If you met the Olive Tree crew at the ETS or SBL meetings, you saw that signing up for the Olive Tree Newsletter at those meetings gave you a chance to win a free iPod Touch, preloaded with Olive Tree resources.  Well, the winners have now been chosen.

Congratulations to our winners!

• From the ETS drawing:   Doug Powell of Tennessee
• From the SBL drawing:   Kathy Barett Dawson of North Carolina

We hope each of you enjoy your iPod Touch, and the Olive Tree resources we provide with it.

And we video-recorded both drawings using an iPhone, in case you were wondering how we spend our time at the office.

Drew and Sarah draw the ETS winner

Drew and Stephen J draw the SBL winner

Are you planning to attend one or both of these meetings?  If so, come visit Olive Tree at our display booth:

ETS – Evangelical Theological Society, New Orleans, November 18-20
        Olive Tree Booth # 100

SBL – Society of Biblical Literature, New Orleans, November 21-24
        Olive Tree Booth # 808

We’ll be happy to give you a demo of our latest BibleReader release on iPhone, which implements new features especially for original languages.  We’ve also released an entire bookshelf’s worth of original language texts, tools, and resources for iPhone, including

• Greek New Testament (NA27) with Mounce’s Morphology and UBS Dictionary,
• LXX (Septuaginta) with Parsing and LEH Lexicon, and
• BHS (Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia) with Westminster Morphology and BDB Lexicon.

Engineers Stephen J (@stephenljohnson) and David T (@dtrotzjr) and original language specialists Drayton B and Steven C (@steventcummings) will be happy to show you around these new resources.

And if you’re interested in seeing the best of BibleReader software for Greek and Hebrew study, be sure to watch Olive Tree in SBL’s Bible Software Shootout.  Side-by-side with Bible software peers like Logos, Bible Works, Accordance, and SESB, Olive Tree will demonstrate how our software answers real-world research questions, like:

I want to study a part of speech, e.g., demonstrative pronouns or interjections. How do I get all of the lemmas for that part of speech, get all the occurrences of those lemmas, and the results organized in such a way that I could write an article/monograph on that part of speech from the data?

If questions like these spark your interest—because of your academic work or your personal study—watch Olive Tree perform at the Shootout, and see how Olive Tree’s latest tools can help you in your own Greek and Hebrew study:

Bible Software Shootout
Saturday, November 21
4:00 – 6:30 p.m.
Rhythms Ballroom 3-SH, at SBL

We’ll also post this presentation on our website later, so everyone can take advantage of the information presented by Drayton and Stephen J.

Monday, September 28, Olive Tree had the privilege of being a part of the 2009 Chatlos Bible Conference at New York Theological Seminary in New York City. The title of the conference was “Linking Sense to Sound and Sight: Bible Study and Technology”.

The conference had a unique structure with the morning consisting of lectures presented by leading biblical scholars speaking about the modes of communication in biblical and post-biblical times. The afternoon sessions were presentations by leading bible software companies, including Olive Tree. Each presenter shared how our companies are working to build on the ever-shifting ground of technology and the study of the Bible.

With advances in technology occurring at such a rapid pace, every area of life is being affected. This includes church life, academics, and the study of the Bible. This conference attempted to present participants both with a philosophical framework and practical tools to address this change. Olive Tree’s BibleReader was just the tool for many of the participants.

Dr. Jin Han, and the NYTS folks extended such warm kindness to the presenters and made the conference a distinct pleasure to be a part of. And, he introduced many of us to our first taste of authentic Korean cuisine! It was something we all thoroughly enjoyed and won’t be forgetting any time soon.

Matt Hudson works for Olive Tree Bible Software as an eBook Architect. He received his M.Div. from Beeson Divinity School and lives in Knoxville, TN.

As you know, OliveTree.com is up and running on our new server! Behind the scenes, of course, we’re still hard at work fixing bugs we’ve discovered, resolving problems that come up, and continuing to test all the areas of OliveTree.com to make sure they work they way they should.

We’d like to invite you to participate in our process of testing!

There’s a special Olive Tree 22% discount coupon available now through Monday, October 5.   This is a very limited time offer, but we want to make it available to test how our discount processes are working. The coupon code for this offer is:

TryOliveTree2009

You can also learn more about how to use coupons at OliveTree.com.  If you try this coupon, here’s what we want to know from you:

• Does it work?
• Did you have any difficulties along the way?
• Anything else you’d like to report about your OliveTree.com experience?

If it works, great!  Enjoy your titles!  If it doesn’t work, please contact us and let us know, either by emailing support@olivetree.com or filling out a support ticket here.

We hope that using the coupon will be a simple, streamlined process, but don’t worry—we’ll make sure you get the 22% discount on your order no matter what.

And if you notice any other problems at any time, feel free to contact us immediately, either by email or support ticket, or by sending us a reply on Twitter @OliveTreeBible.