Tomorrow evening, we’ll be having an all-community game day. Well, game night, really - but that doesn’t sound as nice.

We’ll be playing Call of Duty 4 on the Xbox 360, because nothing inspires community bonding like shooting at each other with assault rifles.

Where: Xbox Live
When: June 8th, 2008 at 6 pm Pacific.
How: Just add my gamertag, Kromaen. I’ll start up a private lobby a few minutes before game time.

It’ll go ’till people lose interest. If I recall, lobbies cap out at around 16 people - so there aren’t a whole lot of spots. If you’re dyin to play, show up early. Check out this thread for discussion.

See you tomorrow night!

When I first launched Heliocity 365 days ago, I never imagined how much I’d come to enjoy it. I can’t even begin to count how many awesome people I’ve had the opportunity to meet, nor how many fond memories have come as a result.

We’ve already accomplished so much as a community. This community stood together, and helped to reshape a service its members use most. Then we went and did it again. We’ve grown to remarkable numbers, through nothing but word of mouth and natural discovery. We’ve banded together to tackle obstacles that kept our devices from their maximum potentionial. Perhaps most notably, this community has provided help to thousands upon thousands of other Helions. Without a doubt, this community has made being a Helio customer better.

Happy Birthday, folks. The best is yet to come.

We’re considering making the switch from Google Adsense to handling advertising in house, across all sections of the site.

Some stats about Heliocity:

• 500,000 page views per month.
• Our reader base stretches across the US and is made up of gadget lovers, tech-minded individuals, vendors, software and product developers, corporate power figures, and those considering Helio.
• We are highly respected as a source for all things Helio, and as a member of the blogging community at large.
• We are the largest and most tightly knit community of Helio users by many leaps and bounds. Both our readership and our registered member base grow significantly each day by word of mouth alone. It is estimated that 1 of every 50 Helio subscribers is a registered member of our site.

Contact me at greg at heliocity dot net if you’re interested.

As the first of a number of additions coming to this site, I’m incredibly stoked to announce two new features: the Image Gallery, and our Mobile Downloads site.

Image Gallery:

The Image Gallery allows forum members to share images in an incredibly easy and organized way, with a full rating and commenting system built in. Got a ton of Ocean wallpapers you’ve made? Upload’em! Want to show off your collection of work? Stick a link to your “My Images” page in your signature!

Right now, we’ve got three categories in the Image Gallery:

• Wallpapers: Finally, a place to put’em all! Users can easily upload their Wallpapers by device and category. To get the ball rolling, we’ve already uploaded around 250 awesome user made wallpapers. (If you see any of your work uploaded by the username “Wallpapers”, just send us a list of the image IDs [grab it from the url] and we’ll make sure it gets put under your name)
• Heliocity Mugshots:: It’ll be like a yearbook, without the generic messages of good will! We wanna see pictures of forum members rockin’ their Helios.
• Accessories:: It’s way, way too hard to find pictures of Helio accessories. Even on Helio.com, the product shots don’t tend to show enough. Well, we’ve got accessories - lets fix that.

You can find the gallery at http://forum.heliocity.net/index.php?action=gallery, or by clicking Forum > Gallery. Once things get rolling and we’ve made sure all the kinks are worked out, it’ll find its way up to the big bar up top.

We’ll be adding tons of categories to the gallery, depending on what people want. We’re open to ideas!

Mobile Downloads:

What good is a massive collection of wallpapers without an easy way to access it from your device?

That’s where the Mobile Downloads site comes in, and I’ve already got a little sneak preview version up and running. Check it out on your device at https://downloads.heliocity.net.

From the Mobile download site’s streamlined interface, you can easily access the entire Wallpapers collection on the go. It automatically pulls all of the images on the fly and sorts them by their proper categories.

The download site is built to look gorgeous in both portrait/landscape modes. As the whole thing is running with SSL certification, you won’t ever have to deal with hitting “View in HTML”. You don’t even have to remember to type HTTPS - it’ll handle that for you.

A few things started acting kinda whonky at the last second (for example, application uploads), so we pulled them before launch for the sake of gettin the goods to you guys sooner. Don’t worry - those sections will be up and running within a few days.

