August 23, 2007

80 for 80 recipients

This post has been a while in coming. We’ve had two more Wii winners purchase their Wiis and send in pictures. It’s great to see these guys finally get their Wiis. We’ve been downplaying the promotion a little until Wiis are finally easy to purchase here in SF, but sending PayPal transfers so that winners can purchase Wiis locally seems to have worked out fine. Anyway, sorry for all of the winners who had to wait a while to receive their units. Hopefully the receipt of the units will ease the pain…

June 08, 2007

New Wii Winner

Well, as planned, we have considerably slowed down the promotion of the 80for80 content until we can resolve the supply issues that have been plaguing us with Wiis since early January. We are still getting some people competing however and last week we had another winner, James Cannon, make it into 80% land. Congratulations, James.

We have also been offering to winners the ability to receive $250 cash payment via PayPal if they would like to purchase the Wii themselves locally (you might have better luck that we’ve had in the Bay Area). If we have not yet contacted you about the potential, let me know and we’ll get it set up. Thanks again for all of your patience.

March 20, 2007

New Wii Winner and Supply Issues

Well, it has been two weeks since the last winner, but Thad Murphy has crossed over and done a yeoman’s job or getting to 80% rating confidence. We’re happy to have him as the newest member of that exclusive club.

We’ve actually been putting the brakes on the marketing front for the 80for80 contest while we have been dealing with significant supply issues surrounding our acquisition of Wiis. We had a few Wiis in possession at the start of the contest and had estimated that the supply issues around Christmas would loosen up and provide us the ability to ‘buy-as-we-went’ to keep up with the pace of awards. This has turned out to be a pretty bad calculation.

We’ve been making up the difference by buying Wiis on Craigslist. This is a reasonable short-term solution, but the time investment of finding the right seller and then driving all over the Bay Area to execute the transaction is not sustainable given my schedule. I’ve been working with a couple of people who I believe can provide me with supply as new orders come in to Best Buy, Target, etc. and we’ll be testing out this solution over the next couple of weeks. It’s not an ideal solution, but until Nintendo can keep up with the market we’ll do what we have to.

The existing 80for80 winners have my apologies for not yet delivering on our commitment. It’s unfortunate, but like I said, we’re slowing down on the promos until we can get this issue resolved. Thank you to all of the winners for your patience…

March 02, 2007

Wii Winner Update and Other Stuff

Todd just received his new Wii yesterday and sent over a picture. I hope Todd is doesn’t pull a groin bowling or something. We didn’t have a winner last week as we’ve been pretty quiet on the marketing front. So… here is what is going on…

We’ve been fleshing out our strategy as it relates to channels and the portability of CozmoTV and we’ve come up with some pretty interesting innovations. We got very close to getting the new front-end out in late January. However, given our traffic requirements, we have been working on getting a portable version of CozmoTV up and running since then. We have a working prototype that we are starting to have people check out, but we still have another two weeks or so until it will be ready. I think the widget is going to rock.

That brings us back to our status overall… We have very minor tweaks left on the new front-end. As of this week I put Jason back on wrapping up those changes so that we can finally get the update out. Joel is working on getting some of the graphical touches wrapped up on the widget. Once they each finish these tasks over the next few days, Jason will get back to working out the remaining kinks in the widget video playback and tweaking search results across both platforms.

It’s very difficult to do so many projects simultaneously with only two developers, but we can’t rectify that until we get these two releases out the door. I apologize to all those who have been waiting patiently for the new stuff. It will be worth the wait.

February 20, 2007

New Wii Winners!

We’ve tallied the results from last week and we’ve got three new winners… Dustin, Mark and Tim all reached 80% and will be receiving a Wii! It was a big week this week as our user base continues to grow. Thanks for all of those ratings and keep up the great work.

February 13, 2007

WOOOps… We Have More Wii Winners Than I Thought...

It appears that I did not analyze the correct data when determining the status of last week’s 80for80 winners. In fact, Luke Wallace did in fact cross 80% and will be receiving a Nintendo Wii. We actually had three official winners as of Monday last week!

We also have one more likely winner from this past week. We seem to be getting a pretty consistent winner per week. We’re going to have to up that pace if we’re going to reach all 80 winners in the next three months:) 76 more Wiis left…

Also, we’ve updated our Featured Channels list with some fresh content. I think the Christmas Channel has become a little stale:) We’ll be updating the list again when we release the new interface.

February 06, 2007

Progress on Interface and Wii Winners

We’ve been working hard on developing the Flash version of the application and this has impacted our release of the updated version of the site. It sucks, but given the delays in getting the Ajax version wrapped we ran into time issues on the Flash widget that could not be moved without consequences to our March roll-outs. Anyway, suffice to say, we have not yet finished resolving the rendering issues with the new Ajax interface for some browsers. Release of the Ajax update is imminent and those who have expressed interest in trying out the Flash widget will have access soon.

We also did not have a new winner for the Wii contest last week. Some people are getting closer… so keep on rating, the response has been phenomenal and we’re going to keep going until all 80 Wiis are gone.

January 29, 2007

Our First 80for80 Winners!

Well, we’re happy to announce the first winners of the 80for80 contest. The first winner actually reached 80% a couple of weeks ago, but we wanted to wait with the post until we could show Joe Wodarski with his new Wii. I hope Joe enjoys it!

We also tallied the results from last week and have a new winner. Todd Simson also reached 80% confidence early last week. Congratulations, Todd!

That also means we have 78 Nintendo Wiis left. So get rating, there is still plenty of time to win…

January 26, 2007

Another 80for80 Contest Update

We’ve already had a couple of winners of the 80for80 contest. We’ve had quite a few entries and a number of people that reached 80% in ways that disqualified them, but we’re excited to announce the first two winners on Monday the 29^th. (The first winner should be receiving his Wii by then:)

I also get a lot of requests from members asking if I can check their status throughout the week. We’ve been handling these requests as they come in, but this is time consuming. From now on we will be running our analysis on Friday each week and announcing the past week’s winners each Monday. So, if you have passed 80% you can send us a request for information, but we won’t be releasing your results until Monday. If you reach 80% over the weekend, don’t plan on being notified until the Monday following. We’re sorry that we can’t run the analysis each day, but we just don’t have the time.

Anyway, keep rating those shows. It takes some effort, but as two members have already demonstrated, it can be done…

January 15, 2007

80for80 Contest Update

Quite a few of you have been contacting me about the status of the ‘80 for 80 Contest.’ We are aware that some of you have crossed the threshold to the promised land. We just have to finish crunching the data to identify those that did not legitimately reach the required show ratings. Don’t worry, we have plenty of Wiis left. If you got to 80% legitimately over the past three weeks, you are going to get a Wii:)

BTW, our 80for80@cozmotv.com email address has been bouncing sometimes.  I'm not sure why.  If you are having issues, just send your questions to feedback@cozmotv.com.  I'll get it and respond as quickly as I can.