Disclaimer: Seagate is one of my sponsors and this post is part of that sponsorship.

Next week Seagate will announce some new hard drives on Tuesday — they are pretty cool drives, I got a preview under embargo that’ll run on Tuesday, September 16th 2008, on FastCompanyTV. Bill Watkins, CEO, will ring the bell at NASDAQ. But here’s a way you can win one of these new drives by doing nothing but using FriendFeed or Twitter.

On Tuesday at noon Eastern I’ll be standing by the Kodak sign in New York City’s Times Square (on side of Marriott Marquis hotel). I’ll have 20 drives. First 20 people to show me what Twitter or FriendFeed account they learned about the contest from will win a drive. So that’s one way you’ll win a drive, but that requires you to be in Times Square on Tuesday at noon. Not that easy for most of you.

But, not only will those 20 people win drives, but the 20 people who they learned about the contest from will also win a drive (we’ll send those to you).

All you need to do is Twitter or FriendFeed about the contest, tell your friends who’ll be in New York on Tuesday to come by and pick up a drive and you’ll win a drive too (these are cool drives, by the way, more about them on Tuesday).

Oh, and what happens if one of the 20 say they learned about the contest from me? Well, we’ll put that drive in a pool and randomly give it away to someone who Twittered or FriendFeeded about it.

Why only Twitter or FriendFeed? Because they both have great search engines that we can use to track your Tweets or FF items.

Make sure you include the word “Seagate” in your post. Also, yes, lawyers are involved and Seagate will have some rules and regulations up shortly and I’ll link to those on Monday.

Some ideas to help you win? If you have friends in NYC, make sure they know about the contest. Blog about your Tweet/FF item. Digg your Tweet/FF. Email your Tweet/FF around.

Any questions?

What’s the most successful new company out there of the past two years?

I’d argue it’s iLike, a music sharing and discovery service that came out on Facebook first, but has moved other places.

When I quit Microsoft they had no users.

Today they have 30 million.

How did THAT happen? It wasn’t because they got bloggers all hot and bothered about them. They didn’t win any contests. I don’t even think they showed up at Demo or TechCrunch or other industry conferences. If they did, they didn’t cause any headlines on blogs about how they were going to be THE next hot thing.

What did they do? They were first out the gate on Facebook’s application platform. That was a real paradigm shift. It was the first application platform I remember where I could see the apps YOU had loaded.

Second datapoint?

Yesterday I ran into the founders of Posimotion. Their company didn’t exist a few months ago, but today they are seeing 50,000 downloads a day of their iPhone apps. I don’t remember THEM being talked about anywhere, or on any famous tech blogs, but they are kicking but and well on their way to being a dominant software firm. How did they do it?

They were first out of the gate on the iPhone.

By the way, talking about the iPhone, Posimotion has some awesome iPhone apps.

Almost all of their apps are NOT free ones, so you can guess how much revenue per day is flowing into this very small company (which isn’t venture funded, by the way). Here’s my favorites from their 12 apps:

A level is a leveler which uses the iPhone to level picture frames and stuff like that. It’s a very cool use of the iPhone’s accelerometer.

Ever forget where you parked your car? If you used G Park you’d never forget again (it uses the GPS to memorize where you parked).

Golf Flyover is for golfers who want to know where to play golf and it uses the GPS in the iPhone to tell them information about the courses they are playing.

Pool is a fun game and well done using iPhone’s touch surface.

Well, since I’m irrelevant, I think I’ll take the rest of the day off! Heheheh.

Congrats to all the physicists at CERN for getting the Large Hadron Collider up and running. Twitter and FriendFeed are going nuts.

Earlier this year physicist Frank Taylor gave me a tour of the LHC, which is up here.

Part I
Part II

Just look at the home page of Twitter’s search engine to see the trending topics are all about LHC right now. Even Google got into the act and changed its logo worldwide to one depicting the LHC. Here’s FriendFeed’s search engine for LHC.