Comparison is often made between “Christmas time” when retailers go crazy and other big events causing an uplift in sales, visits, profit, etc. For example, those huge lines outside Apple stores when a new iPhone is released, the school holidays for a water park or on a smaller scale, Sizzler might get excited and load up the salad bar on pension day. For bookmakers, its Melbourne Cup, there is no event like it. The traffic (visitors) to the website is 100x the average Saturday, unlike the retailers though, we’re just lucky we don’t have to find a car park during the madness. This year, we’re getting behind some great $400 bonus bet offers at bookmaker.com.au.

I laughed last Christmas when the General Manager of the local Westfield shopping centre was on a short TV spot on the 6 o’clock news, he said “It’s Christmas time, this is our [retailers] Melbourne Cup”, it’s great to see the comparison being made the other way around!

Enjoy race 7 ladies and gents.

Long time, no blog. But I have some exciting news.

We’ve just soft launched our new horse racing portal at HorseRacing.com.au. Our business acquired the domain name late 2010 and we started plans for the site immediately. There’s only a few pages live at the moment covering some of the biggest group races in Australia and also some of the major Australian racecourses. But, this site is going to be massive so keep an eye on it. In the near future we will have full horse, jockey and trainer profiles, odds comparison, tips and much, much more all on one giant horse racing industry portal.

The site itself is a reasonably simple design, we want to keep it quite light so that come Melbourne Cup time we can handle the enormous amount of traffic we will handle (my best guess at this point will be close to, if not more than 1 million unique visitors across our network this year on Melbourne Cup 2011 day alone). Anyway, if you have any questions about the new site, let me know. Don’t forget to leave some feedback in the comments.

The Spring Racing Carnival is upon us. There’s some great racing this weekend at Randwick starting with the Epsom Handicap. We have the Turnbull Stakes on Sunday at Flemington, an absolutely awesome race with more “big names” than The Expendables. Visit my favourite sites for everything you need to know this Spring Carnival:

 2010 Spring Carnival Racing Guide:

• Caulfield Guineas - Date: 9th October 2010
• Caulfield Cup - Date: 16th October 2010
• Cox Plate - Date: 23rd October 2010
• Victoria Derby - Date: 30 October 2010
• Melbourne Cup - Date: 2nd November 2010
• Crown Oaks - Date: 4th November 2010
• Emirates Stakes - Date: 6th November 2010

Use these sites for all of the latest news, results, odds, final field, form guides etc.