We certainly brought you Monet, the Concorde, Debussy and the croissant (sheer genius). While I’m at it, we can also take credit for the metric system (sorry to our US members!) and the not-so-humble cabaret. And then of course, there’s the bicycle and let’s not forget creme brulée.

But you can thank us for these things later. In the meantime, it seems only fitting that we also had a hand in creating Myows, the global platform to help creative folk protect the integrity and value of their Original Work through registering and managing their copyrights. But you knew that.

Even more fitting: as of today, Myows is available in French!

After considerable effort and many cups of (good French-pressed) coffee, Myows is now available to the Francophone world.

Considering that French is spoken by over half a billion people worldwide (from Mauritius to Quebec, from Paris to Laos) we think that’s quite an accomplishment! What’s more, for 136 million people, French is their native language (mother-tongue speakers).

To be sure, not all of these individuals are creative and even fewer have access to a decent computer… but for those who do and who are, simply select French from the drop down menu in the top right hand corner of your Myows homepage and you’ll be good to go.

Voilà et Bienvenue dans un Monde plus sûr pour vos Droits d’auteurs.

NB: It’s been a lot of work and the French site still has a lot of things that are needed, so please view it as an early Beta. For instance, I still need to record the screencasts and some links might redirect you to English pages instead of their French counterparts – we’ll address that. You may report bugs and give your impressions about what we’re busy achieving on the Myows French Forum. Thanks in advance for your understanding and support.

This is just a quick note to let you know that the votes are in. Our expert panel of judges (including Max, Dave, Jonathan Bailey (from Plagiarism Today), Adii (from Woothemes) and myself) has finally come to a decision!

Once again thanks to everyone for their sterling input, time and energy. And so (he says opening the blue envelope…), the $1000 cash prize for overall coolest App that best met the criteria set is (drumroll) the very useful and well executed Myows Drupal Module developed by WildPeaks.

We will be in contact with you shortly to get your prize to you. Thanks again to everyone for contributing to the Myows vision and helping us help you!

Vote for your favorite app and we’ll double your Myows storage space
(from 500MB to 1GB).

Simple, just the way we like it.

Now comes the hard part: deciding on the winners.

Luckily, this is a team effort though, so we’re counting on you guys to cast your vote and help us decide who takes home the now cliched (but still very desirable) iPad prizes! Remember the original brief:

We were looking for plug-ins, add-ons and stand alone applications that improve the user experience and add useful functionality:

1- Use the new Myows API to develop a plug-in, add-on or stand alone application that assists other Myows members in registering, protecting and/or managing their rights

2- Develop this solution in a way that allow users to access key functionality in 4 steps or less

3- Implement your code and design with integrity, simplicity and elegance

The FIVE CONTENDERS ARE (In no particular order ):

——————-

1 -> Owit (WP plugin)

5 -> Myows for WordPress (WP plugin)

——————-

As usual, we want to keep this simple and make it as easy as possible for you to voice your opinion.

Just head over to this forum thread and leave a comment mentioning which App is your favorite.

Voting ends on the 31st of May. We’re seriously looking forward to your feedback!

Thanks guys.

The deadline for submissions has arrived and we are proud to present the five entries that will compete in our 4 Step Api Challenge. We’re very impressed by the look of things but let’s give these external apps and plugins a spin and start posting our feedback.

Drupal Module

A feature-rich integration of your Drupal content with Myows

ShirtSafe

This has been designed to leverage the Myows service for users of Printfection.com

Owit WordPress Plugin

A slick WordPress plugin to register your WP Media to Myows.

CapOW

A fantastically easy way to register a website’s design with Myows- just enter the URL.

Myows for WordPress

Currently, you’ll notice that the ambitious “Myows for WordPress” isn’t quite finished – We at Myows take the blame as we’ve been extremely busy and still need to answer a few of the developer’s questions. In light of these special circumstances, I trust you’ll understand that we’ve allowed the plugin to be finalized in a few days, and that voting shall then begin.

Thank You

Thank you to the participating developers who are revolutionizing the ways in which we can protect our work – you will be upgraded to the soon-to-be-launched Pro Accounts and we look forwards to shipping 2 iPads and 1000$ prize – but more importantly, thank you for growing our Copyright Oasis, we are so grateful you chose to contribute your time, talent and expertise to our cause, and to have you in our community.

As you might know, we are running a Challenge to celebrate the launch of our API. We even published a tutorial on nettuts to help you get started.

The deadline for our challenge had been set at the end of the week.

There’s some pretty impressive apps in the making that will revolutionize the way most of us manage our copyrights ( and so far we have two amazing entries – ShirtSafe and Owit WP plugin – please give them a try ), but after contacting privately the participating developers, we have decided to allow you more time to submit your entry too. So everyone wins in the Myowsphere!

On Sunday, we will close the entries for “Round 1″ of the contest and you will get to vote for your favorite app.

If more than 3 apps have entered, and are in a working state, the contest will go ahead as originally planned.

