Mister Wong.com Goes Public and Announces an Exciting Logo Contest

You may already know from my previous post that I am a big fan of Mister Wong, the already popular in Europe social bookmarking service that has just been out of public beta in English language. If you want to know my opinion, Mister Wong definitely has a chance to get at least some of del.icio.us users away and keep them - for long. When you browse various bookmarks and groups on Mister Wong, you really feel it is populated - while del.icio.us always gives me a peculiar feeling that I am bookmarking alone.

I tested Mister Wong a while back when it was in a private beta and now I can not help but encourage all our readers to rush to Mister Wong, export your bookmarks from where you now have them, import them to this service and stay there for all your bookmarking needs. It is really worth it! And definitely the news that Mister Wong is now open to the huge and tech-savvy English-speaking community is exciting because I am totally sure all of my friends will soon be there and we will now have a neat place to share our bookmarks and actually make the bookmarking process social.

But the Mister Wong team apparently decided that their public launch is not enough of a pleasant surprise and announced an international logo contest to create a better logo for the product by means of crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is definitely growing popular these days but this contest is actually something to work on if your designing skills are something you are proud of because unlike many such contests giving away some $100 gift card Mister Wong team is making the prizes huge. To be more specific, they are giving away $12,000 total in prizes: grand prize of $6,000 and two runner-up prizes of $3,000.

The reason for the contest is simple: after Mister Wong was first introduced to the choosy English-speaking geeks, some of them have started to criticize the logo that seemed to have a racial feeling about it. And since the guys behind Mister Wong are obviously very good listeners (well, they have implemented all of the features I thought were needed when I first reviewed it so now I can see absolutely no faults in the service) they decided to let the people decide. And so here we've got a global contest to create and choose the best new logo for Mister Wong (the previous one has already been removed from their portals). The contest will be hosted on all the six international portals of Mister Wong (English, German, Russian, Chinese, French and Spanish). This gives the designers from around the world a chance to submit their creations and Mister Wong users to vote on them. The top 12 logos will be reviewed and voted on by an international jury (of which I am a proud member, by the way).

The contest will be launched on all the Mister Wong websites on Tuesday (August 7) so it is about time to start working on a new logo for them if you are a designer yourself or share this piece of news with your friends if they have better designing skills. And do not forget to sign up for an account with Mister Wong because you will only be able to vote if you register prior to the beginning of the voting process. So what are you waiting here for?

UPDATE (August 9): The contest is now live and the team is waiting for the first submissions!