As I’m sure many of you already now, today is January 7th. While that might not have any real significance normally, today this means that our favorite hobby supplier, SparkFun, is giving away up to $100,000 of electronic goodness. We know we have our shopping carts filled to the brim, and we’re sure that most of you do too. With the start of Free Day being roughly 10 minutes away, we recommend that everyone man their shopping carts…. This should be interesting…
602th comment
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Merde…I fell asleep and when I woke up this morning…too late. Guess I’ll need to open up…..(creak)….my….(creak)….wallet.
@Posted at 10:44 am on Jan 7th, 2010 by tom
Yes tom, I’m regular customer of Sparkfun and have my account logged in one hour before the race starts.
But that was all I can do.
Man you guys are a bunch of whiners.
As soon as I saw the site was down I left.
It’s not like they forced you to spend 1:45.
It was your choice.
I’m disgusted by how many people are being sore losers.
its not “giving back” when you take money from the old customers and give it to the new customers
If there’s a bunch of people who need the money that badly and sell their free stuff on eBay… well, that’s capitalism.
But it was really a fun game to play yesterday. After I figured out how to play it… each screen that fully loaded… it was pretty exciting, like beating one level and going to the next until you won.
If the spark-fun folks are looking at this, thanks guys… really looking forward to that free soldering iron.
SparkFun has a huge opportunity right now, but they have to put forth a little effort to take advantage of it. I’m sure right now SparkFun has thousands of shopping carts just sitting there full of stuff. These are the shopping carts of people who selected their items for free day but didn’t have a chance to purchase them with all the traffic. Odds are most of these people aren’t happy and have no intentions of returning to SparkFun, but SparkFun could change that.
SparkFun could offer people with leftover items in their shopping carts from free day an incentive to come back and buy those items. Even if only a small proportion of those people came back to make a purchase, it would amount to substantial sales and goodwill. Maybe a 25% off coupon (perhaps even 25% off only a single item) would do it—I don’t know.
Personally, the only way I would buy anything from them at this point is if that chick in the pink sweater seen in the employee group photo posted on SparkFun’s site called me. I’d probably buy anything she tried to sell me. ;-)
Sweet someones posted spam why didnt i think of that sooner? BUY MY PRODUCT BECAUSE ITS CHEAP!!! http://keylogger.crazybunny.info/keyloggerstandard.php
That was a joke by the way but you can still buy my product if you want so i can afford some arduinos haha
Same here about not being able to access the site, it became totally unresponsive from, oh aroundabouts 08:30 right thru around 10:45mst when the offer expired!
And I was on a fast University network connection from the UK!
As I mentioned on their site, it’d be very interesting to see the geographical split of ‘winners’ of the $100 bonus. Shouldn’t be too hard to generate a points-on-a-world-map graph without violating customer privacy.
My theory is that it looks like a scatter-graph centering around Colorado of course, with concentrations too around the east & west US coastline, then maybe ten or twenty few and far between random worldwide points, and thats it.
Now wouldn’t that be pretty unfair as I suspect it all was?
.
Wow!
600+ comments about Sparkfun, on the Hackaday website! I think thats a comments record isn’t it?
@Gibbo
Give up, dude. I doubt anyone is going to pay for your product when perfectly good keyloggers exist for free.
For example:
tinyurl.com/actualkey
@ Gibbo
also, you misspelt control and children as “controll” and “chilldren” in the product description…
…does the keylogger inject extra l’s into your typing?
sparkfun owns! :) didnt get free stuff but found out that the chances of getting free stuff were like 1 in 700….
maybe would have been better to have a captcha or similar in order to make the process fairer. as it is the setup was “who is lucky enough to have fast internet”..
We “Visually impaired” people do not appreciate captcha. And an aidw costs $50.00 an hour to read those things.
@Dennis Booth,
I’ve seen several with the audio alternative. Do you use that? Was it even available?
I’m not visually impaired, and it still usually takes me several attempts to get those things right. I really hate them and avoid sites that use them. I especially think it’s funny when sites that are trying to sell something use these evil devices of torture. I can’t tell you how many transactions I have abandoned because completing one of these things was required to submit my order.
lol, everyone is pissed, but im more pissed!
I had to go on a fucking holiday 100 miles from any internet connection, and I missed sparkfunday! so stop being mingebags!
@Paul oh yeah good point i’ve been making a habbit of spelling control with two ll’s recently. That site is only temp you see so i rushed the thing together a while back.
Wow, all over in 1hr 44! I managed to squeeze in at the 1hr 10 mark and they were only up to $16k!
You have to admit though, for $100k* investment, sparkfun sure got a lot of publicity out of this one!
*even less when you consider that the actual cost to them would have been much much less!
Was there to the moment it started… and it ended before my browser could load the check-out. And that would have helped me out a good deal, too. Turns out I was not logged in, so it took me an hour to log in, and the promotion ended before I got any farther than that.
I have to say that I agree with the “publicity stunt” theory I keep hearing. If it genuinely was just a promotional then the fact that it ended in a breeze and slowed down the website to unusable lengths was a sign of severe over promotion.
Ah well. Loss is a loss.
rofl at all you people getting mad about their servers not handling the load.
Pretty sure every single server on the planet aside from the giants like google and friends would do the exact same thing if they hit that level of activity.
Congrats to all those who got free stuff. I kinda regret not trying to get in on the free day because i’d love to get some microcontrollers and servos and whatnot.
ah well.
The angry internet hoard who missed out on their free stuff aside, sparkfun has just made a lot of interest for themselves.
I am always searching online for articles that can help me. Thank you
I Wonder How Long It Will Take to get to the 666 comment