Cue fanfare for the results of the first European Gadget of the Year award. In case you missed our previous post it is like EuroVision for gadget lovers, except of course without Terrry Wogan's irritating commentary or strangely-clad Scandi metal bands. We teamed up with the top European gadgets sites, namely Xataka (Spain), Daily Gadget (Germany), Journal du Geek (France) and GamesBlog (Italy) to ask our combined readership exactly what is the continent's favourite gizmo? And the winner is, you guessed it, the Nintendo Wii games console which attacted over half of the votes cast in every country apart from Italy. Second place went to the Apple iPod nano (which oddly enough polled better in Italy than anywhere else), while Nokia's N Series phones, which are vey big in Spain, finished in third. Thanks to all who voted and to everyone who blogged about the contest.

Katie has had her haircut, Gemma is out trawling designer stores for dresses and Chris is clipping his nasal hair. Yep it can only mean one thing - the Shiny awards are tomorrow night.

Just like previous years we have a glitzy London venue (this year it is Soho House), loads of top journos, bloggers and hangers on the guest list and some funny looking statuettes to give as prizes.

The awards are in association with mobile phone network Orange.

We also have the mother of all goody bags courtesy of our sponsors; Vonage, Spinvox, Firebox, Logic3, Kensington and Knightsbridge based hair and beauty salon Paul Edmonds.

So thanks to all, and to those who are coming, don't forget your goodie bag.

The Shiny boys’ tuxes are back from the dry cleaners, while the girls are fending off calls from major Italian fashion houses. Yep the awards season is on its way. And up there with the Globes, the Oscars and the south Suffolk Marrow growers' Vegathon is the annual Shiny awards.

Each year Team Shiny, in conjunction with a crack possee of gadget know-it-alls from The Sun, Guardian, Q etc get together to vote for the best and worst gadgets of the year. Among the categories are serious stuff like Green Gadget, Best Smartphone and Web 2.0 innovation as well as a few more entertaining contests which we’ll let you know about very soon.

Sorry to say that the Chav Gadget award, won so spectacularly by the Apple iPod shuffle last year, is no more, but we have come up with a suitably cheesy replacement. We are also teaming up with several European blog networks to launch the first ever Blog readers Euro-Gadget of the year. You’ll get your chance to vote on that very soon too.

Over the next week or so we will also be posting the nominations on Shiny Shiny and Tech Digest. The awards will be held in a swanky central London venue on February 21st. Now where did I put that satin sash belt…