Horse Racing Fantasy Community

Once again this week, a lot of backend work continues to be implemented. We are very close to launching some of the new features and expect to get two major new features released by the end of the month. I feel pretty confident about the handicapping system for the Breeders' Cup final races as well as the Player Business Ownership Program. I know for sure that Monday we are upgrading our trainer leader boards. We have separated insta-tournament leaders from general tournament leaders. I believe this will be published and live Monday night.

We've made a lot of progress on the bonus program. The special quarterly awards program for the top horses will begin as scheduled on April 1. We have two days worth of development left, two days of design work and three to four days of testing and moving to the live site, so I feel very confident that we should hit our April 1 start date. Yes, I know that's April Fools' Day, but this is a serious program with serious bonuses for players with the best trainer game horses. If for some reason there is a slight delay, it will only be a few days. The scoring will still be considered through April, May and June and the awards for the best horses that fit the categories that were mentioned last week would all still apply as if the quarter was complete. In other words, even if the program starts a few days late, we are paying out the full awards for the second quarter.

We are very busy with our new partners program and continue to work things through with the NTRA. So far, the beta launch of our partnership has been very successful. Next week we go live with another major partner, one of the most established names in horse racing, both from a Web presence and print media. We have secured three other partnerships. All are major horse racing entities. The reason why I'm mentioning this is that we are simultaneously implementing the technologies and new features for our players and building out the partnership programs to ensure our projected growth rate for 2010. We still believe, prior to the Kentucky Derby, we will have five to six major partners launched. In aggregate, the partners represent at least several million visitors a month. That's a lot of exposure for our game and community.

I haven't been spending a lot of time in the community lately, but when I do go there, I'm finding more and more player negative activity from a small group questioning the integrity of the company. I've decided that all negative comments, specifically those that are actually being published to hurt our brand name with intentional deceit are just going to be deleted. I personally don't care, but when our partners visit our site or new potential members visit our site and see these intentional misrepresentations, that just won't fly with me and my partners. So, if you start to see threads disappear, it's not because we don't want the community to express their opinion. It's because we're not going to allow any misdirection or untruthful, intentional, deceptive comments. In fact, we may even move the entire message board system to a special page in the community off of the main navigation tabs. This is not an uncommon practice. In fact, some of the largest websites in the world with communities take them out of the mainstream path for this exact purpose.

I have also received a lot of private messages pertaining to the business bonus program. I probably posted on three different occasions how the program will work. You can simply review my past blogs for all of this information, but here's a quick summary. There are a handful of different businesses - from racetrack veterinarian service, horse feed companies, horse transportation companies, racetrack ownership and several others. Each week these businesses will go up for auction. There will be a brief description of the business and its potential revenue. For example, the business may be a racetrack and the potential revenue could be between 50,000 and 100,000 community points per month. Players who want to own that racetrack will place a one-time private bid in community points. In addition to placing the bid, they must pledge their stable earnings, as well. Ownership for these businesses will last between six months and two years depending on the business. So, for example, a player may find a particular business for sale (such as the racetrack) with an earning potential of between 50,000 and 100,000 points per month for a period of twelve months. A player who wants to own that business will submit a private bid of community game points. He decides. It could be 100 game points - it could be 100,000 community game points. In addition, the business has a fixed price, which will be deducted from your stable earnings. If you are the high bidder, the stable earnings are deducted and each month, you will receive the community game points and a business operation statement letting you know how much your business earned that month.

Essentially, this is simply a bonus program. These bonuses do not affect other members. In other words, they are not charged for the benefit of the player receiving the bonus. It's our way of rewarding the top players in our game based on their success in the game and their investment in the game. Currently, your stable earnings have no exchange value. Their current value represents how well you've managed your stable. This is important for player bragging rights in our leader boards, but now we're taking it one step further and providing these bonuses through the business ownership/auction program. There will be a direct correlation between the business cost (stable earnings) and its potential earnings in community points over your ownership period. In addition, this program is only available to VIP members. If you're not a VIP, you cannot participate in the program. Besides being another great feature and paying out community game points, business owners get very unique badges and when players visit your profile page, they will actually be able to take a flash video tour of the business you own. You can own as many businesses as you want and there will be multiple businesses for sale each week. In other words, many players can own a veterinarian business, many players can own a feed business and many players can own racetracks.

We've implemented a lot of small fixes going on with the game and are in the final testing of the new build. We'll probably release the new build by the second week of April. No one will lose any stats and, from a functionality standpoint, there really are no additional features in the new build. We've just fixed some issues and allowed our horse racing client application to store more data on your computer and pass data to the server more effectively.

As you know, we've begun the 3-year-old insta-tournament programs and they're now available and can be found in the View Upcoming Trainer Tournaments list.

It's been just about one year since we launched the trainer game. Going through everything with my head engineer, I was blown away when I found out that in the last year our development team performed over 10,000 hours of actual product development. Anyone who understands computer programming can appreciate the amount of effort, expense and dedication that has gone into quickly making us the fastest-growing horse racing game on the Internet. I'm looking forward to the Florida Derby. Though one of the key contenders has opted out for another prep race, it still looks like a very contentious field and another indicator that we are well on our way down the Triple Crown path.

Have a great weekend!
- Puddles