Angry in the Great White North

Back in December 2005, I wrote about Andrew Stronach's babes-and-betting internet venture. The main website was called SheTips and the idea was that the online staff would be available to help clients pick horses to bet on races taking place throughout North America. That staff would would then place the bets for the clients, acting as runners.

I suspected that the role of the runners was, in part, to separate the computer system that was the user interface for the clients, and the computer system that hosted the bets, which could then be located offshore, and was not directly accessed from within the United States or Canada.

The runners also helped entice clients to place bets. They did so by being bodacious betting babes!

click to enlarge

Andrew Stronach is the brother of Belinda Stronach, Liberal MP. Back in 2005, I was interested in whether Andrew Stronach's venture had political implications, what with Belinda Stronach being a Liberal cabinet minister. In particular, it wasn't clear just how legal the idea was. That was in part because internet gambling was (and in some ways, still is) a grey area in the law. Also, the role of runners placing bets (bodacious or otherwise) contravenes gambling laws in some jurisdictions, where bettors must place their own bets. Of course, there was the salaciousness of the whole thing.

Today, the Liberal Party is out of power, and Belinda Stronach is leaving politics altogether. But I thought it would be interesting to see if SheTips had gotten off the ground. Back in 2005, it was still in development, and looked like it had been for quite some time.

I have to report that the status of the scheme is difficult to ascertain.

The main site, SheTips.com, if offline. No pages are served up at that domain. The domain seems to have expired, and is currenly owned by Tucows.

I noticed a few months back that the SheTips webpages had moved to a new site, RunBets.com. There was no redirection or announcement that I saw, but I tracked it down by studying the portfolios and resumes of the many models who posed for SheTips pictures. Did I mention that sometimes writing this blog is lots of fun? Anyway, I tracked the fact that many of them listed RunBets (and SheRunsBets.com) about a year after the work for SheTips, often with the same photographer, or that they listed these sites together in their resumes.

[Note that these young women listed the work they did for SheTips as soley photo shoots. None mentioned that they would be moving from modeling and acting to a new career as wager specialists for SheTips. That might suggest that despite the photo on the site, a bettor is not talking to the girl featured. Maybe the intention was to replace the pictures with new pictures of the actual girls working once the site went live. Or maybe, just maybe, if the site had gone live, the young woman a customer would be talking to at SheTips did not actually look like the girl pictured on the computer screen. I wonder if that happens at other sexually-oriented internet web sites? How disappointing.]

When I checked RunBets.com a while back, it was a virtual copy of the SheTips site. A slightly different colour-scheme, and a new name, but otherwise the same.

Today, however, the site seems to be gone. The domain is still owned by Andrew Stronach, and clearly is related to the SheTips effort:

Registrant:
ASIP Holdings Inc.
14875 Bayview Avenue
Aurora, Ontario L3G 4G8
CA

Domain name: RUNBETS.COM

Administrative Contact:
Tips, She domains@smackinc.com
14875 Bayview Avenue
Aurora, Ontario L3G 4G8
CA
+1.8777438477

The original betting site is gone now. When you visit runbets.com, you see a front-end for Selective Dating. The online dating service is run by Smack Inc, a Toronto-based online company that helps companies build "brand communities". Smack was involved in SheTips in some capacity as well, showing up in the domain registration information.

But that's not quite the end of my search. The original SheTips and the follow-on RunBets were linked to SpiritsAndSports.com. Spirits and Sports was another portion of the Stronach online venture. When I first studied the venture, Spirits and Sports was the core of a loyality program. Bettors earned points for using the SheTips system, and those points could be redeemed at Spirits and Sports for, among things, parties with the girls.

So has Spirits and Sports gone down like SheTips? Oddly enough, no. It is still owned by Andrew Stronach at the Aurora address:

Registrant:
Sports & Spirits Productions Inc.
14875 Bayview Avenue
Aurora, Ontario L3G 4G8
CA

Domain name: SPIRITSANDSPORTS.COM

But I can't tell what is at this site, because the home page is protected by a password authentication wall. Weird. Lots of sites offer services only for paying subscribers, but they all have a freely accessible home page that explains what the site offers and acts as a marketing vehicle to drum up new customers.

If I wanted to register myself or my sports bar as a member of Spirits and Sports, I wouldn't know how. The registration page, if there is one, is presumably behind the password wall.

Maybe it's an exclusive club, and membership is by invitation only. Maybe registrations happen on a different site altogether, and only members go to Spirits and Sports. Maybe new memberships are suspended. Maybe it is a temporary thing until the site goes live, and only registered beta testers are allowed in. Or maybe the entire SheTips models-as-gambling-advisors business venture has folded and Spirits and Sports is an entirely different operation now. Or maybe Spirits and Sports is dead, and the password query is just a relic of the old code.

If the whole venture is dead, I wonder why. Maybe Andrew Stronach hit a technical wall in making SheTips work. Maybe the use of beautifiul girls was not a sufficient market differentiator to make the site successful in an online world filled with gambling sites. Maybe legal problems got in the way, what with the challenges online gambling sites face with government regulation.

Or maybe this is a pause before SheTips in some form and under a new name explodes onto the internet.

Interesting.