Born-and-bred Ohioans need no explanation of what cornhole is. Canadian censors, on the other hand, have apparently never heard of the bean bag game.
The founders of Columbus-based JUFTi learned that the hard way last August when they launched Cornhole All-Stars, "the first and only true 3D cornhole game for your iPhone or iPod touch."
While the app was published on Apple's App Store worldwide, the Canadian App Store would only list it as "C******e All-Stars."
"We sent a formal letter of inquiry to the Canadian government demanding to know why our title was censored. And we sent one to Apple," says JUFTi co-founder Jon Myers, who says he believes his is "the first app to be censored by a government."
Myers also contact the Wall Street Journal (which wrote wrote about snafu) and staged a high-profile meet-up in Toronto. The censorship was mysteriously lifted.
While Canadian downloads remain "a blip," Myers says the game is catching on among others, with about 60,000 downloads to date.
"We do get downloads from all over, and the other thing too, is we have about a thousand Facebook fans."
Formed a year and a half ago, the 10-employee company recently entered into a licensing agreement for a Garfield the Cat game for iPhone, iPod and Facebook, which Myers hopes to launch this summer.
While the company so far has been self-financed, Myers says efforts continue to find new ways to raise revenues.
"One of them is a marketplace for brand integration into apps � for example, we have the bean bags inside our (cornhole) game. If Donato's wanted to put their graphic on our bag, they would be able to access our platform and find in the marketplace that advertising opportunity and buy it."
Source: Jon Myers, JUFTi
Writer: Gene Monteith