godsakes

Really firms are either going to be foused on the marketing side or the product side - A lot of these new channels can only be taken up by some of the major bookies - purely because they have huge existing player databases and can cross sell - essentially it's all about economies of scale enabling them to aquire players at a profitable price (easier said than done). on the other side of the business are the software firms who realistically can't compete in terms of customer aquistion with these established firms so their best strategy is to license their software and earn money from fees and revenue share deals. Online bingo was neglected by many software firms such as crypotologic and microgaming who rule the casino side - online bingo looks set to be the next big thing after poker (in the UK there are special rules governing bingo which means it doesn't suffer as many legal restrictions).

There's alot of uncertainty with regards to the legal side of things in the online gambling sector. The US hasn't really got a coherent policy on gambling - bare in mind landbased gambling is illegal in most states (Indian casinos an exception). So far their attempts have been targeted to towards restricting financial firms i.e. credit card companies from dealing with transactions to the gambling companies. Some years back PayPal stopped accepting customer deposits to online gambling firms. That's one reason why some e-wallet firms have done very well from this sector namely Neteller. On the federal level, the laws which have been cited in restrictions on gambling include the wire transfer act which was really intended to restrict mafia activities. I believe the WTO ruled against the US in using the law against offshore gaming firms. However there has been recent attempts to introduce a bill to ban online gambling outright - which could take the form of ISP filtering (sounds like google china to me). I understand this bill has not been successful yet. Perhaps more worryingly the state of Washington has just passed a law to make it an offence to promote online gambling - I know someone who runs a gambling info site based in Washington who's seriously considering moving to Canada to avoid the potential fallout. In the UK it's finally legal to run an online gambling firm based here, all very well but why would an online gambling firm want to give up the tax advantages of being based offshore? in addition far from the Daily Mail talk of gambling taking over the country the new law restricts advertising copy so highly they might as well have banned gambling advertising all together. In a lot of European countries online gambling (advertising and firms) is illegal - not for the moral reasons but because the state wants to keep their monopoly on the gambling market - I understand Ladbrokes won a court ruling against one country as it breached EU competition rules so hopefully the situation will improve.