HI,

I understand how it must feel to see others flying way ahead of you, but with a little observation of this race over the last two days i can tell you that 2 of the balloons currently on the leader board were no where to be seen a couple of days ago yet they are now floating fast!

Some of the balloons have been in the race a little longer as the race was origionally supposed to end sooner but due to lack of participants the other balloons asked for the race to be extended in order to give others including TBC members a chance to join in.

The speed of your internet connection shouldnt have a bearing on how fast your balloon moves - it should take approx 30 seconds to cross the screen its the same percentage for everyone so no one has an advantage.

Personally i think there is more reason to now keep on at the race as its getting more interesting - more movement on the leader board etc.... its just for fun but of course everybody would like to feel that they are winning

With regards the top of page that gives you your position earlier in the race there was someone trying to 'cheat' the system and David removed them - because of this it messed the positions up by one but the leader board is correct.

Just a tip check out the penguins - you need to aproach them in a certain way but get it right and your balloon will benefit!!!

JO x

Well this advice sounds lovely if I could work out how to move my balloon in the first place!

Hmmph!

OK

Lets flip this around the other way.

If you sell balloons and helium to a School - each child that buys a balloon does not stand much chance of winning. It's more about the fun of taking part and raising cash for the School.

Here's a race I did for a School (I've reactivated it so you can have a look):

www.balloonrace.com/solsch

If you look at the leader board there were 251 balloons in the race. Most of the kids were trying to beat their mates rather than trying to win. And all for a £25 book token.

They also learnt how important it is to spell an email address correctly (that was an accidental positive side effect).

Now lets look at where we are in the world, the kids of today are the future. They are all on Facebook, Twitter - and they can do tricks on a computer with their eyes closed.

More and more retail outlets are closing and turning to the internet.

I see this virtual balloon race as opportunity for our industry to have it's own little trend....
Instead of a widget showing your tweets - what about a widget showing a leader board?

We can develop widgets for school websites -i.e a podium etc....

I accept that balloonrace.com is a little rough around the edges and we're working on that - but try to think 5 years from now, things are changing fast and it's getting more difficult to sell real balloons - every other word is environment. You dare not bring your shopping home in a plastic bag.

Rather than think about winning the duel split - what do you think of the concept?

I think I must be missing something.

My balloon is about 268 km behind the leader, I think I can gain about 3km a day playing the little game and the normal daily boost, so if no one moves I should be able to catch up in about 3 months. Obviously other people are getting extra boosts from somewhere, I know you can request a boost from a friend which I think would be about 2/3 km worth, so I need about 420 friends. Now I timed my balloon going across the screen, took about 90 secs or so, so 270 km would be about 6 hrs worth of playing.I know this is probably a lot different to a lot of other peoples times but that is an average on my PC, old computer & slow connection, what can I say? Also switching sites to follow the balloon is a 'lot' longer than it should be, basically I think the thing is too heavy on the PC resources for older machines. My son was in watching me earlier and I explained the idea, he asked why I was doing it, I told him it was a game, he looked at me as if I was mad and said 'but games are supposed to be fun!'

So I'm sorry I don't have a lot of positive to say, but I just can't see it as something kids would want to do!

Thanks

Jim

Hi Jim

I can see where you're coming from - if it takes more than 60 seconds to get across a website then this game must be driving you nuts!

There's a heavy amount of flash animation to make the balloons look cool and move smoothly - that's why it's slow.

It's takes about 30 seconds on average. We made it slow so the balloonist has no choice but to look at the website under the balloon - like a random search engine.

Imagine if your website was under the balloons and everybody was looking at it...... it's free to add a website.

A boost from a mate is worth 100 which takes you over more than 3 sites. So, 10 clicks from friends and you've got a 1000 boost.

The system doesn't store email addresses. As it was designed for kids we needed to make sure the kids emails were not available anywhere.

Anyway - thanks for taking the time to explain your issues, any feedback is useful feedback.