So, Whats next?

The guides and reviews sections are finally gettin’ the lovin’ they deserve. Exciting stuff. Stay tuned!

Helio just sent over the details on a promo they’ve set up especially for Heliocity readers, and it’s a pretty friggin’ sweet deal. You get 2 free months for referrals, while your friends get 10 bucks a month off their bill for a year (includes $99 Unlimited) and (if they’re grabbin’ a Mysto or a Fin) a $50 dollar prepaid gift card.

The promotion will be running until the end of April, so go snag yourself some referrals!

The details:

Greetings Heliocity.

First we want to thank you again for all your support. We love what Heliocity stands for and we appreciate the service you provide to all the Helions out there.

We’re so grateful that we have a couple great offers for all your faithful readers.

Here’s the deal:
Existing Members can get two months of free service when they refer a new Member (certain restrictions apply, of course). Click here to find out more.

The new member you refer gets the following deal:
New Members can use a special promo code (see below) to get $10 off their monthly fees for a full 12 months (valid on $40 plans and higher, up to and including the $99 All-In plan)

Plus, if they get a new Mysto or Fin, they also get a $50 Helio Prepaid Visa Card.

Click here to get started or go to http://www.helio.com/page?p=promo_50&

Promo Codes:

Ocean: oceanoffer
Fin: finoffer
Mysto: mystooffer
Heat (black): heatblackoffer
Heat (gold): heatgoldoffer

~ Your friends at Helio

Which items would you want from a Heliocity store? (Pick up to four)

• Heliocity swag
• Helio swag
• Device accessories
• Other (Post in comments)
• Nothing!

View Results

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As we’ve mentioned previously, we have a whole lot of stuff in the works. Some of it’s obviously taking longer than we’d planned, but we’re hoping to announce some awesome enhancements as soon as possible. A few things were gettin’ set to roll out the week following the redesign, only to get set back by a drive failure followed by a few weeks of pure craziness. With some of these rad new things coming closer to fruition, we’ve begun looking forward at what we should work on next.

One thing that we’ve been considering is a store. If we took that road, what type of stuff would you be interested in? Device accessories? Vegan Meatloaf? Helio swag? Heliocity wear? We’re not too interested in selling devices or contracts - we’re mainly looking into stuff those already within the community would want.

One thing we’re really interested in knowing about is that last item - Would you rock a Heliocity shirt? If we’re gonna do that, we’d do it right - no CafePress crap. American Apparel for the win.

Let us know what you think, and what you’d want.

Back in July, a few Heliocity members and I met up to grab some foodies. It rocked face - the food was good, the group was great. Fun times were had. So much, in fact, that we’re doing it again.

JustinB and I are going to be down in LA next week, and we’re lookin’ to kick it with any Helions in the area. The last meetup was damn fun - this one just might be even better.

When: 8:00 PM on Tuesday February 26th
Where: PF Changs at the Irvine Spectrum (Google Maps:61 Fortune Dr, Irvine, CA.)

Let us know over in the forum if you think
you’ll be able to make it.

(Update: For the sake of all the people saying “Gah! I’m 45 minutes away from Irvine and don’t get off till 7:30!”, we’ve moved it back a half hour to 8:00 pm. Hopefully that doesn’t push it past anyones bed time.)

Welcome to the new Heliocity.

To make this place all that much better, we’ve decided to redesign it from the ground up. We’re taking all that’s great about this place, and setting the bar 10x higher.

We’ve given the whole site a fresh and professional new look, custom designing a unified theme across the site and forums. I handled the coding side of things, with designer Tim Shundo on the concept work. We’ve implemented structure changes to allow this place to grow dramatically and help visitors better navigate the site, while improving the overall experience.

The next few days will be a bit of a transitional period. Such a big layout change tends to result in a few unforeseeable bumps and kinks. Once we’ve made sure they’ve all been ironed out, we’ll be rolling out big upgrades across the site. A completely overhauled guides section, a massive and regularly updated reviews section, and a number of other things set on really making Heliocity the ultimate Helio resource. And of course, we couldn’t do something like this without some celebratory contests - more details on those later.

I hope you all enjoy the new look and any coming upgrades!