Ash K. Gilpin

This is a follow-up to my first post on Bodog. Well, it’s been a little over a week now since first signing up with Bodog. Overall, I have to say that I am impressed. The system is quite easy to use and odds of winning and payouts are much greater than that of stocks. Well, payouts at least. Winning is more 50/50 whereas stock prices can fluctuate by numerous variables.

Personally, I haven’t had much success. It’s been more of a rollercoaster ride for me. I generally do pretty well at picking the teams I believe are going to win; however, I find myself getting greedy and choosing other options in parlay bets to further my riches. Unfortunately, the greater the chance of reward - the more risk. Too often I have seen one bet on my parlay screw it up for all of my other bets.

I believe the trick with online sports betting is to bet on the “sure” thing. Naturally, there’s no such thing as a “sure” thing in gambling, but I mean to choose the team that you have absolute minimal chance of losing on - then do a Moneyline bet instead of a Point Spread. Now repeat this strategy on about 3-4 other teams and tally them up in a parlay bet. This is where you can find your best payouts. If you are new to it all, try betting small - like $5. There are numerous parlays in which I have been where the payout on $5 risk is more than $200. Where else can you get a return on your investment like that?

If you’re interested in getting started, you can sign up here. Good luck everyone!

As many of you know, PayPerPost recently aquired most Performancing’s assets earlier this week. This aquisition got a lot of people asking about the future of the popular Performancing blogging plugin, which wasn’t acquired.

Well, it’s still available; however, it has been rebranded as ScribeFire. The site currently has a landing page up and will be launching shortly. In the meantime, the old plugin can still be downloaded on the Mozilla site.

ScribeFire reports that 400,000 people have downloaded the software, so far. There’s no word on how many active users there are, but a lot of bloggers swear by it.

It has been reported by Red Herring and VentureBeat that Digg has just closed an $8.5 million Series B round of financing from previous investors Greylock Partners and the Omidyar Network, bringing the the total of capital they’ve raised to just over $10 million. They previously raised $2.8 million in October of 2005 from Greylock, Omidyar and several angel investors.

It has also been reported that they are not yet cash flow positive but should be in the near future, and currently have 18 employees.

On another note - Digg’s competitor, Reddit, was acquired by Condé Nast in October.

There are several sites on the web that allow you to convert your audio and video files into different formats. But Marseille, France-based Hey!Watch appears to be a much more robust product than anything I’ve seen previously, and they’ve added developer tools to help build their functionality directly into other web services. The service is in private beta, but there is some information on the home page for you to read and you can request an invitation to join.

With Hey!Watch, users can import files to the service in a number of ways, including uploading from a hard drive or simply putting in the URL of a video from YouTube or other popular online video services. But they also allow users to upload videos via a RSS feed, so new enclosures from future shows will automatically be uploaded as well. The company has also created bookmarklets and a Firefox plugin to import a video from a currently viewed website to the service with a single click.

Once you’ve uploaded your files, they can be converted to all of the usual formats and then downloaded. And they’ve also used RSS intelligently here as well - they’ve created a RSS feed for all of a user’s converted files, so they can simply be gathered from a feed reader without going back to the Hey!Watch site each time.

Most products / services like this have only been available as software downloads for the program to run on your desktop.  Having such tools available online is pretty cool stuff.

Google Maps and its associated local search is a quick and easy means of locating businesses and obtaining directions. Most people who use it already seem to enjoy the graphical interface with its extremely reactive GUI. But when using spoken output, this visual richness can get in the way of quickly listening to the results of a maps query.

As an alternative, Google Maps also provides a simple to use a textual interface that serves up directions very efficiently when working with a screenreader or a Braille display. This alternative view into Google Maps is here, at the Textual Maps UI (http://maps.google.com/?output=html). It’s extremely useful for blind and visually impaired users, as well as an effective solution for those times when you’re at a non-graphical display and need to quickly look up a location.

Just type a simple English query of the form start address to end address and quickly get the information you’re looking for. Though Google added this option to enhance the accessibility of Google Maps for blind and low-vision users, perhaps others will find this alternative view a useful addition to their maps arsenal.

For those of you that don’t know, today is my birthday.  I just turned 26 years old.  One of the gifts I received was a DVD called The Secret.  It was a pretty interesting video to watch.  It claims that the secret to life is the Law of Attraction.  Basically, whatever the feelings you have - you will attract and manifest things of that nature.  Example: if you are happy and have a positive outlook on life then you will attract positive things in to your life.

