Online bingo strive to foster a sense of community and interaction between players as this helps customer retention. One of the earliest known online bingo games, launched in 1996, was a free bingo game called "Bingo Zone". To play, members had to provide demographic information; in turn, members would receive targeted ads based on the demographics provided. Another early pioneer for free online bingo was Uproar, which launched Bingo Blitz in 1998. The game of bingo has been able to sidestep many of the laws which ban gambling online. In England, for instance, section 65 of the 1928 Royal Commission Report on
Bingo (United Kingdom) the first modern version of the game appearing at carnivals and fairs in the 1920s, and is attributed to a Hugh J. Ward, who for marketing reasons most probably took the name from pre-existing slang. The patent for a modern Bingo card design went to Erwin S. Lowe in 1942. A typical bingo ticket is shown to the right. It contains 27 spaces, arranged in nine columns by three rows. Each row contains five numbers and four blank spaces. Each column contains up to three numbers, which are arranged as follows, with some variation depending on bingo companies and/or where