Once again, Chitika managed to uphold their reputation for thinking outside-the-box by putting one of our Chitika-ites in an owl costume at SES NY 09. He was featured in video interviews filmed by me, @KarlaChitika during the conference (which will be featured on the blog very soon), as well as put a smile on everyone’s face who came to the Chitika booth.

SearchAppalooza Mania!
Tuesday afternoon many gathered in the Grand Ballroom for our much anticipated SearchAppalooza ‘Search Apps Contest’ where 5 finalists presented their apps to Jennifer Slegg (CEO Jensense.com), Larry Cornett (VP Search Yahoo!), Rob Griffin (SVP Search Marketing MediaContacts), and Don Dodge (Business Development Emerging Business Team Microsoft Corporation).

All of the apps were really great. If I were judging it would have been a very difficult decision, but the judges (who are clearly more thourough than I am) found some flaws and a winner was closen rather fast. The winner of the “Kick-ass Search App Contest” was:

Tom Wilde of: Everyzing.com

He received a Kindle2 sponsored by Yahoo!

The coolest thing about Tom’s app was how it created a way to take, otherwise unsearchable, video content and convert it into searchable text. This could ultimately make way for a whole new outlook and marketing perspective centered around search content in video. Amazing!

**The SearchAppalooza video will also be featured on the blog early next week- so be on the lookout for that, which features all the presentations from the app finalists.

Twitterers also had the chance to participate by Tweeting their favorite app finalist to be in the running for a Kindle2 sponsored by Chitika. That winner was:

Alex Winton, @doctoroak

And lastly, Chitika hosted their near-legendary, 3rd-Annual “Cookie Eating Contest” at the end of SearchAppalooza to win an HP 1000 Netbook. Eleven contestants gathered to eat as many Oreo (double-stuffed) cookies as they could in 2 minutes. There was a tie! 12 cookies ate by two people (who would of thought)- so they then challenged eachother to a Oreo face-off. In the end, 18 Oreos was consumed by our winner!
You can watch it all go down in our video here:

Chitika is taking SES NYC ‘09 by storm!

Send us a note if you are coming–we are offering all Chitika friends 20% off SES full conf passes, and free exhibit passes.

What’s in store?

Our SES “SearchAppalooza” workshop will feature Chitika’s “Kick-Ass Search App” contest…“Think American Idol for developers, with Yahoo! and Microsoft as the judges.” Read more…

Stop-by our SES booth (#230) and meet “Hooty the Search Owl” –a 6′4″, fluffy owl who loves to play frisbee.

Can’t attend?

You can win cool stuff & watch SearchAppalooza from your couch.

• SearchAppalooza Twitter Contest for an Amazon Kindle2!
  To enter, click here to post a SearchAppalooza tweet.
• Watch SearchAppalooza live web-cast fan page.