esnippers' den

The Karaoke Contest started today!

The eSnips Karaoke Contest started today and we're all very curious to see which song will win. They are all excellent; it's definitely going to be very difficult to choose a favorite to vote for.
You can see all the participating songs on the special karaoke homepage during the next week.

But to make it even easier for you to ensure you don't miss any of them, here is the full list of contenders (in random order):

• Micky sings Bridge Over Troubled Waters
• Dale sings When the Thought of You Catches Up With Me
• Ed sings Wicked Game
• Genise sings Walking in the Rain
• Foxe sings Pour Me
• Rachael sings Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again
• mightymann sings Oh Darlin'
• Melissa sings There You'll Be
• Agnosie sings Sustaining Swag
• B11Bobster sings Heaven
• Jayelsae sings Whatever Lola Wants
• Achint sings I Can't Unlove You
• Ritisroo sings My Immortal
• Fierynette sings I've Got to See You Again
• Connie (Heads Together) sings The Greatest Man I Ever Knew
• John sings Country Partners
• Roy (kingk) sings You'll Never Find
• Layla Hamilton sings Ganz Alleine
• Mezzo sings Cry Me a River
• Milo sings Ticket to Ride
• Michelle sings Simply The Best
• Nikkou sings Wonderful Tonight
• WMXX sings Macy's Day Parade
• Jaywalker sings Mary
• Terry (rockinchic66) sings No Rain
• Markisrael21 sings One Moment in Time
• Rush sings Separate Ways
• Casinogirlishere sings Still the One

I suggest you start listening to them now; you only have a week to decide which one to vote for :-)

eSnips Karaoke Contest begins in 5 days

Have you submitted your song?  Did you forget?  It’s not too late! Submit your best karaoke performance by tagging it with "karaoke_week_summer06" and we'll be in touch with you.

Here are a few suggestions we have on how you can improve your chances of winning the contest (and the iPod nano, of course):

• Make sure you describe your competing song with the song title, the original artist, and, if you wish, a bit about your interpretation.
• Make sure you uploaded your picture to your profile page. Remember: you and your song will be featured on the homepage during the contest week; people will want to see what you look like!
• Invite all your friends and family to listen to the competing songs during the contest week and to vote for their favorite.
• Do you have a website or blog? Perfect. Place an eSnips widget of your song on your site and make it easy for your visitors to go, listen and vote for it.
• Let us know what websites and forums you and your karaoke friends love to visit, and we'll try to promote the contest in these sites.

More information on the contest can be found on the contest page and the detailed contest rules are here.
Good luck to everyone!

Karaoke Week & Contest to start July 31 (and more important details)

What a great reaction we've had for the Karaoke Week! Thank you to all you singers out there, we didn't expect so many songs to be submitted. We want to feature each and every one of you on our homepage next week. And since we want to be fair to everyone, we ask that you pick one song, your absolute favorite. Make sure you choose your best performance because this song will be featured on the eSnips homepage during the Karaoke Week!
I will contact all participating eSnippers directly with more information.

The contest will start on July 31 and will end August 6. Each competing song will be featured on the eSnips homepage during this week and the song with the most votes will win an iPod (iPod nano 2GB). Anyone can vote, so invite all your friends to listen and pick their winner.

It's not too late to join the contest. Choose your best song and tag it with the special contest tag: "karaoke_week_summer06".

Brad is chasing nature images

Brad recently joined eSnips and he shares his amazing photographs of nature on his bradmancha's Photos folder. Brad mentions on his profile page:

"The beauty and richness that surrounds each of us every day is often overlooked or even not looked for by many in their daily lives and our hope is to share a little of that beauty that we find with others through our images."

Here are a few examples of Brad's great work, but you really should go and check them all out.

         

         

Karaoke Week on eSnips – sing your heart out and win an iPod!

The next eSnips Spotlight Week is coming up at the end of the month and this time we’ll put the spotlight on our wonderful community of karaoke singers. Karaoke Week will feature singing eSnippers (you know who you are) performing their favorite songs. But it gets better: one of you will win an iPod!

More information on the contest will come soon, but why wait? Submit your songs today. All you have to do is tag your best song (or songs, if you're really good) with the following tag: karaoke_week_summer06.
Only songs tagged with karaoke_week_summer06 will enter the contest (please make sure you tag the file itself and not the entire folder).

Be sure to invite all your karaoke buddies too. The more songs we have, the better the competition will be.

In honor of the Karaoke Week we even made Snippy, our eSnips bird, sing :-)

Rachael's Art

Another wonderful artist joined our eSnips community: Rachael Pennington.
Rachael is a painter:

and a photographer:

She also sells some of her art on eSnips. She sells both paintings and photographs, and they are amazing.

Be sure to check them out!

eSnips Marketplace – eSnips introduces e-commerce

As you may have noticed, we recently added a cool new feature to eSnips – the eSnips Marketplace. It enables you to use PayPal payment services to sell individual items in your eSnips folders.
Check out the TechCrunch post on the new feature here.
We introduced this capability because we noticed that a large group of artists, musicians and photographers have been using eSnips to publish their creative work. We were very excited with this use as we’ve always viewed eSnips as a sort of online street fair. We’ve also noticed that several designers really want to sell their creations, and have resorted to asking visitors to email them with requests. And so, we wanted to offer eSnippers basic e-commerce tools and provide an easy, simple way to sell their creations to other eSnippers. Here's a great example of an item for sale on eSnips (one of my favorites):

Read more about it on Yael's blog.

eSnips Open Studio Week

Our very first User Spotlight Week launched on the eSnips homepage - Open Studio Week.
eSnips Open Studio features 7 amazing artists who sell their art and music on eSnips. Take a look around the studios and let the artists know what you think!
We are also asking anyone who would like to join the next Open Studio week to contact us. More on that here.
We'll be introducing a new User Spotlight every few weeks; the next one will be Karaoke Week. If you're a singer (and not only in the shower) and interested in participating in our Karaoke Week, send me an email.
And as always, if you have suggestions for more User Spotlight Weeks, I'd love to hear about it.

Invite anyone to be a member of your eSnips folders

If you want to make it easier for your friends to know when something new happens in your eSnips folder – then invite them to be members of your folder. Members of a public eSnips folder will get notifications about recent updates to the folder so that you no longer need to ask "did you hear my latest song?"
Start by clicking on the "Invite People" link on the right side of the folder (under "Things you can do"):

 
Then enter your friends' emails in the "Invite by email" box and tell them a little bit about what the folder is about by editing the "Subject" and "Message" of the email invitation.

After you click on "Send Invitation", everyone you invited will receive an email with a link to the folder. As soon as they click on the link and visit your folder they become members of the folder and they get special treatment! They'll receive a notification when something has been updated, posted or uploaded to this folder. They can receive an email or a desktop notification (your friends can choose in which way and how often they receive these updates).
If your friends are eSnippers too, the updates will also appear on the "Latest News" section of their eSnips homepage. A link to the folder will also be listed under "Friends Folders" so it can be easily accessed.
Invite your friends to be members and you'll be sure everyone knows what's going on!

Service downtime

There was an unexpected technical problem yesterday and eSnips was inaccessible for a few hours.
The problem was fixed as quickly as possible and all is back to normal now. We know how annoying it can be and sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. We are making every effort to avoid the re-occurrence of such incidents. Please email me or contact our support team if you have any questions or concerns.