Cheers Dave

We joined the balloon race last weekend and asked all our friends to boost the balloon, when we worked out how to move the balloon we shot up to 2nd place and then 1st place as so many friends had also asked there friends to send us a boost. This was going really well until this weekend when we noticed that we did not recieve the correct boosts for the amount of e-mails received. As today was the last day we wanted to try and win obviously and with over 160 e-mails confirmations coming through of boosts we expected to do really well but noticed that our boost was only going up by 10 or 20 at a time, it is now over 2 hours past the end of the race and we are still getting e-mails confirming a friend has boosted our balloon. How is this possible??? Has everyone in the race received the correct about of boosts or is there a bad glich in the programme

We joined the race on Thursday last, took me a day to work out how to use the system, then emailed everyone i knew and posted a help on Facebook. I didn´t play on Monday as i was at the NEC. So had an awful lot of catching up to do Tuesday.

I did enjoy playing, and all my friends and family had fun with the boosting. although some prob dreaded me emailing and nagging them lol....

Hope this has proved worth while, and have recommended this to a couple of charities who did play, and a school.

How on earth did the one with 3,000+ get them....? It was hard work enough to make only 800km.

I do know that some of my friends who had more than one computer in the house could boost from each computer, do you check IPs or is it a cookie thing.

Anyway not being a computer nerd i assume you can check.

Well done to the winner....not too sure how that worked? but hey its only for fun, and to test the programme.

Good luck with it all Dave. Let me know when your up and running and will promote this with gusto!

Balloonbabe.

Well done whoever won. I never did work out how to get my balloon moving. David said he was going to do improved instructions, having found that a huge percentage of those created had never moved. I don't know if he did.

Please could the animated 'icon' which is superimposed over the forum postings be moved over to somewhere else where it's not obscuring the list.

Ta

Well thank god that race is over.

It got to the stage where I was worried to look at the leader board and I dare not check my emails.

I wanted to do it as a bit of fun to test the system - but I guess when you offer a decent prize things start getting serious. I certainly got the system tested though.

I am amazed that people like Sally could build up to 200+ email boosts per day. I was checking the website Analytics and there were 1000's of hits bounding in from various websites all over the world (it's a shame all the hits weren't allocated to the balloons, but I'm working on that).

It really does show how powerful the internet is. You ask 5 people for a boost and they spread the word to 5 more etc, etc, etc.

What I've learnt from this is how a system can fall over with large volume. It's all very well me testing it with 5 balloons in play, emailing myself and boosting a test balloon - but you only get a real workout when there's a real race - and then the wheels fall off.

I'm going to work on fixing all the above issues, make sure it's easier to get your balloon moving and fix the problem Nick spotted - refresh cookie boosting.

Then - "I'll be back".

Meanwhile - if anybody wants to do a race between you and your mates - I'll build them for free (balloonrace.com/yourname).

Thanks

David

As soon as I heard there was a competition where I could win a Conwin Dual Split I knew I had to enter as this is a piece of equipment that could really benefit my business.

I entered my balloon right at the beginning of the virtual balloon race and started promoting it to literally EVERYONE!! I contacted everyone on face book, posted links on all my websites, emailed all my past and present customers from both my decor company and my training company, had my partner email his contacts and add links on twitter and contacted my brother in the USA who posted the request out to all his friends and colleagues and posted it on a host of forums - at one point the balloon was being boosted by a large amount of the Tottenham Hotspurs football fan Club members! Having my brother help meant that while I slept he was promoting then in the morning I would wake up and move my balloon forward!

It was clear that towards the end it was going to be a tough race - both Salchas WivaTwist and JellyBelly were moving on fast and in the last couple of days it was a really exciting race between JellyBelly and Salchas.

Friday , Saturday and Sunday were crazy, the family worked together as a team finding more boosts and moving the balloon forwards in the race and I literally worked through Saturday night to secure my lead - but at midday Sunday the race was over and my balloon JellyBelly had won!!

This race was a trial so David could test out the virtual Balloon Race - it is clear that there are several major glitches that need to be sorted before this race is ready for schools and charities not least the need to stop individuals cheating the system as was apparent in the beginning of our balloon race. I also experienced not receiving all the boosts I had emails for and I worked out that when our balloon was moving the boosts didn’t get added, I tried to let David know of all these problems but realistically he wasn’t going to be able to mend them mid race, however all these things I’m sure will help David improve his system for the future.

Personally I would like to thank David for putting up such an Amazing Prize and now I need to put my prize to good use!
Well done to Salchas you released a very strong Balloon and played a fantastic game......

JO Uddin- CBA
NABAS INSTRUCTOR for
BALLOON TRAINING ACADEMY