Blingo Buzz: April 2005

If you won a Blingo Movie Ticket prior to April 19th your ticket was mailed yesterday (tickets won between April 19th and 30th will go out early next week). We plan on getting your prizes to you even sooner in the future.

In case you're wondering here's what a Blingo Movie Ticket looks like.

Enjoy the show!

When we first hatched the idea for Blingo one thing was obvious -- we wanted to partner with Google for our search results. The answer to the other important aspect of Blingo -- what prizes we should give away -- has never been as obvious.

People would probably be surprised at the amount of time we spend obsessing over the prizes we offer (after all, it looks pretty simple). But there are lots of issues, and the bar is high for a Blingo prize :) We've even developed some basic principles that help us decide on the prize pool. A Blingo prize should:

1. be something that just about anybody would want, hence the reason we tend to have the most popular new gadgets along with music and movie-related prizes
2. come with everything you need to enjoy the prize, hence the reason we give you a TiVo with a year of service included (vs. just the TiVo box)
3. be small (like a movie ticket) or medium (like an iPod) vs. large (like a car). We can give away more prizes this way and let everybody have a real chance at winning (we did give away a Plasma TV one month, but in general we'd rather give away 15 iPods vs. that one TV)

Another thing we do is offer a gift certificate option. If you win an iPod (or anything except a movie ticket) and you don't want it, you can choose an Amazon Gift Certificate instead.

We're always looking at new things (like iTunes) and would love to hear from you if you've got any prize comments or ideas. Just send me an email and I'll take a look.

Welcome to the new Blingo Blog. We hope this will be a useful place to find Blingo related news, answers to common questions from Blingo users, and random thoughts related to running Blingo. If you've got a question please send me an email here.