The Perceptus Back Story

Happy New Year!

We’ve hinted at this for years, and we’re finally doing it today. Print-Bingo.com Premium Access account upgrades are now $12, but we are also  officially increasing the access term by 50% to 3 years. Previously, it was $10 for a 2 year term.  The 2 years expiry was never enforced, and we currently have no plans to enforce the 3 year expiry.

A few thoughts on our pricing and term length change.

The price has never changed since print-bingo.com was launched in 2005. If we estimate an average inflation of 2% per year, we have lost 10% of our revenue after adjusting for inflation.  Further, as a Canadian firm, where our operating expenses and salaries are paid out in Canadian funds, we’ve had a large hit from the rise in the Canadian Dollar over  the US Dollar – but that’s a problem for all Canadian exporters, not just us *.

• The ability to print up to 200 pages per run of standard numeric bingo cards.

Yes, that’s really it.

We did not have customizable bingo cards, design saving features, draw chips, randomized draw lists, or serial number features initially.  These were all added over time as the user base of the site grew.

Today, an upgrade to print-bingo.com will get you the following feature(s):

I think that we offer much better value now than we did a few years ago.

About the 2 year versus 3 year terms.  When print-bingo.com launched, we had no idea if it would be worth our while to run this site indefinitely. So, we picked a length of time that we were sure that we could promise our users.   Now that our site is well established, we’re pretty confident that we can increase our guaranteed length of access  by 50% to 3 years – even this is probably conservative.

* For the curious, our first sale was on 2005-08-10 at 13:55, at that time,  USD 1 =  CAD 1.214.  At the time of writing (late December 2010), USD 1 = CAD 1.00644 .

With the recent automatic upgrade of Google Chrome to version 8, Google made their built in PDF viewer the default viewer *.  I.e. there is now no need to separately download Adobe Reader or Adobe Flash Player to browse the web with Google Chrome.

Generally, I like this addition to Google Chrome; however, it caused some work for us.  Our web based bingo card generator, print-bingo.com, is highly dependent on PDF’s.  That’s the sole reason why our bingo cards are dead-easy to print out by the hundreds.  Unfortunately, Chrome’s built-in PDF renderer does not display PDFs that are in an IFRAME tag properly.

For the last few days, this is what users of print-bingo.com would see after generating 5 pages of bingo cards on print-bingo.com:

Broken PDF rendering in an IFRAME in Google Chrome 8 - screenshot from print-bingo.com

Chrome tries to scale the parent page to fit everything in… and it fails badly.

We were not able to get things working 100% the way we would like, but we have a workable situation now.

The basic steps that we had to take:

• Change from IFRAME to OBJECT tag.  For whatever reason, this fixes the zooming issue.  And it was quite simple.  In our case, there wasn’t much difference between the two HTML tags.
• Unfortunately, we can’t find a way to get Chrome to print the contents of the object tag without printing the rest of the page (though, perhaps using CSS  might work).
• Instead, we added some bold warning text that gives Chrome users instructions to use the manual download links. We use a little function to identify Chrome users – the two key lines of code are: 
  $u_agent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']; 
  if(preg_match(‘/Chrome/i’,$u_agent)) { $ub = “Chrome”; }

So, we ended up with a workaround.  We sincerely hope that Google will add the missing interface elements that will make things just work, but until then, we are doing some other site improvements as we prepare to bump up the price of Premium Access to $12 in 2011.

* If you want to go back to using Adobe Reader in Google Chrome, you can turn off the  built-in viewer by going to the special address about:plugins and change Chrome PDF Viewer to Disable.  Of course, website owners should not depend on end-users to do this just to visit your site!

We finally decided to create a Harry Potter word list for our Harry Potter themed Bingo cards for print-bingo.com.  Check it out now!  You can play your customized bingo game while you wait in line to see the movie!

Entry level access to our web based bingo card generator is free!  An upgrade of $10 will get you a few extra features.

We admit it.  There is room for improvement at print-bingo.com.   We still firmly believe we operate the best web based bingo card generator.  Period.  However, there always has been a long list of items on the to-do list.  In our defense, we never really expected the site to continue to grow the way that it has.  In many ways, features were put-off until the traffic justified the effort.

We decided that we were long overdue to start actively seeking  feedback from our paid  users.  So we did.  Obviously, we used our own hosted survey service, PapayaPolls.com.  Eventually, we’ll create a separte survey for non-Premium users of our site too.  Both will be updated and revised as we go along.

We’ve got a handful of responses so far.  While there are no clear patterns, the input is extremely valuable.  It’s a highly recommended exercise.   After all, shouldn’t all decisions be data driven, if possible?

We’ve added a new word list for our template bingo card design collection, so, please welcome our new Columbus Day Themed Bingo Cards.

That  set of word lists is getting hard to browse, we’re going to have to improve the template listings page soon!

Also fitting for this time of year:

• Canadians!  Our Thanksgiving Word List is alive and waiting for you!  Unfortunately, it’s a little American-centric, since most of our business is  from the USA. You’ll have to edit the word list to make it more Canadian.
• Our Halloween Word List is getting a lot of search engine traffic – already!

Some other recent items of note:

• If you’re a fan of Bingo on Facebook, look out for our revised Facebook advertising campaign.  We’ll see if we get an ROI on these ads this time around.  We tried Facebook advertising two years ago, and it was a dismal failure.
• Our Facebook “like” button was initially mis-configured.  Whoops.  After fixing it, we discovered a whole lot of “likes” that were built up, presumably from the Share link that has been part of the site for years. Nice!

Thanks for using Print-Bingo.com.  Basic use of our bingo card generator is still free!  And an upgrade for the entire feature set is still only $10… for now.