We made much ballyhoo here last month about a $25 iTunes giveaway for joining our mailing list. Earlier this week, amid much secrecy, we drew four names off of our mailing list and figured all that remained was to make four members of the Appy Army happy with their gift cards.

Simple, right?

Ah, but as Carl von Clausewitz told us, “Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war.”

For the above quote, substitute “software development” for war … or in this specific case, substitute “marketing of software development” for war.

von Clausewitz

We’re babbling.

OK, here’s what’s going on.

Our winners came from Brazil, Germany, Austria, and the United Kingdom. Awesome! We love our international players. But … Apple apparently doesn’t allow us to purchase iTunes Gift Cards or codes for any store but the one where we’re registered (the United States). So, getting codes to our international winners has been one of those simple things that has accumulated von Clausewitz’s inconceivable friction.

And it is not just the major issue of international payments that is vexing us. Turns out that for on-line certificates, Apple only permits denominations divisible by ten … so we can’t actually award a $25 certificate. Instead, it just became $30 USD. Ah, well, more love for our players, that’s fine. But only two of the four winners have actually contacted us to verify their email addresses! So to our German and British winners … write us back! We have a prize for you (provided we can figure how to send it out of the country).

All of which is our problem, and not yours, and we sincerely apologize for the delay in awarding prizes. We’ll get it dialed in one way or the other!

But there will be some changes for the December drawing:

1. The drawing will be for a $20 USD iTunes gift code.
2. The recipient must accept a U.S. code (many of our overseas friends have already set up accounts in the U.S. iTunes store).
3. We will draw five names, rather than four, for the December drawing.

We’re sorry for the inconvenience this will cause our international players, but at this hour we really don’t see a way around the way Apple handles international iTunes gifts. If anyone out there has any insight or work-arounds for us, we’re all ears!

Thanks!

(And if you want to sign up for our goofy list, click HERE … but please be a resident of our solar system, it is so much easier that way).

This entry was posted on Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 3:06 pm and is filed under announcements. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.