Smiley Award winners
March 4, 2008 on 1:13 pm | In Events, Fun Stuff | 11 Comments
Back in September 2007, we told you about a celebration at Carnegie Mellon University that honored the Emoticon. Twenty five years earlier, Professor Scott Fahlman was the first to use the text version of the emoticon with his colleagues on a computer message board. To mark the anniversary, Professor Fahlman and his colleagues teamed up with Yahoo! to start an annual student contest for innovation in technology-assisted, person-to-person communication, now known as the Smiley Award.
Last week, “One Cold Hand” (http://onecoldhand.com), a website designed to reunite lost gloves with their mates, was named the winner of the inaugural Smiley Award. “One Cold Hand” was created by Jennifer Gooch, a graduate student in Carnegie Mellon’s School of Art, and Turadg Aleahmad, a doctoral student in the Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) – part of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science. They will share the $500 first prize, and their names will be engraved on a plaque kept on permanent display at the university.
Winner Jennifer Gooch said. “A lot of my current work and research looks at how people use technology in order to connect. As a native of Dallas, we didn’t need gloves very often. When I moved [to Pittsburgh, PA] I noticed them everywhere, lying on the ground lonely and useless. I thought a site to reunite gloves — a dating site for gloves, as it were — would be an interesting metaphor for our attempt to find what’s missing.”
A Smiley Award honorable mention went to “Moodjam” created by doctoral student Ian Li. Moodjam is an online diary that allows people to express their moods and feelings using patterns of color. Another honorable mention went to “Buxfer” (http://www.buxfer.com), a free, Web-based application that allows its users to easily keep track of shared expenses, which is handy for roommates, student social groups and many others. Buxfer was created by computer science doctoral students Ashwin Bharambe, Amit Manjhi and Shashank Pandit.
The winning student projects were chosen by a panel of faculty and student judges at Carnegie Mellon and Yahoo! joined in the celebration held on campus last week (see pics here).
Congratulations to “One Cold Hand” for winning the first Smiley Award! We look forward to seeing even more innovation inspired by Smiley in the coming years.
Sarah Bacon
Product Manager
Here are some photos of the Smiley Award party, held last week at Carnegie Mellon University (photos courtesy of Ralf Brown):
[...] Press Release from Friday CMU noted it Friday and now has it in releases On the blog of the CS department head And just now I saw a write-up on Yahoo’s Messenger blog [...]
Pingback by Adventures in Egotism » Blog Archive » Geez, I’m sure glad I shaved — March 4, 2008 #
WOULD LIKE TO HAVE SMILEY ICONS ON YAHOO E MAIL . OTHER DOWNLODS OF SMILEY ICONS SLOWS OUR COMPUTERS DOWN AND I WANT USE ANY THING WITH ACTIVE -X SO GIVE US SMILEY ICONS WITH OUR EMAILS WITHOUT HAVING TO DOWNLOAD ACTIVE -X AND MAKE THEM FREE LIKE WHATS IN OUR YAHOO MESSENGER ,THE MORE FUN THINGS YOU GIVE ON YAHOO THE MORE PEOPLE WANT TO CHANGE TO IT. THANKS,WANTING SMILEY ICONS
THIS SMILEYS ARE GETTING OLD AND TO MUCH TROUBLE . THANKS NILA
Comment by nila harris — March 6, 2008 #
Can you please add some smileys for asl and c2c so arab or indian folks won’t have to flood the room or pm box with squiggly fonts?
Larry, between adding more cute smileys and fixing bugs in messenger or stopping the resurgence of porn bots, it’s definitely more cost effective to make superficial cosmetic changes in messenger.
Comment by roflmao — March 8, 2008 #
Heyy…i luvv the smileyss!
Comment by kinjiee — March 9, 2008 #
hey it is just great to have this smiley award
at least the smiley changes the way of email-life
Comment by DiPi — March 13, 2008 #
when do we get new smileys fer the messenger and mail?
Comment by michael pressley — March 31, 2008 #
the smileys make a bad day seem great…they make me laugh…
Comment by tator — March 31, 2008 #
i would like to have cultural style smiley.. smiley with kebaya (traditional indonesian dress) or kimono (traditional japananese woman dress)..i think ..it’s awesome..viva smiley
Comment by Lucifer — March 31, 2008 #
You can have whole conversations with smileys! I love them!
Comment by Mrs. Free — April 1, 2008 #
let’s face it there are still some smiley’s that haven’t been used or never thought of but one thing is for sure it should be a smiley for every mood and i mean every mood.
Comment by allen isley — April 4, 2008 #
I would love to have smiley faces
Comment by cassie — May 2, 2008 #