Introducing direct, branded URLs to your mobile page

You may remember, in addition to your keyword and shortcode (Remember "send McAlister to 43863?), you also have your own branded URL, that your fans can use on their PCs or their phones. It's short and simple:
http://adva.us/mcalister
or
http://advamobile.com/mcalister

Those URLs always brought you to your mobile home page. Not anymore.


Choose any of the following to send your fans to the correct page you want them to go.
For example:
http://adva.us/mcalister?p=b will send your fans to your mobile "Buy" page (your merchandise page).
http://adva.us/mcalister?p=t will send your fans to your mobile "Tweet" page.

So, what do you need to do? simply add "?p=" and the page key to your URLs and you're done!
The page keys are:
h: home (example: http://adva.us/mcalister?p=h)
b: buy (merchandise page) (example: http://adva.us/mcalister?p=b)
g: gigs (example: http://adva.us/mcalister?p=g)
t: tweet (example: http://adva.us/mcalister?p=t)
l: blog (example: http://adva.us/mcalister?p=l)
n: news (example: http://adva.us/mcalister?n=h)
u: buzz (example: http://adva.us/mcalister?p=u)
a: about (example: http://adva.us/mcalister?p=a)
r: request gig (example: http://adva.us/mcalister?p=r)

That's it!
As always, feel free to send us ideas and comment to here

Your Tweets are now visible!

Hi again,
We've just introduced a correction to the way tweets are presented, following some of your reviews: Previously, if you tweeted about a band on their mobile page, you couldn't actually see your tweet. That has to do with how we're tied to the Twitter API.
But now it's fixed. As soon as you hit the "Tweet" button, the page will refresh, and along the older tweets we collect from the web, you will see your recent tweets at the top of the list.

Just makes it a little more fun =)

How about trying it now? Brimstone's artists would love to hear from you!

Couple minor changes on the home page

Hi all,
We're celebrating these days our 400th artist to get their own mobile fan club! It's very exciting for us and along hard work, we're happy to see artists communicate with their fans using the SMS blast tool, fans downloading music and watching videos, and everyone benefiting from our free service.
To celebrate this occasion, we're introducing 3 changes to the home page, requested by many artists:

• Highlight tickets on sale right on the mobile home page: Whenever you set gig tickets for sale, the nearest 3 gigs that have tickets on sale will show right at the bottom of your home page. This way, it's not intrusive to the fan who just wants to listen to your music, but it does a better job of making your tickets visible to those fans who will be interested in them.
  
  
• Highlight merchandise on the home page: Similarly, we've been requested to give you tools to promote the merchandise on sale better. One way to do that, we've taken 3 of your merchandise items and highlighted them at the bottom of the home page. Again, with the intention of not being obtrusive about it, just serving you and the fans who want T-shirts, CDs etc.
  
  
• Last, a very minor change to the footer, in which the links are now one below the other, a little like an iPhone interface. Slightly nicer.
  
  

We hope you like those changes and use them to promote tickets and merch to your fans. As always, feel free to give us more direction and feedback here.

Brimstone Radio and Adva Mobile Announce Mobile Marketing and Internet Radio Collaboration

We're very excited to announce our partnership with Brimstone, an artist promotion company and internet radio station. Brimstone Radio will offer mobile marketing services from Adva Mobile to promote Artists featured on Brimstone Radio.

From the press release:

"Fans of Brimstone Radio can now find this Internet Radio pioneer on their mobile

phones, where they can discover new music, learn about Brimstone Radio sponsored

events, watch videos, download content, purchase merchandise and interact socially

with other Brimstone Radio fans. Their services are provided through powerful mobile

marketing software developed by Adva Mobile.

In addition, music artists featured on Brimstone Radio can offer their own mobile

marketing service to their fans, including mobile messaging and mobile-optimized web

sites that offer a variety of content and activities such as news, music and video

downloads, interviews, ticket and merchandise sales, recommendations about other

artists and influences, contests, voting, raffles, backstage passes, text to screen, and

more. Brimstone Radio and their musicians sites are linked together to enable easy

discovery of new music and musicians on the sites."

"Brad Simmons, Founder, Brimstone Radio: “Setting your

band apart is paramount in this “New Age” of indie music

and partnering with Adva Mobile is a huge step in that

process. Adding mobile interaction to their arsenal will

certainly enable our family of artists to build a strong and

interactive fan base.”"

Check out their mobile site by texting "Brimstone" to 43863 or clicking here.

Read more here.

We're now part of MHT's "5 startups to follow"

We're very proud to join MHT's list of "Startup Watch: Five you should follow". It's a big deal for us and we hope to earn more titles like this in the near future.
Read more here.

Announcing our new partnership with Microfundo!

We're very excited to announce new partnership with a very important and innovative player in the music space, Microfundo.

Microfundo will use mobile marketing services from Adva Mobile to enable mobile

microfinancing for International Music Artists. From the press release:

...thanks to a new Boston-based business collaboration between Microfundo and

Adva Mobile, aspiring musicians are getting a helping hand - from fans using their

mobile phones.

The idea is simple: Fans lend money via their mobile phone to support music projects of their favorite musicians. Fans are then repaid via revenue from future download sales of the artist’s music.

Musicians create their own mobile site that displays their microfunding campaign.

Musicians make direct appeals to fans at a concert or live event. Fans can respond and

contribute - in the moment – using their phones.

Microfundo CEO and co-founder Brad Powell got the idea bringing microfunding to the

music industry while working for Calabash Music, the online world-music company that

he also founded. “All of the artists I came into contact with faced the same financial

hurdle,” Powell says. “They needed capital. Most international artists in particular are

ignored by the mainstream music industry, creating a significant hurdle.”

Powell found a solution in one word: microfinance. He studied how international

microfinancing organizations like kiva.org arranged for investors to provide funds and

services to small businesses typically shunned by banks. He concluded it would not be

too hard to start something similar to support musicians.

“If this is working well for people who are funding what are basically complete strangers

in a foreign land,” he said, “why wouldn’t it work for music fans to fund artists whose

music they actually know and like.”

This is very exciting to us, specifically because we, too, believe that researching and finding new ways for artists to stay creative is vital for us to enjoy their creation.

So please, visit Microfundo's mobile website, check out their artists and help them bring you great music!

Oops...

Hi all,
Guess we just joined the list of services brought down by usage...good/bad news!
Yesterday around 5PM EST we had an hour where our server was down by usage, so first, SORRY to anyone who tried using us and couldn't. We've resurrected the issue and allocated more resources so it doesn't happen anytime soon (and hopefully never again).

If you were in any way affected by the outage and need assistance, please do let us know.

Thanks, & keep rockin'!
Adva Team

Announcing Concertwire partnership

We're very excited to announce one of the most important partnerships to date, with Concertwire. The Concertwire mobile fan club is essentially a promoter account for us. We're promoting over 100 shows in the next 3 months, including direct access to the artist information and tickets for each of the shows. Over time, as more Concertwire artists get their own mobile fan club, the link from the show will link directly to their mobile fan club page.

This announcement is important because of two reasons:

• First, we're revealing a new set of promoter-oriented features (check it out):
  
  
  
  • Promotion of a series of shows controlled by Concertwire.
    
  
  
  • Direct access to extended show information, including location, time and description.
    
  
  
  • Direct access to artist information as well as tickets information.
    
  
  
  • Quick show discovery function by date, artist, venue and city.
    
  
  


• Second, Concertwire is a great partner to launch with. They understand the value in strond fan relationships and how mobile is a great and effective new medium to access the fans and give them an optimal experience.
  

To read more about the announcement, read here.

And, if you're interested in your own promoter account, write to us!