If not, the winner of “Round 1″ will receive an iPad and we will start “Round 2″ of the challenge. The app which receives the most votes during “Round 2″ will also win an iPad, and the Grand Jury prize will consider all apps and our favorite will receive 1000$. Every participating developer will also be upgraded to our soon-to-be-launched Pro Accounts.

The deadline for “Round 2″ is set to the 15th June 2010, and voting will take place until the end of June. Participants of “Round 1″ will be entered into “Round 2″.

Code-wranglers, we’re counting on you, and our team is here to help.

Take fuss-free copyright management to the next level.

Get your hands dirty with Myows’ publicly available API, fresh from the desks of our globally-scattered development team. This brings us one step closer to our platform-vision: helping the planet’s switched-on creative community help themselves. We’re looking for Myows members to help us add further functionality to the existing app at Myows.com. The brief is straightforward:

1- Use the new Myows API to develop a plug-in, add-on or stand alone application that assists other Myows members in registering, protecting and/or managing their rights

2- Develop this solution in a way that allow users to access key functionality in 4 steps or less

3- Implement your code and design with integrity, simplicity and elegance

We’re looking for plug-ins, add-ons and stand alone applications that improve the user experience and add useful functionality. To participate, you’ll need to create a thread before 15th May in our API forum category and provide a link to a demo of your app.

Fellow Myows users will have the opportunity to vote for their favorites from 15th till 31st May 2010. The winner takes home an Apple iPad (yeah, we’re self-funded!) and so does the runner-up (…yet generous!). We are also busy putting together a panel of industry heavyweights to award a jury’s grand prize of 1000$ to the app that best fulfills conditions 1,2 & 3 above.

Finally, any developer who creates an app we deem to be even vaguely useful and presentable will receive a lifetime Myows pro account (valued at over 1000$). Again – that’s just the kind of guys we are.

Feel free to create apps for resale (on Themeforest or CodeCanyon for instance) or build your own business on top of the Myows API. Obviously, we’d like you much more if you made your work available to the world for free, but we’ll get over it.

Feel free to run ideas and questions by the Myows team and other members by posting them up on the Forum. We are all here to help. Good luck. Be creative.

EDIT: Nettuts has published a video tutorial prepared by Dave:
How to Create an App with the Myows API (15 minutes).

A little over two weeks since opening Myows for Beta testing, we have done some nifty changes to the homepage (If you’re logged in, you’ll need to log out to view it).

jQuery to the rescue

We switched from a Flash-based header, built with the Gaia Flash Framework, to a jQuery-powered approach.

The immediate benefits should include :

1. Faster loading times
2. Ability to track conversion rates and clickmaps
3. Compatibility with devices who don’t support Flash
4. Better indexing
5. Increased UX
6. Scalability

I would love to hear what you think of it!

We now offer 500MB of free storage

During BETA testing, we’re now giving everybody 500MB to kick off with.

We may amend this in future depending on usage patterns and user feedback (rest assured: BETA testers will always have at least 500MB available to them).

Remember, Myows can optimize the size of the files you upload to save you space so 500 Megs should allow you to realistically store about 2500 images or 15,000 text files without paying a cent.

If you reach your storage limit, contact us and we’ll see if we can hook you up with a little extra room.

So if you’re haven’t done so already, get your free Myows account and start managing your copyright in a matter of minutes.

We are live, we’re in Beta and we’re ready to protect and serve with the most comprehensive set of free copyright management tools available.

Myows is more than an app, it’s a movement: forward-thinking global creatives who respect the originality and integrity of their work and expect others to do the same. It is our stated mission to reduce the incidence of online copyright theft by 20% by 2020.

We’re going to do it but we need your backing… starting today.

Sign up already!

If you haven’t set up an account on Myows, here are three really good reasons why you should:

1) Prevention is better than cure

myows makes it extraordinarily easy (and free) to protect your original works (OWs) as you create them, providing evidence of your copyright as you work: prevention is better than cure.

The upload process is super simple – you’re just a few clicks away from creating the copyright evidence you need! Get your myows account

2) A true one stop shop.

It’s also the world’s only total copyright management solution that we know of, allowing you to keep track of your copyrights, assign licenses, deter theft and pursue perps – all from a single (and sexy) platform.

In addition to assigning rights, attaching supporting documents and providing easy access to sound legal advice and templates, myows also helps you deal with infringements step by step, in a legally compliant way, for free. The software will even build a reliable case history for you as you progress.

3) Safety in numbers

You get to tap into a global network of talented creatives who have got your back wherever you are: .

Warn would-be perps that you’re part of Myows, you’ve registered and protected your work and that you’ll take action if your work is copied without your permission.

Expect this

The Myows blog is here to educate and enlighten myows users and cunning creatives the world over.

We’re here to know everything there is to know about our rights and how to protect our work without incurring massive legal bills or looking like a monkey.

We’ll also expose the odd content thief and style pirate and keep you updated on what’s happening in the riveting world of copyrights and intellectual property (someone’s got to do it).

Want to fully familiarise yourself with the free Myows app? Take a few minutes out of your day, turn on the left side of your mind and explore myows.com for a cool video intro, tuts, Q & As and a basic overview of what we’ve put together for you.