Win $500 – Spring Fling contest update

Gydget’s Top 10 most-grabbed contest is heating up, with a little more than two weeks to go.

These bands/organizations are in the running to win one of our contests ($500 for the most-grabbed gydget in May/June, $500 for the most-grabbed new gydget and $500 for the most-grabbed new indie gydget):

* Affliction Banned	* Ani DiFranco
* Bayside	* Beyonce
* Burton Cummings	* Chevelle
* DeVotchKa	* John 5
* DWELE	* Lacuna Coil
* Lil Wayne	* Melvins
* Mindless Self Indulgence	* PROZAK
* Ray J	* Scotty Vanity
* TECH N9NE	* The Cult
* Train	* Woof! Think About It (PETA2)

Even if you’re not on the list above, there is still time left to win the contest since it is measured weekly! See www.gydget.com/newsletters/2008-05-07

To get more grabs and increase your chances to win, please bulletin your fans as much as you can (just login and use the bulletin code on your gydget.com promote page). Check out other ideas to increase your grabs in the link above.

FanSpace, our MySpace App Has Launched!

This morning we publicly launched FanSpace on MySpace. FanSpace enables fans to more easily discover, display and share artist and team widgets across MySpace, thus increasing exposure and driving ticket, music, ringtone and merchandise sales – see example screenshot at right. To see a live example, click here. FanSpace is a communications platform for bands and sports teams looking to engage fans on MySpace. Built specifically for the MySpace platform, FanSpace incorporates the best viral features of the platform to ensure that music fans can easily discover and share media and information-rich fan widgets, or gydgets, with their friends. When bands create a free gydget on Gydget.com and add it to their profile page it is automatically included in the FanSpace gallery for fan discovery. Fans can collect all their favorite band gydgets on FanSpace so they and their friends always have access to their favorite music, videos and tour news.  See the press release here.

New Homepage launched

We’re inching ever closer to launching our new MySpace application (watch this space) and to celebrate we’ve redesigned our home page and added a ‘Most Viewed’ section – fans can click a tile to grab a most viewed gydget and add it to their MySpace, Facebook or other site.

The gallery will continue to show ‘Most Grabbed’, which gives smaller bands, teams and other organizations a chance to be grabbed by fans. Oh, and gallery search is coming real soon too!

Rest In Peace, old gydget home page. Rest In Peace.

“This thing is really neat-o, people”

Amanda, Ani DiFranco’s self-proclaimed “social networking maven”, has been generating some comment over on MySpace with her blog post “What the hell is a widget?” In part, she says:

Well, for our purposes (and the purposes of this blog), a widget is a little box that we’ve embedded into our profile that does lots of stuff. And this thing is really neat-o, people.
In one little box, you have Ani info at your fingertips, including tour dates, news updates, music, graphics, and even video…

Yup, that’s pretty much it. And our favourite response?

Clearly, a ‘widget’ is a thingumy, doohickey or whoosiewhatsit.
Whatever it is, it’s pretty cool … now I want one.

Posted by Craig Hughes on Friday, May 09, 2008 at 5:29 PM

See Ani’s cool gydget here: www.myspace.com/anidifranco

Have a Spring Fling… and Increase You Grabs

Please visit www.gydget.com/newsletters/2008-05-07 to see the online version of our latest newsletter, featuring:
* Five tips to increase your gydget grabs
* Flash tricks: add flash to your gydget
* How Gydget helps power Fancorps
* Leading festivals use Gydget
* Top 10 by grabs for April 2008

Creating a great looking gydget

If you have seen some of the great looking gydgets we have posted on the homepage you know that there are some tips-n-tricks for making them look great. The Last Goodnight, David Banner and Stroke9 have created flash movies that fill the entire gydget.

Here are the step-by-step instructions for doing it on your own:

1. Create a .swf that is 425 W x 215 H (px) at 30 frames/second.
2. Upload the .swf as the wide image under the ‘settings’ tab on gydget.com.
3. Go to the ‘tabs’ tab on gydget.com.
4. Click ‘add content tab’.
5. Call the tab ‘home’ and use this link as the image: http://attendio.cachefly.net/content/clear.png
6. At the top of the ‘tabs’ tab, select ‘home’ in the drop down next to ‘show this tab when gydget loads.’
7. Go to bottom of page and click save.

Ray J’s Sexy Gidget

Willam Ray Norwood, Jr (hence ‘Ray J’) is a singer/rapper/actor famous, or infamous, for four things:
1. He had a hit in 2005 with the single ‘One Wish’.
2. He’s the singer Brandy’s brother.
3. He once made a sex-tape with reality TV-starlet Kim Kardashian, and
4. He’s got a really cool gydget.

OK, he’s not really famous for that fourth thing. But he does have a legion of fans who are adding themselves as Top Friends and buying his new album, “All I Feel” which was released on April 8, 2008. You can listen to the first single ‘Sexy Can I’, by clicking Ray’s sexy gidget image here (actual gydget will open in new window):

March newsletter – OUT NOW…

Our March newsletter is here, featuring:
* Tips on adding YouTube Channels and new Content Tabs
* How Gydget helps power Sony BMG’s MyPlay site
* Top Grabs Contest Winner.

Check it out and, as always, please send your feedback to info@gydget.com

Pictures from South by Southwest

News from SxSW

There was a lot of buzz at SxSW about our integration with The Orchard’s new Artist/Label Workstation (TM). Now, any artist who is distributed by The Orchard will have a media-rich solution for exposing fans to new music, video and news on the leading social networking sites. That’s 10,000 new clients! The news was picked up by Billboard, VentureBeat and many other news outlets.