Greetings from Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. Twenty-seven hours and 4,400 miles removed from Earl's Court, it's time to take advantage of travel-travel induced delirium and do a little post-IGE reflective blogging.
Monday - The Tribute
For me, the week's festivities got underway Monday evening with a dinner cruise on the Thames honoring Sue Schneider, who retired last summer after eight years as CEO of River City Group and an additional two years heading Clarion Gaming's US division. Sue has been one of the world's most instrumental figures in the proliferation of the interactive gambling industry and I suggested to some of my coworkers that we pay our gratitude for her contribution as an industry pioneer by doing a roast. They liked the idea and immediately volunteered me as emcee. (Thanks!)
Look for video of the evening to be posted online soon - something that almost wasn't possible due to my jet-lagged colleagues, Tony and Dawn, leaving the video equipment in a taxi. (I would never do something like that).
Moments after getting out of a taxi, members of Clarion Gaming's St.
Charles office wonder if they will every be reunited with the
professional recording equipment left behind the back seat.
Click here to view more photos from that evening.
A little teaser for those who can't wait for the movie to get the gory details . . . Topics include: nepotism, gullibility, frizzy hair, computer literacy and relationships with legendary country western singers.
Secondarily, we embarrassed Clarion Gaming's Nancy Krause with a boisterous rendition of "Happy Birthday" and we lambasted Steve Cook for blowing the surprise by copying Sue on his RSVP to the party.
Anyway, it was good fun and I'm happy to say that Sue is still talking to me.
Tuesday - Cybercrime
On Tuesday I attended the Cybercrime conference. In a nutshell, the event is seven hours of techies scaring the crap out of each other with harrowing tales of cyber predators deceiving, stealing and scamming in the digital environment.
I should point out up front that the full title of the event is "Combating Cybercrime in Betting and Gaming." For the sake of convenience, I refer to it as the "Cybercrime" conference, but I'd certainly like to emphasize the "combating" part, so as not to suggest that this is an event for cyber criminals to attend . . . although I have to say, bringing cyber criminals and the people who hunt them under the same roof would be a hoot.
Anyway, I spent most of the day chasing interviewees for our post-conference video coverage (to be posted over the course of the next three months), but I did manage to duck in and out of several sessions throughout the day.
The first one I attended was a talk given by PartyGaming's head of regulatory compliance, Leon Thomas, who ripped the recent Telegraph story about I-gaming being a vehicle for terrorism. People in the industry know the article was preposterous and an example of how laziness often translates to horrendously irresponsible reporting, but Thomas pointed out that the absurdity of the claims made in the article is lost on the average Telegraph reader. He also said law enforcement in the UK has a lot to learn about I-gaming and that it is the industry's responsibility in both cases to educate the ill-informed.
I popped into the conference room again toward the end of the age verification session, just in time to hear Andrea Wilson of First Atlantic Commerce ask the panel why no one has used the Skype platform as a substitute for face-to-face interaction with customers. A very good question. Panelist James Blake from Experian was somewhat dismissive because fake IDs would be an easy work-around, but fellow panelist Tom Fears, a regulatory inspector for the Alderney Gambling Control Commission, was intrigued.
"That's the kind of creative solution we'd like to see," Fears said. "We love to see that kind of problem solving in the market."
Fears acknowledged that Skype is not the ultimate solution but added that it certainly couldn't hurt to have another check point.
"It's a way to have another arrow pointing in the right direction," he said.
He also noted that the low cost of using Skype would be a huge plus among increasingly cost-conscious operators.
Sorry, but I don't understand the urgency to perfect age verification in the I-gaming space. Innovative thinking in this area is welcomed with enthusiasm--especially when proposed solutions are affordable--but let's not lose sight of the fact that underage gamblers have access to plenty of sites with no controls. Let's suppose there are two doors to a room - one of them of them is chained shut and the other is unlocked. People will take the unimpeded path--through the unlocked door--regardless of how thick the chain is on the locked door. In other words, if you want to gamble at as site that's off-limits to you, are you going to look for a back door or are you going to move on to an unregulated site that will let you in through the front door?
Left: PartyGaming's Leon Thomas, Top Right: The Age Verification Panel, Bottom Right: Lord Erroll.
And now on to a different kind of "fear." Lord Erroll, a hereditary peer in the British House of Lords, got the Security and Fraud session started with some ominous thoughts about dealing with fraudsters online. "You won't be able to predict what's going to happen," Lord Erroll said. "No matter what you do, they'll get in."
Perhaps they should have wrapped up the conference on that note and sent everyone to the pub early, but they elected to continue, with Mark Davis, head of the London Metropolitan Police Cyber Crime Unit, delivering some potentially good news. Davis acknowledged that Leon Thomas' assessment that law enforcement is way behind the curb in combating cybercrime is accurate, but this, he said, is about to change because the cyber crime unit received approval for funding in October 2008 and will begin operations in April 2009.
He also pointed out that a vast majority - 87 percent - of UK industry fails to report Internet crime. One of the major reasons for such a high number, he said, is a general lack of confidence in law enforcement. However, thanks to the funding approved in Q4 '08, fraud protection in the UK, he said, will soon be on par with that of the US, and he is hopeful that with this comes a new found confidence in the system.
And finally, Davis stressed that UK law enforcement wants to help the online gambling industry and that it is now up to the industry to do a better job in reporting cyber crime.
So let's review:
United Kingdom: Arrest cyber criminals; protect the I-gaming industry.
United States: Arrest the I-gaming industry; protect cyber criminals.
The scene at registration - Top Left: Senactive donates a helicopter to any Cybercrime attendee who leaves a business card, Bottom Left: The Clarion Gaming helicopter play date will surely be awesome, Right: It's almost noon and conference organizer Mark Walker, a disturbed after learning that 10 speakers have yet to check in and pick up their badges (the yellow ones), has fallen out of his chair. Deanne Mackintosh doesn't seem to have noticed. My next IGE blog will focus on the expo.