To kick off the launch of WorldSings, the company is launching their annual contest which is open to any musician or band performing original music. After creating a profile and uploading content, artists can participate in the contest while also growing their fan base through traditional social networking. On WorldSings, artists are expected to interact directly with fans via wall posts, chat, and direct messages.

Artists also get to know who exactly their fans are as WorldSings plans on sharing key demographic information regarding fans' age, gender, location, etc.

About the Competition

The World's Best Song competition, an effort to expand people's musical knowledge, is somewhat like a cross between an American Idol-type competition (or any of its overseas counterparts) and the Eurovision Song Contest, a popular European contest and one of the longest-running TV shows in the world. On WorldSings, fans will vote for their favorite songs throughout the year and on March 19th, 2010, the top 20 vote getters will fly to Las Vegas, Nevada to compete in a live competition at Planet Hollywood. The winner of the competition will receive $500,000 and the title of World's Best Song. The other $500,000 will be divvied up among the other 19 finalists.  Music fans have an opportunity to win, too. They can compete for prizes during the year including the grand prize - an opportunity to fly to Vegas to see the top artists perform.

Without the competition aspect to WorldSings, the social network would just be too much like MySpace Music to be of interest to anyone but the most serious of music aficionados. However, the contest could actually be a big draw for this new music destination site. Don't believe us? Just look at the millions of viewers tuning into American Idol and Eurovision's Song Contest.

WorldSings will officially launch during SXSW on Friday, but it opens to the public today.

The contest was meant to showcase extensions that made use of the new capabilities Mozilla introduced in Firefox 3 and managed to combine this with excellent usability and the use of open standards.

Pencil, one of the three Grand Prize winners, is an easy to use tool for GUI prototyping and diagramming, which makes uses of Firefox's SVG support for rendering and scripting. It's obviously not the most exciting of applications, but it works as advertised and is a great tool for anybody who needs to draw up a GUI prototype quickly.

The second Grand Prize winner, Tagmarks, adds a set of icons to your URL bar that allows you to easily add tags to your bookmarks or to quickly bookmark and tag a page at the same time. Out of all the plugins in the contest, this one is probably the most immediately useful. Adding tags to a bookmark can be useful, but few people make use of this capability. Tagmarks also allows you to safe your links to Delicious in addition to your local bookmarks.

The third Grand Prize winner is also a tagging extension: HandyTag. HandyTag suggests tags for your bookmarks based on the tags you have already used, tags given by Delicious users, and tags HandyTag's keyword extractor suggests.

Fire.fm

Fire.fm, the best new music add-on, gives you easy access to your stations on our favorite streaming music site, Last.fm. Fire.fm works exactly as advertised and provides a nice way to play music through Last.fm without having to keep a browser window open. You can also easily access your favorite stations by just typing in a few letters into the URL bar.

1) One free ticket to the event, valued at $695.00;

2) And for those of you who won't be in California at the time, we're also giving away a free Microsoft software pack, featuring Microsoft Vista and Office 2007.

So we'll select 2 winners - one for a local Silicon Valley resident or someone in the area on 15 Nov, and the Microsoft prize for someone who can't make the Mobility event.

To enter, all you have to do is tell us - in the comments here - what is your current favorite Mobile Web app, and why. It's that easy. I'm really curious to know what peoples favorite Mobile Web apps are - e.g. what is your best iPhone app, or what you play with most on your Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, etc! Simply leave a comment here and you're in the running for the two prizes. Please also tell us if you can attend Under the Radar Mobility, so we know whether to consider you for that prize. The two winners will be randomly drawn.

Thanks Dealmaker Media for the two prizes. We also have a $100 VIP discount for the Mobility event - click here to get that.

UPDATE: The winners have now been announced.