America, the voting is over.  Did your virtual appliance pick make it into the top group?  Did you vote?  If not, you only have yourself to blame.  You should have picked up the phone and dialed, or you should have text messaged in your selection.  Oops, wrong challenge.

Ok, so maybe there wasn't a recording contract at the end... maybe you didn't get to watch people sing, act like a fool in a house, eat something disgusting or get their torches put out.  But you did have a chance to make a difference.  You did have a chance to try out some rather cool virtual appliances, and you had the opportunity to vote for one of those appliances to win a prize of $5,000, along with some bragging rights of course.

Did you vote?  If not, I'm sorry to say its too late.  The voting is over.  Let the counting begin. 

Interestingly enough, it looks like the best rated virtual appliances only received 3 out of 5 stars, unless I'm looking at the wrong thing.  I don't see any ranked higher than that. 

Personally, I tried a few virtual machines myself, and while I'm not sure which one was actually worth the $100,000 grand prize, I did find some usefulness in a few of them.  Nothing jumped out to me as ground breaking or inventive... but many were clearly useful, especially to someone as lazy as me at times. 

I'm more curious to see what the esteemed panel of judges think.  What virtual appliance will they believe to be the creme de la creme?  Which one will be worthy?  Which one actually met the requirements and caught the judges eyes? 

Looks like we'll have to wait until Monday, August 14th for the results.

Which one of our contestants will it be?

Stay tuned.