Blingo Buzz: November 2005

One of our biggest fans, Jake McKee, has a great job: according to his blog he helps the LEGO Company understand and communicate with its adult fans. Nice, huh? Since Blingo is located at the edge of Silicon Valley, we've run across many, many adult LEGO fans in our days. A choo-choo going around a programmer's desk is a fantastic motivator. No seriously.

Jake recently posted about his Blingo winnings on his blog, a frequently updated site full of interesting tech news and observations (and powered by software that Jake developed). We discovered his site back in April when he wrote lots of nice things about us, here, here, and here.

Thanks, Jake! We're glad it's paying off.

When Jaime started using Blingo as his regular search engine in September, he seemed pretty skeptical. But just a couple of months later, we won him over:

I questioned whether I would ever win after my previous post about Blingo, but sure enough tonight I hit the jackpot (if you consider a $10 iTunes gift certificate a jackpot). I don’t think a $10 gift certificate is too shabby for just doing a search that I needed to do anyways.
(via his blog)

Cool. Oh, he also mentions that he forgot what he was searching for when we interrupted him. No worries, Jaime. Next time just click "return to your search" after you claim your prize and we'll take you to your results as if nothing ever happened.

Hey look, a picture of an actual real live winner — not just the prize but the winner herself.

Congrats, twodolla, and congrats to your pals, and still more congrats to the other winning Flickr users who we've already mentioned.

Update: another winner appears.

This nice note arrived in our email box this morning:

i just got my $100 VISA Gift Card and wanted to thank you! Thanks to you, I was able to buy Mario Kart DS, a star wars collectible, and 2 large pizza pies for my friends and I. I still have $20 left! This was the very first time I've ever won anything and it feels great!

Congratulations! For some reason this note made us hungry.

If you've been paying attention to our home page you've probably noticed that we added a new prize this month: a portable DVD player. We've already given a few of them away, but don't worry — there are more in the mix.

This thing is cool. It's smaller and lighter than a laptop so you can take it with you on a road trip or in the air, and it even has two headphone jacks so you can share it with a friend.

Of course if you win a portable DVD player but don't want it or already have one, you can choose to receive a Visa Gift Card instead. That's an option on all of our larger prizes. Our smaller prizes have options too: if you win a movie ticket you can take an iTunes gift certificate instead, and vice-versa. It's the Blingo way.

Sometimes our users sum it up better than we do:

Easier than eating ice cream!
Guys, this is so amazingly awesome. It's been around for almost a year, so I'm super sad that I didn't know about it earlier.
(via Josh or his alter ego)

Yep, Blingo is easier than eating ice cream. No offers to sign up for, no points to tally, no drawings to keep track of — just randomly-distributed instant prizes for doing what you do already.

Here's another user who expresses a common first reaction to Blingo:

Okay, at first this seems like one of those annoying ad-infused search engines from the 2000 era where they promised they were giving away $1 million if you searched using their [ahem] website. But I came across it today via Komodo Media and decided to try it out.
....
No spam. Just good clean fun.
(via oranghat)

Thank you, gentlemen. Best of luck to you both. May you find what you're looking for and receive a nice surprise one day for your efforts.

We love the way people take pictures of their Blingo loot and show them to their friends online. Did you notice that Blingo photos have started popping up on Flickr? We noticed because our kind and excited users sent us the links.

Click here to see some of the recent photos and screenshots posted by Blingo winners. Then click "view as slideshow" in the upper right corner to see them fly past your face, Blingo style. And be sure to click some of the photos to see more by the same person. Neat.

(We found a few more using a Blingo advanced search.)