When I first began looking into the online gambling space in late 1995 there were very few companies involved in the business. I remember presenting at the First Internet Symposium on Internet Gambling Law & Management in Washington, D.C., in November 1997. The speaker that preceded me at the conference was Jay Cohen (Jay was one of the first victims of the Feds anti-gaming stance and was later convicted and went to jail). At the same conference I met with the founders of 888, Avi and Aaron Shaked, who over a coffee in the hotel lounge told me they were going to build the biggest online casino in the world (they later did). Later that month, while piggybacking on a conference of the North American Gaming Regulators, I witnessed the lawyers for the famous Golden Palace scoping out potential software companies. At the same show Martin Moshal, founder of Microgaming, was manning his own table (in a room with three other “exhibitors”) and doing a demo of his own software. What a long way the industry has come…..