I am really shocked to read what was posted on this site. First of all, the header is very misleading in my point of view! I am a ChampionChip Timer up North and try and provide the best professional service to our clients (which are the event organisers and you the cyclists (and others using our service)). I think what Colin explained is quite clear and we thought it is an open way of showing the costs we charge for using our service. Nothing wrong in charging for a service. I do not want to bore you with detail, and would just like to clear something about the results for seeding: After each and every race, we provide the event organisers with a full set of results for what ever purposes he want to use it. Our view is that the event organiser pays for the service, hence the results belong to him. If he wants to pass the results onto someone else for "general" seeding purposes, it is up to him to do so. We do not send any results to anyone else, as the results belong to the event! So we do not "charge" for results as stated in some of the responses. We have already been paid for it. With regards to the e-mail promotions we do, when you bought your chip, you indicated on the form that we could send race information to you via e-mail or SMS. If you agreed, we use your e-mail address and once again provide a service to the event organisers to do some promotion for his event by sending out these e-mails. In general terms it is called advertising, and this is quite a low cost wise way of advertising an event. The cost of such an e-mail promotion was mentioned somewhere above, but no mention of how many e-mails were sent out for that amount. I can tell you that there are probably in the region of 30,000 e-mails that goes out to certain regions and cyclists to advertise the event. We are proud of our product and service, and will deliver this service to the best of our abilities to you and the event organiser!
