GLXW Featured in Financial Times
Financial Times Wed march 24, 1999
Online Gambling by Caroline Daniel
Virtual Chips, Real stakes
A lucrative online market has emerged as gamblers flock to new internet casino sites.
In the world of "click and bet" there are no free drinks, no irritable waitresses chewing gum and no James Bond lookalikes. It is just you, your computer and an addiction to gambling.
As Larry Weltman, executive vice president of GLC Limited which runs online pornography industry. The next biggest industry, which is coming to the Internet, is gambling."
Java-based applications, running on a browser, and which do not take as long to download, are also becoming popular with developers. Faster still are the games based on HTML (hypertext markup language, in which web documents are written), although the graphics and animation on these are, until now, less
compelling.
However, Providing such glitzy entertainment does not come cheap.
GalaxiWorld claims to have spent $25m developing its Internet casino, the first fully functioning Java-based gaming system.
It was launched in December, with a "Play4Fun" version in January. The site offers 28 casino games, including slot machines, video poker, blackjack and roulette. The game takes up to three minutes to download.
In the Play4Fun version the customer is given $1000.00 of "play money" to make bets. To make a bet in Roulette, the player drags a virtual chip onto a position on a virtual Roulette table, and clicks "spin".
After a few seconds, and enlarged graphic of a spinning roulette wheel materializes on-screen, with a close up of a ball bouncing enticingly past the numbers, like a spin of the wheel of fortune. When the hall stops, your account is either credited or debited. The whole experience takes around a minute. Once acquainted with the fun site, punters can move on to playing
for real money. In January, its second month in operation, $7.3m was wagered on the GalaxiWorld site, up from $3m in December.
Lets face it, GLXW is the leading online casino. First its Java-based and second its listed on the NASDAQ National market
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