Online betting all day long
When I hit Vegas, I spend very little time in the casinos. Usually about a roll of quarters in the slots and that’s pretty much all the casino gets from me. I do however spend a bit more time in the Sportsbook betting facility. Not so much because I bet heavily on sports, but more that I like the betting environment when I’m in there surrounded by the television screens and the players looking to participate.
Online betting is a mega-dollar industry, and if you are going to fund part of it, you definitely want to be sure you are at a reputable, safe and highly efficient online site. bet365.com seems to be just one of those sites. I never realized before the total range of online betting services, and I think these folks have them all and then some. They have interactive games, live streaming of actual sporting events, online casino action, and even dedicated online poker areas.
Having that sort of range of services in one manageable account really sort of blew me away. Add to the fact that bet365 also provides a bevy of mobile services and I’m not sure I’d ever have want for another online betting provider. Check them out if this is your party. I’m betting you’ll have a good time.
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Ecommerce Software
Some of you close to me may know that I am doing more work with one of my business partners as we ramp up towards the launch of The Fight Channel. One of the necessary areas of my research has to do with figuring out which shopping cart software we are going to use when we do launch that site. Additionally, I am also in the proposal phase of providing another Los Angeles based company with online streaming services and their current shopping cart, while adequate, is not really anything special, and so I’ve been able to use my online research time for double duty (always a good thing!)
If you’ve done any searching online at all you’ll realize there are literally millions of results for “ecommerce software” in Google:
Smorty asked me to give my opinion on ecommerce software by ashop. I have to tell you that I am favorably impressed by what they offer. Not only are you going to get almost overloaded by a ton of helpful information, there are four pricing plans that are sure to cover your ecommerce software needs.
In fact, I was briefly looking at the “starter” package, and I figured out that with all of the customization ashop offers its shopping cart customers, you could almost run an entire website off that plan for about what it costs to host your own server box at a decent hosting service. And why would you host your own box when you are going to have access to all sorts of features and benefits that you’d have to build on your own.
Things like: SSL security (that can be really tricky to set up, I know :’( ), SEO pages, back up services (I still can’t get CRON jobs right), SMS order alerts? come on! I couldn’t set that up and have it working right for what these guys are charging for entire ecommerce software packages. The list goes on.
I’m definitely going to check them out, especially since they have a 10 day free trial. Add to that they actively promote their own affiliate program, and you’ll likely have a favorable opinion of this ecommerce software provider also.
AZ DOT Pledge
You may have noticed that I posted via twitter and a couple of flickr pics on Monday, my experience going to the Arizona Department of Transportation to become fully “Arizona-ized”. Dread had been filling me ever since I moved to Cottonwood 3.5 months ago.
Why the dread you ask? Mostly because I was coming from California, and if you live there, or have ever had the “pleasure” of going to the DMV there, you’ll immediately recognize that it can be quite the ordeal to deal with that bureaucratic behemoth which wallows in the worst customer service climate for any business or agency on the planet.
In all fairness, perhaps things have changed in the intervening 3 and a half months. Doubt it. The last time I visited a CA DMV (with an appointment, no less) my goals were to register a vehicle and title/register a trailer. With appointment it took me nearly 45 minutes to do what amounted to about 10 minutes worth of transactions.
Compare that with the recent experience at the AZ DOT/MVD where I registered a vehicle and got an AZ drivers license. The entire process took about 20 minutes (and here’s the kicker) I walked out of their building with my new drivers license in my wallet, the plates for my newly registered car, and the actual official, legal title for the car registered in AZ!
There is to be no waiting for any of that to be mailed to me 3 to whenever months from now. I won’t have to be disappointed when I see my picture on my new license (I was able to be disappointed immediately!) Actually, the image was very nicely exposed and I actually looked like I looked in that moment (my happiness about that is the story of another post, I’m sad to say )
I should have known the experience was to be a very different one when I read their mission statement they display (proudly, I hope) on their waiting area wall:
“Division to be a world class customer service organization”
Mission Statement:
To provide innovative products and services to meet the growing motor vehicle needs of the “New Arizona”
How have your experiences with motor vehicle departments been in your part of the country/world? We’d be especially interested to know what happens in other parts of the planet!
Lazy Internet Marketing
One of the aspects of these blogging networks that truly concerns me has to do with the web site owners that become members and then stay completely internal to that network as they attempt to use the system to generate new traffic and actions to their site.
While it is possible that every single “shout box” entry I’ve ever gotten was placed by someone who logged out of the network, and then visited my site and then logged back into the network in order to leave a “shout”, I doubt it. That’s the beauty of how the BlogCatalog/bumpZee/MyBlogLog’s of the world work. You install their widget (hopefully customize its output to fit into the look and feel of your site) and that way others can see those whom have visited you pages of late.
When an email notification is delivered to my inbox and I spend the time to go to the blog network site, login and read the shout, private message, whatever, I’ve obviously invested some amount of effort to the process. And that’s how things are designed to work. No arguments there.
I get messages that say “Please come to my site, and leave a message about this that or the other…” (see image insert) and then I go to my home page to check on whether that person actually spent the time to visit my site, and leave any comments on any of my posts. When they haven’t, I immediately know they are just being a lazy internet marketer who thinks that I am going to be so impressed with the fact they left me a “personal” message at my (in this case) BlogCatalog page,
that I’ll immediately jump through hoops, click the two or three page views to get to their actual blog/web site, and spend the time reading and commenting there about whatever.
And to make it worse, if there is ANYTHING of interest at all that makes me want to click through to their sites, if they haven’t even taken the time to install the widget that shows others who has visited their site from that network, the browser window immediately gets closed and I move on with my work. Yes, I realize there are hosting sites that may not allow for the widgets to be installed. Whatever. Host the code on your own server. If you are going to be legitimate at some point in your online ventures, you are going to have to get to a host that will give you more flexibility or spend the $10 a month for shared hosting accounts that allow you to host your own. It’s really not that hard. Try it!
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