Enjoy and good luck…

GALACTIC GAME CHALLENGE

Enter for the chance to win $1,000!

Create a fun game with aliens, spaceships, and robots! The Sims Carnival™ makes it easy for everyone to be a game designer.
Here’s your chance to win these awesome prizes:
Winner will receive the grand prize of $1,000!
2nd and 3rd place entries will each receive a Nintendo® DS

NVIDIA Preface Gadget Development Contest

NVIDIA and Microsoft have come together to allow developers an opportunity to enter a gadget of their creation in the first contest of its kind. What gadget can you create?

Finalists will receive roundtrip airfare to attend NVIDIA’s NVISION event in San Jose, CA (August 25–27) where the winning gadget will be selected by a panel of judges from NVIDIA, Microsoft and Dell. The winner will receive a DELL XPS 420 system and have their gadget featured on the front page of NZONE.com, included in the NVIDIA newsletter, and the Windows SideShow section of Microsoft’s Windows Live Gallery.

[via Widgets Lab]

Kick start your path to healthy living…

We’ve not seen any of the KickApps Widget Studio beta or features that spawn out of this partnership, so this is a very interesting development and we’ll keep an eye on it.

KICKAPPS AND CLEARSPRING PARTNER TO
ACCELERATE WIDGET CREATION, DISTRIBUTION AND ADVERTISING

Companies Collaborate on Advancing KickApps’ WidgeAD™ Format and Clearspring’s Widget Ad Network

New York and Mc Lean, VA, June 10, 2008 — KickApps, the leading on demand social media platform, and Clearspring Technologies Inc., the world’s largest widget syndication and tracking service, today announced a strategic partnership to further accelerate widget usage and monetization. Under the agreement, Clearspring will promote KickApps’ new WYSIWYG Widget Studio (currently in beta), a self-service widget-authoring environment to the Clearspring user base. This will enable Clearspring customers to easily build their own rich-media and interactive widgets with tremendous ease. KickApps will use Clearspring’s powerful distribution and tracking services to provide one-click distribution and in-depth analytics to anyone using the KickApps Platform.

more…

PicApp.com is a service that states on their about page, “Add the best stock photos to your blog “for free!” Off course, it’s not “completely” free. You will have to give up some real estate for ads served along with the photos. It’s up to each individual person do decide if it’s worth it or not, but in our opinion it’s a pretty good compromise.

We like the “animated” version of their photo widget a bit better. The reason is that the ad is hidden after the initial load. Their classic widget displays the ad at all times and takes up more room. Both versions are embed below so you can see what we mean.

PicApp is pretty simple to use. However, the site seems a bit slow and the library of photos is currently lacking. They are a new company so we fully expect these issues to be resolved quickly.

Now, if this were a post about beach volleyball and in particular Kerri Walsh hitting against Elaine Youngs, you can see how PicApp can bring life and a lot of value to the post. And, it didn’t cost us a dime.

“Animated”

Image details: AVP San Francisco Best of the Beach Open served by picapp.com

“Classic”

Image details: AVP San Francisco Best of the Beach Open served by picapp.com