Yesterday, I announced the New Media Super Contest, where the goal is to get as many sponsors as possible, spread the word using as much new media as possible, and then give away a lot of prizes, including cash, electronics, and a lot more. Yesterday’s announcement began the first phase, sponsor hunting. The sponsorship is off to a great start, with over $1,700 in prizes offered up in the first day. Keep watching the NMSC PRIZE TOTAL badge on the right to see the total go up and up.
While I continue to pursue and accept lots of new contest sponsors and great prizes, you can be earning early entries into the contest, before it even begins.
Just copy the code below and throw it on your blog, livejournal, myspace, forums, etc. You can also write a blog post about the contest, tweet it, or find any other creative way to spread the word. We’ll be giving out bonus prizes randomly to some of the people who help promote this contest before it starts. By the way, your tweet, blog post, etc. will still count as a regular entry, too.
However you do it, just point people to http://www.joetech.com/suggests/nmsc for the latest contest info.
HTML:
FORUM BBCODE:
Here’s what it looks like:
The more buzz we create, the more attractive the contest is to additional sponsors for even more prizes, so spread the word and let’s skyrocket that prize total! We’ve already gotten a great start, thanks to the PS3 offered up by PinkyArcade.com [UPDATE: PinkyArcade gave us the run around for months until I finally just bought the PS3 myself for the winner])!
It’s time for the biggest contest I’ve ever had on JoeTech.com. Sponsors in the “Joe Tech New Media Super Contest” will enjoy a ton of new RSS and email subscribers, site traffic, product/blog/website buzz and brand name recognition. I will be working very hard to promote the contest and in turn, the sponsors.
Here’s a few sponsorship ideas:
- CASH ($10 or more) – Think BIG
- Text link ad on your blog/site for a month.
- Text link ad on your blog/site for a year.
- Banner/125/button ad on your blog/site for a month.
- Banner/125/button ad on your blog/site for a year.
- A free review on your blog
- A free copy/license of your software
- Gift cards to Best Buy/Amazon/etc.
- Entrecard Credits (1,000 or more) – Think BIG
- Any product you would like to purchase – Think electronics (ipod, macbook, headphones, XBox, etc)
- Anything else of real value you want to offer.
The bigger the prize, the higher you get on the sponsorship list. I will start the contest in a couple weeks or so. More sponsors can join in after that, but it’s best to get in early. A big thanks goes to our first sponsor, AFrogToKiss.net. I’ve just announced this thing, and so far we have $500 in sponsorship already (this number will be updated in the image on the right).
I’m also going to be putting in more cash than I’ve ever given out in a contest before, and I’ll up the ante if I reach some goals by the contest deadline, January 1, 2009, so keep watching.
To sponsor or for more details before the contest is announced, email joe@joetech.com with the subject “New Media Super Contest”. Please include the prize you would like to offer and it’s value in US dollars.
Those of you who have been paying attention know that I posted a review of the green laser that Warnlaser sent me. Then I followed that up with a contest to give away my green laser, and all you had to do was comment, favorite, tweet, or stumble for entries.
There were only a handful of entries, but I still saw some avid participation. It should be noted that there were a lot of comments on various photos, on Flickr, when only comments on the single laser photo counted as entries. So here’s the breakdown of entries:
Comments on either post (12):
Comments on the one Flickr photo (3):
Fav on Flickr photos (2):
Tweeted post (2):
Stumbled post (8):
As always, I headed over to random.org to pick a winner:
Our winner is MarixD. Get me your address privately and I’ll send your new laser out.
Don’t worry. If you didn’t win this contest, I’m sure I’ll have another very soon. If you can’t wait, check out some of the other cool contests around the web:
- Kid Tech Guru is celebrating 3 months of blogging with over $400 in prizes
- MiniSpace.com is also giving away a Macbook Air in their design contest, which I will be entering for sure.
There’s tons of contests out there and lots of free stuff to be had, so search the web for them, or just subscribe to my blog and I’ll mention more when I do another contest.
As I have mentioned in the past, I rely on Windows XP for my television needs. I have cable coming into the PC, which acts as a Tivo-like digital video recorder and then feeding the source back out to my TV. It’s cheaper than Tivo (I don’t pay anything per month to record), and I can play downloaded media, etc. on it. The only downfall is that I’m tethered by a corded mouse and keyboard. In fact, I have to be right in front of it to do anything. With a 52 inch TV, that’s a bit of an eye (and back) strain. Those days are over. Keep reading and watch the video to see what I mean.
A discovery
A week or two ago, I came across something called the Air Mouse. It’s an iPhone app that communicates with a server instance to become a wireless air mouse for whatever computer the server instance is running on. It’s a great idea, but I’m always busy and quickly pushed it aside for another time, thinking the install would take forever and it wouldn’t work that well anyway. Boy was I wrong.
Installing Air Mouse
What’s worse than having to go through a long, tedious install? Doing so on a computer with a barely-working input system. This was part of my hesitation. I bit the $6 bullet and installed the iPhone application. This was the easy part. Then, I downloaded the server application to my laptop and then moved it over to my TV PC. I then ran it and the install took about 90 seconds total, which was a nice surprise. An even nicer surprise was that the they communicated right away and just started working. Awesome! Well, not totally… Keep reading.
Using Air Mouse
Using this thing took a little fumbling around, but that’s because I missed the link to their Air Mouse help page. This page is refreshingly complete, full of all the information you could want about how the app works, unlike some apps I’ve installed.
With the application, you can use your iPhone like an actual air mouse, waving your mouse around to move the cursor, or like a laptop’s touch pad, moving your thumb across the surface to move the cursor. The touchpad option is much easier to jump right into, giving you more control right away, but the air mouse option would be ideal in terms of flexibility with the learning curve trade-off. Whichever you choose, it’s simple and it just works well. On top of all the mouse goodness, it comes with a built-in keyboard that they promise we’ll be able to hide when we’re not using it. I no longer have to get off the couch to type in a web address on the TV.
Because I am the only one who really does anything other than watch TV on my TV PC, the fact that MY iPhone must be used for it to work is fine. In the 1/2 hour I’ve had it installed, I’ve already done a few things on that machine that I had been putting off due to the mobility constraints posed by my previous mouse/keyboard solution.
This is probably the best money I’ve spent in the iPhone Apps store. Here’s that video of the Air Mouse in use.
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