MotorsportReg.com Blog (38)

Making participants safer

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

If you ask any event organizer what is their #1 priority, they will universally tell you it is safety.

Starting today, attendees can now enter medical information that event organizers can print off in batches and provide to Advanced Life Support and Emergency personnel crews for serious incidents.

Suggested by Stacy King from the Triangle Z Club, the information collected aggregates what most racing organizations (such as BMW CCA, Porsche Club of America, SCCA and NASA) use and provides a single source of information that organizers can rely upon.

Participants need only enter this information once and update it periodically as their health changes. For each event they register, organizers have access to print a limited, privacy-enhanced document designed specifically for emergency workers with large type and clearly laid out information. Beyond name and a basic vehicle description, no personally identifiable data is printed maximizing the privacy of participants while providing the information necessary to safely treat them in case of an incident.

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

For everyone who checks our driving events calendar, we are thrilled to announce the addition of the entire SCCA calendar! This includes solo, solo 2, club racing, rallycross and pro racing events and has pushed the total number of events to 1410.

John Steflik at SCCA in Topeka, Mark Walker and Chris Riddle at DVTI worked with us in lightning-like fashion to provide the events and help us understand the available data.

Because the number of events has grown so large, the calendar now defaults to displaying the next 2 months of events and provides a link at the bottom to see the entire list. Your best bet will be to search by your zip code to see events in your area.

SCCA events are automatically included in our RSS and iCalendar files or webcal:// feeds so you can access them from your favorite news reader or calendar application. Don't forget you can subscribe via email as well!

We syndicate our listings to other websites who wish to include events from our database like JustRacing.com and Trackpedia.com. If you're a webmaster and would like to syndicate all or part of our feed, just drop us a line.

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

With the explosion of web 2.0 calendaring services, iCalendar and RSS event feeds have become a hot item. Our calendar has supported both of these formats since nearly day one providing support for desktop software like Outlook, Mozilla Calendar and Apple iCal.

Today we released an improved version of our iCalendar feed that supports popular web calendars like Google Calendar, Yahoo! Calendar and 30 Boxes.

Although we've tested with these services, any service that understands iCalendar or RSS feeds should be able to read in our calendar listings. If you search, for say track events within 300 miles of your zip code, before clicking the calendar link, you can subscribe to just that subset of our calendar.

You'll see the new Google and Yahoo! links whenever you're looking at an individual event on the public calendar. Logged in users will see this in the next day or two.

Many thanks to Jauder Ho for his help with finding and resolving this issue.

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

In the "support people doing good things" category, we just signed on to sponsor Coco's TrackSchedule.com. TrackSchedule.com is well-known among east-coast track junkies and many organizers list their events on her calendar (including some of our customers).

2006 is all about helping as many organizers as possible to have more fun by saving them time and effort. I like to think of this as a karmic +1.

I have some exciting news as well to announce tomorrow here at Pukka as well...

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Announced today, Amazon S3 is a giant hard drive with only an API. There is no "Windows Explorer" way of using it (yet). Websites all over the Internet, like ours, could use Amazon's hard drive to store our images and other media files and take advantage of their huge infrastructure and support staff with just a few lines of code.

We have been looking to add file storage to let our customers upload files for their participants (rather than wait for a webmaster to upload to their own site). We have been hesitant to take on managing the storage and versioning of these files. But, at $0.15 per gigabyte of storage and $0.20 per gigabyte of transfer, I think we're running out of excuses!

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Customers can be surprising. On one hand, they easily notice things that an engineer or product manager have a hard time seeing with their proximity to the product. On the other hand, they can just as readily ignore an oversight as "part of the package".

This week I had two interesting encounters with customers on opposite coasts. The first brought to my attention that the comma that should separate city and state in an address was, in fact, between the state and zip code. This was true everywhere in our system. It started from one form somewhere, a simple typo in the code, and was re-used over and over until it was the "standard" in our app. Not exactly mission-critical but hard to believe we have been staring at that every day for probably 2 years without noticing it!

On the other coast, a customer and I were working with some reports to identify why he had two different numbers for his registration count. Whenever we're talking inventory, my first move is to run the inventory report to see how many of each item has been sold and see if those numbers line up. As we were looking at the report, I noticed that we needed to sum two columns together in order to find the total registration fees sold. "Odd", I thought, as that should be summed up on its own.

