backgrounds. So YOU can help color up the Poken world!

In other news, we finally managed to sit down and have a talk with the Poken guys to talk about the upcomming business Poken. Interested? Stay tuned, we’ll keep you updated this weekend.

———— New features added ————

• major front end redesign of the identity part of the site.
• Start_Poken.html can only be used once for “auto login” (this is a security fix)
• Additional networks have been added:
  - Mixi : http://mixi.jp
  - Ameba:  http://www.ameba.jp/
  - Gree: http://gree.jp
  - Smart-fm: http://smart.fm/login
  - Tuenti: http://www.tuenti.com/
  - Wer-Kennt-Wen: http://www.wer-kennt-wen.de/
• The “add network” logic is more intuitive, it asks for email or id depending on the network (and for flickr it specifies yahoo_id)
• the friends per page can be set between 9 and 45.
• The home page has been improved (but the really cool one is coming later!)
• The home page has a “register my poken – join!” link. This is to help people with new Pokens who come to our website instead of clicking on the Start_Poken.html on the Poken device.
• Plus I think that we’ve now addressed all the security concerns people have (Germany and Japan seem to be the most concerned). I’ll make a blog post over the next few days which discusses why the security of Poken is good enough.

Call to Action

So I say we’ll create them ourselves. I call a competition to create cool new background designs for Poken ID cards. Give me color!

The Rules

You create a design for a Poken ID card based on the standard Poken background.Upload it somewhere (you page, blog, flickr account) and link it here in the comments. You can create as many designs as you like but only your best one will count.

All designs have to be published under the Creative Commons License so that everybody is able to use them in their profiles.

The competitions ends on the 25. of April 2009 at 00:00 – so the 24. will be the last day. The winner will be chosen by me and announced the following weekend.

The Prices

As already mentioned in a preious post, I just received a Black Pack of Pokens. I’ll donate 3 of those for those who create the best designs: one Frankenstein, one Geisha and one Scream-Poken.

• The winner can choose one of the three mentioned Pokens he likes best
• The runner up can choose one between the remaining two
• The third price will be the remaining Poken

Examples

It would be nice if you would spread the word about this competition. Let’s color out profiles up together!

Here are some examples to get you going:

It contains: 4 standard Pandas, 2 Geishas, 2 Elvis, 2 Scream and 2 Frankenstein. Reeeally nice, Poken, thank you! Makes me look forward to the next 12pack.

Oh, and you can win some of these. Want to know how? Come back this weekend!

The new features include:

• On the front page, right under the logo, you can see if a Poken is currently connected
• The main menu now unfolds to give you easy access to the most important tasks
• Left of your own ID card you’ll see your current number of Poken contacts
• Your own contacts are now browsable by timeline and alphabetically with a new pagination, with 9 contacts on each page
• Individual contacts can now be easily exported as vCards
• You can add tags to each contact during import or manually from your list of contacts

The page really improved through these features and I’m looking forward to more changes that will gradually be added. Nice job, Poken!

• Poken hardware explained
• Poken hardware explained 2