I can still remember the day I registered WinningStreak.com back in 1995, I was living in South Florida at the time and there was an article in the Ft. Lauderdale Sun Sentinel about a new proposed gambling ship to be docked at the famous Bahia Mar, the article went on to say that the name of the boat was the "Winning Streak". At that time I was involved in developing one of the first on-line Sportsbooks and we had just installed an on-line Casino on a server system in Curacao but late at night, about 2:30am in the morning, I awoke and wondered if the Domain name was available, sprang out of bed and logged on to the Internet to find out. Imagine that? Winning Streak was available, so I registered it. The gaming ship project sank.
In the beginning of the Internet era, most investors who were told about online gambling would just smile and/or laugh at the notion that people would send money or credit card information to someone in Curacao, or other far-flung locations, so they could play games online. Sportsbetting was a little easier to conceive because many people had already heard of telephone sports betting with shops in Jamaica but still the number of naysayers and skeptics far outweighed the believers, still we forged ahead and kept pitching our ideas, always focusing on gaming mavens thinking they'd be the best target to find a true-believer who would take the risk and put up the money.
During the last half of the '90's I was so busy working for other people, developing online casinos and sportsbooks that I didn't pay any attention to my own domain: Winning Streak. Then after a very interesting and eye-opening contract in Costa Rica, where I witnessed some of the most successful Sportsbooks in high-growth mode I decided it was time to begin developing something on my marquee brand.
From 1999 onward, the website WinningStreak.com became somewhat of a sandbox (test site) for other projects that I was contracted to work on. In some cases it was a conflict of interest to be working on winningstreak.com while consulting for a gaming company that was essentially targeting the same market, so my own site would be neglected and slowly fall out of date while traffic dropped off and sections of the site were left in disrepair. When content management systems (CMS) came into vogue I started installing these various software systems but never focused enough attention towards fresh original content and just didn't have the time or resources to make the site into anything special.
Ironically, despite my inattention to winningstreak.com there were years when it made decent money as an affiliate portal, even while I was spending my time on other tasks. People seemed to want to get on winning streak so requests would come in every day (and still do) for links, or to join other programs.
Now that I live a comfortable life in Brazil and have either completed all projects or delegated them over to capable partners, I'm left to get back on a winning streak. This time I'm convinced that Movable Type has the best software, especially the newest version called "Motion" which leverages the growth and power of Social Networks, it embraces these other Action Streams (as they're called) and pulls them into the dynamic publishing platform to make them part of the conversation.
My new challenge is to upgrade and modernize winning streak, into a practical and useful social community for gambling enthusiasts, gambling portal webmasters, affiliate managers and gaming company owners. If you're reading this and fall into any of these categories, then please ; get yourself on a winningstreak.com.
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