I checked our API and found that we're actually generating the "inventory" totals from the "package" totals! In 90% of cases where organizers have a simple mapping between packages and inventory, these two reports would be the same or nearly the same. But in cases where an organizer takes advantage of the system to more flexibly sell their inventory with early-bird discounts or late fees, these two reports are most certainly not the same. It is fairly easily reconciled using an Excel output and some math but that is the step we were trying to prevent in the first place!

Lesson of the day: your customers are both eagle-eyed and blind as bats. They will accept what you put forth as The Right Way^TM so test, test, test and test some more!

An "Endless Beta" web application is no excuse; your users will trust that you know what you're doing! Don't underestimate the value of a set of fresh eyes or someone with less domain expertise. Those folks just might be your future new customers.

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

We released version 3.1.0 today which brought a lot of significant changes. The largest is the addition of a new trial or limited access account which does not accept online payments. This allows an event organizer to use MotorsportReg.com (with a couple of limitations) completely free.

We also upgraded our internal forums package to Galleon 1.5 from Ray Camden.

We have a number of our own tweaks added to it like Textile markup from Pete Freitag and support for Gravatars, a globally accessible avatar.

This release continues to confirm for me that open source software and "Web 2.0" style services make it easier to build high-quality applications. Instead of building our own infrastructure for uploading, resizing and storing images, we let our users sign-up once at Gravatar and use their avatar all over the web. Plus, Gravatar gives us a rating for the content of the avatar to prevent inappropriate material from showing up in our forums.

Our 3.1.x tree has a number of important changes coming and we have a pretty aggressive release schedule for the next 3 months as we add new features and refine existing ones.

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Last week, one of our customers had to completely cancel an event after the first morning due to severe weather. This is pretty rare. Most events have a small handful of cancellations that can be managed easily but this event has more than 100 people who need a refund or a credit towards a future event.

That's a lot of people.

I did some thinking Monday about how we can improve the cancellation process. The tricky part is that we can't directly perform refunds because in 99% of the cases, we've already sent the event organizer the monies that need to be refunded. Combine that with a second round of bank processing fees for credits and it's not financially great for anyone either.

Enter Paypal. People occasionally ask why we don't accept Paypal and it is because it gives too much control to a third party (one that isn't a bank and isn't regulated as such, I might add). We don't have anything against Paypal per se; we built our payment processing system before Paypal offered an API to process cards behind the scenes and redirecting attendees to paypal.com is not an option for us. With the investment we've made, there is little point in switching now since our rates are lower.

In this case however, the best solution does appear to be Paypal. Using their Mass Payments API, we can send as many as 250 refunds at a time for a quarter per transaction. Paired with an upcoming enhancement to handle credits and coupons, this will be a big step forward in eliminating the post-event reconciliation and paperwork that we're not very good at yet.

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Trackjunkies on mailing lists everywhere recently saw announcements about Trackpedia.com, a publicly-editable wiki on racetracks around the world. We've teamed up with Billy and John to help drivers find events and excel when they arrive at the track.

Trackpedia.com provides track guides, videos, pictures, lap times and other in-depth discussion about a particular racetrack. Because it's editable by anyone, the content grows with the expertise of the community just like Wikipedia.

Starting in the next few days, Trackpedia will integrate our calendar listings on a track-by-track basis to provide enthusiasts a list of upcoming events at a given facility. In return, we will be linking to Trackpedia's track detail pages to provide more information to enthusiasts attending an event at one of these tracks.

Over the past 4 years I have been dismayed by the constant re-inventing of the wheel I've come across in the track community. Hopefully with efforts like these, we'll see more collaboration which will benefit participants everywhere and eliminate duplication of effort.

Topics: Misc

Should we give it away?

June 11, 2013 by Mark

2006 is really the first year we've been serious about sales and marketing. When I say we, I mean "me", because I'm the person in charge of it. My expertise is primarily in product management and user experience work so the touchy-feely side of sales is difficult for a once-upon-a-time-engineer like myself.

Over the past months, I've been trading emails and phone calls with organizers from around the country. We've been having great traction but the perceived cost of the service has been a deal-breaker for some groups despite the fact that our only service charge is for online payments.

We've seen the most skeptical organizer become a cheerleader after using MotorsportReg.com, but we won't have any cheerleaders until they try it. We need to find a way to get more people into a trial.

So... we're considering giving away a version of our service without online payments for free - or close to it. This would let organizers for next to nothing obtain all of the benefits of electronic pre-registration without incorporating any financial overhead.

We think people will see the benefits of integrated online payment and eventually upgrade.

Would you try our service without online payments for free? What about for some nominal fee like $25?