Being my birthday, I started thinking about my past and everything that has led me to where I am now and how some of the excerpts from this DVD have applied.  Surprisingly enough, things that I have applied myself to full-heartedly, I have in fact accomplished.  This is not to say that you just need to “think” good and good will come.  It doesn’t work like that.  It’s not only a way of thinking, but also a way of doing.  You really need to apply such ethics to your everyday life.

I’ve found myself, as of recent, immersing myself with thoughts of stress, not being exactly happy about where I am in my life and goals I wished to have achieved by this age, etc.  I can’t say it will be an easy process to full adopt this new way of thinking and feeling, but I think it’s definitely worth the effort of trying.  The idea is to be happier (mind, body and spirit) and the universe around you will do the rest.

“We become what we think about, all day long.  Therefore, build your own world.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Since the debut of the new transparent Sidebar in Google Desktop 4.5, Google has been working to make it widely available outside of the English-speaking world. Well, they’re finally done, and now you can get it in any of 28 languages. And just in time for the holidays, they’ve added several holiday themed gadgets. More details are available on the Google Desktop Blog.

I just signed up the other day with Bodog.com, an online gambling site that lets you place bets on sports teams, casino games or whatever your fancy.  I have a few friends that have been using the service for some time now - one with fairly moderate success and the other - well, it has been the equivalent of a year’s salary.

I started off today by doing several parlay bets.  Now, I have never been much of a sports fan, but when you get money on the line - oh boy!  I was yelling at the TV and cursing at the refs.  Good stuff.  Unfortunately, I didn’t do well in my bets for today; however, I only risked $5.  So, not like I am out much.  On the bright side, I could have been up $125 off a $5 bet (greater the risk, greater the reward).

Anywho, if you have ever been interested in applying your sports knowledge to supplement your income - Bodog.com could be the place for you.  They will even pay you 10% on any deposit you make for extra incentive.  I started with $300 and then they gave me $30 deposit bonus (10%).  Not a bad deal.

If you would like to set up an account and get a 10% deposit bonus, you can do so by clicking here.  Enjoy!

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) will introduce a beta version of Adobe® Photoshop® CS3 software, the next release of the world standard in digital imaging, on Friday, December 15th. Adobe is delivering a widely available Photoshop CS3 beta to enable customers to more easily transition to the latest hardware platforms, particularly Apple’s new Intel-based systems. The beta is available as a Universal Binary for the Macintosh platform, as well as for Microsoft® Windows® XP and Windows Vista computers. The final shipping release of Adobe Photoshop CS3 is planned for Spring 2007.

Packed with new features, Photoshop CS3 beta also includes a pre-release version of a major upgrade to Adobe Bridge, as well as a preview release of the all-new Adobe Device Central. Photoshop customers can use Adobe Device Central to design, preview, and test compelling mobile content, created specifically for smaller screens. This new tool, integrated in the Photoshop CS3 beta, simplifies and accelerates the creation of mobile content through a preview environment and built-in device profiles.

New startup LicketyShip, the Kozmo-like ecommerce service that delivers goods within a couple of hours of ordering, is counting on this holiday season to make a name for itself. The company, which we first noticed back in January, launched in September, but they’ve recently gotten a lot of mainstream press attention and are offering $9.99 delivery up through Christmas Eve. So while the big ecommerce sites can no longer get stuff to you by the big day, Lickety Ship is still running strong. The company is only shipping same day in the Bay Area currently.

They are almost certainly taking a hit on the $9.99 deliver charge - LicketyShip outsources delivery to local couriers with extra capacity to make deliveries, which is costly. While the holiday season is a good time to pick up extra customers for ecommerce companies, Lickety Ship may be sending the wrong signal with the greatly reduced delivery charges.

Kozmo, which offered free deliveries within an hour, flamed out spectacularly in 2001 after burning through $280 million in capital. Real-time deliveries are expensive, and just because there’s lots of demand to have stuff delivered in a couple of hours doesn’t mean there’s a good business model there. LicketyShip needs to prove that people will pay $20 or more (their break even cost) to have something delivered in a couple of hours. The company says that 30% of Amazon orders are for overnight delivery, where the cost of shipment often exceeds the cost of the item itself. If that’s accurate, then there may be a bright future for the company. But Lickety Ship needs to focus their marketing attention on that segment of the market, not last minute Christmas shoppers.