We Have A Winner In Our 'Predict Our IPad Coverage' Contest

Who could have guessed, in January 2011, that you would tell 453 stories on Apple's yet-to-be-announced iPad?

And nonetheless that's the number you did publish, and 4 people guessed precisely that number.

A small over a year ago, you challenged you to theory how many stories we'd tell in 2010 on the subject of Apple's stirring tablet.

We knew it was a prohibited topic: All story we'd created to that date on an "Apple tablet" got tons of attention, and lots of explanation (both pro and con). We'd seen delicious rumors, and figured it would possibly be a prohibited product or a fantastic flop. We knew we'd be essay a lot of stories on the subject to encounter the urge for data on it.

Little did you know that we'd median about 2 stories for every workday.

We received over 10,000 entries is to contest. Guesses ranged from 0 to 99999999999999999999 (followed by a lot more nines). There were a few nerdy guesses too, similar to 3.14159 and 6.0221415 - 10²³.There were a few snarky answers, similar to "365*x where x=# tablets sold" and "0 (i hope)." Someone even attempted to speak up a function to be able to gain on the expertise of the crowd, with an access that read: =AVERAGE(A2:A1000)+1. Sorry, that regulation did not compute.

Eliminating the indeed ludicrous guesses (anything over 10,000), the median of all outstanding guesses was 309. Not too far from the real number, but not scarcely shut sufficient is to averaging function to have worked in any case.

To tally the number of iPad stories, I used a Google finding to find all stories published on Wired.com from January 1, 2010 to December 31, 2010 that enclosed "iPad" in the pretension . I incited off any calm filtering and told Google to uncover me all the duplicates.

Searching on the titles was the easiest design way to establish if the iPad was a leading concentration is to story, and not only something referred to in passing.

In addition, since the name "iPad" was only used after Apple's iPad phenomenon on Jan. 27, 2010, I moreover did a finding for stories with "Apple tablet" in the name published from January 1 to January 30, 2010 .

I put both finding results in to a spreadsheet , sorted by name, and separated duplicates together with any automatically-generated difficulty and label pages.

The consequent complete was 453. I found 4 entrants who had guessed that number, so used a random-number generator of electric power to collect between them. I did so blind: The columns display any personally-identifying data were dark from the short time the competition started. It was only after picking the leader that I suggested the columns containing his name.

And so our leader is Mike Gorman.

Mike, you'll be getting an iPad from Wired. Congratulations.

Photo credit: Robert Occhialini/Flickr