Andy Blackburn – SEO Consultant A collection of SEO, tech and other thoughts…

Real Deal Poker

I'm currently in transit between Prague and home, and going over my notes from the iGB Super Show, and there is one outfit that really caught my attention. Real Deal Poker's platform is something refreshing in what I feel has become a reasonably stagnant market place. There are poker products aplenty out there, all have their pros and cons and all are, within reason, relatively similar in their offering.

Real Deal Poker is the only poker software developer at the moment, which has shied away from RNGs (Random Number Generators) and has developed a platform that actually involves real decks of cards being shuffled (though be it by machines) in order to create a matrix of permutations, from which their poker platform pulls a deck. From my conversations with Gene Gioia the system works something akin to the following:

• A deck of cards (with barcodes) is shuffled by machine
• The order of the cards following the shuffle is recorded and placed in a matrix
• When this particular "deck" is pulled by the poker client, a player (here's the random element) gets to cut the deck at a random position
• The cards are then dealt in order from that position, to create the rest of the gameplay

The client itself isn't much different from any of the others that are readily available, with the exception of the burn pot. The dealer shows a burn card being placed to the side of the deck before each phase of play, just like in a real game... which begs the question, why do we never see a burn stack on any other software platform?

The guys over at Real Deal quoted a piece of research which stated that a large percentage (up to 30%!) of players interviewed at land based poker games state trust issues regarding RNGs as their primary reason for not playing online. By eliminating that hurdle, RDP are inviting a target market which would vastly supersede the current number of online poker players, to join the online poker world!

There is a great vid (albeit a little long) of Gene demoing his platform below, and for any of you wanting to see it in action, hope over to www.realdealpoker.com, take a look, and enjoy some free bucks on me:

Upside-down Facebook page?

Whilst adding some social links to a client site, I had a quick search for a facebook button to chuck in a sidebar. Anyone else notices something funky about this SERP:

See for yourself: Google SERP

Unfortunately the page seems to be down, but there's still a cached version here, screenshot-ed below:

Enough amusement for one day :)

Google and Apple in bed together – again?

This morning, a slightly misplaced click, opened up a page full of code which caught my attention. Who knew that the page source for the Developer Toolset within Google Chrome would start with:

Copyright (C) 2006, 2007, 2008 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.

?
See for yourself. Load up a fresh Chrome window, click the page icon, and scroll down to Developer > Developer Tools:

Right click anywhere in that window, and select View Source:

Tada:

Pumpt – Sony Ericsson’s viral idea using Twitter to inflate Spacehoppers

PUMPT! Quite a few people will have noticed the #pumpt hashtag begin to trend on Twitter earlier on today. Links to a webcam in a warehouse in South London began circulating, and suddenly everyone was watching SpaceHoppers inflate! The premise was simple:

• Tweet using #pumpt
• Watch spacehopper get inflated for a random number of seconds
• See your message on the big screen in the background

A video explaining the pumpt concept is below