The Adventures of JStar88 on The Blue Marble

Building VS Buying at the Summit

I presented at The Poker Summit Europe in London yesterday. My topic was Building VS Buying: How to choose between a Network and Proprietary Technology and it was targeted towards all the people who are STILL in the process of launching new online poker brands - and considering doing so with their own technology.

My presentation was essentially a warning to these people. It wasn't heavy corporate propaganda or necessarily geared towards converting people to our platform. It was an educational check-list of most of the considerations that need to be taken into account before making that kind of important decision and massive investment. I even included a slide listing the 12 major online poker networks, and encouraged people to do their due diligence before agreeing that our platform was the best in the market (said tongue-in-cheek, even though it is).

I am aware of at least eight companies who are getting ready to launch new online poker products (sites and networks) in the next few months . Their products - or at least the clients I have demoed or seen demoed - range from appalling to brilliant. But their back-end systems ... oi, my aching neck ... give me empathetic stress just to think about.

I asked one of these companies what they were going to do about "trust issues" and they asked what I meant. Off the top of my head, I rolled out: "anti-fraud, anti-collusion, anti-dumping, anti-bots, anti-cheating, enforcing privacy policies, maintaining account security, monitoring phishing and pharming attempts in real-time and shutting them down, allowing and enforcing player limits and self-exclusion, fingerprinting devices, getting a stamp of approval on their RNG and keeping players' money safe."

Their response was that they are using SSL 3.0 on "state-of-the-art servers, firewalls and routers" at a top-tier facility in Curacao.

Being a professional, I kept my upper and lower jaws together and wished them the best of luck with their launch.

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who actually paid any attention during the Dot Com explosion and subsequent implosion. Just because an "e-business" had compelling graphics and good promotions, success was not guaranteed. Fundamentals like trust, support and customer experience are vital!

If there are three lessons I've learned time-and-again during the last three years in the online gaming business, it's that: 1) Java really isn't write-once-run-anywhere (it's more like write-once-debug-everywhere); 2) dealing with scalability is never just a matter of plug-and-play - latency issues can kill a business; and 3) just because you have a cool URL with the word "poker" in it does not mean you're going to get rich.

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On a related, but completely different note, a high point of the conference was a late-night poker game I played in at the Royal Garden Hotel. People from five of the major networks were represented at the table and the insults going back and forth were hilarious! I can't possibly include any names or quotes without being accused of libel and slander, but it's good to know that everyone in the industry is paying close attention to everyone else. Fear and respect, baby. Fear and respect.

posted by jstar88 @ 8:37 PM