The online casino industry has grown rapidly over the course of the last ten years. While at the end of the 20th century there were only several dozen online casinos available to gamblers, over the last ten years their numbers have grown exponentially and today gamblers have a choice of over a thousand online casinos.

Land-based casinos, especially in the US, have always promoted themselves as fun-filled places where men, and later on also women, can gamble and have a good time and if they gamble enough their hotel rooms will be comped by the casino to encourage high rollers to come and wager at their establishment 바카라.

In Las Vegas, Nevada the casinos have realized, soon after their establishment that if they want to attract the men to gamble they need to provide entertainment to women. Free drinks were offered to the ladies waiting for their husbands or lovers who were at the tables playing.

When slot machines were introduced the game mainly drew bored women who had nothing better to do in the casino. The casino owners have quickly identified an additional source of income and started heavily promoting the game to women.

During the late 20th century Las Vegas got revamped from a mobsters-run town and turned more corporate. Huge casinos were built and offered non-gambling related entertainment to attract vacationing families and also started hosting large conventions which turned Las Vegas to the convention capital of the US.

Tourism flourished, but profits from gambling have slowly started declining and places like Macau have started competing with Las Vegas as the city whose profits most from gambling.

The introduction of online casinos in the late 90’s have served as another blow to places such as Las Vegas, Atlantic City and Monte Carlo. Suddenly people were given the option of gambling from the comfort of their own homes with a click of a button.

However in those years not everybody had a personal computer and those who did had to surf the internet using dial-up connections which were slow and patchy. This proved to be a problem and in retrospect we can see that these two factors caused a delay in the burst of online casinos.

Over the course of a few short years more and more people have gained access to personal computers, as mass production of personal computer have caused prices to decline, this corresponded with vast improvements in internet connections and the increase of internet surfing speed.

At this point it became much easier for the average Joe to own a computer and surf the net at a reasonable speed. Once this was possible online casinos could not be stopped. It became easier and quicker to download and install casino software, and later on with the development of Flash technology many casinos could offer players to play their favorite casino games directly from their web browsers without the need to download any heavy software on to their computers.

The rapid growth in the gaming industry of software providers and gambling brands has created a welcomed competition between the companies and have forced online casino to take a different approach from land-based casinos to marketing and promotion.

Online casinos were not able to offer their patrons free drinks and hotel rooms therefore they had to come up with other means of promotion in order to attract gamblers. This signaled the birth of online casino bonuses and merchandize promotions.

Online casino have started competing with land-based casinos and other online casinos by offering free cash bonuses to new players joining them. They have also developed players’ rewards programs that awarded top players with expensive branded merchandize.

If you thought it was convenient to play blackjack online 24/7 at home, just wait till you try mobile gambling. The mobile casino is the next logical step in the online casino industry, bringing your favorite online games right to your iPhone, iPad, or Android phone. There are even a few older model phones that support mobile gaming, but for the most part, it’s geared toward today’s smart phones.

Mobile web casinos mean that you can play wherever you can get a 3G connection. Until recently, it was a big enough deal that you could gamble any time using your computer at home, but now you can pretty much gamble anywhere as well. There are three basic approaches to using your mobile device for online wagering: using the mobile version of the site itself; using an iPhone app; or using an Android app 바카라사이트.

In many cases, you can use your smart phone simply by going to the mobile version of your favorite casino’s website. If it doesn’t already have a mobile version, it probably will soon: the market is just too lucrative to ignore. You would play on your handheld device just as you would on your computer at home. Everything’s smaller, but you have access to the same games, same prizes, and same bonuses.

iPhone apps are slow in coming, though they do exist. The UK’s Betfair, Ireland’s Paddy Power, and Austria’s Bwin are three European sites that offer iPhone betting apps specific to their sites. Betfair and Paddy Power apps work only in the UK and Ireland, while Bwin’s only works in the UK and Austria, as of late 2010, though other countries are expected to be added rapidly.

Android mobile casino apps look like they will be more abundant, due to the non-proprietary nature of the Android operating system and the growing popularity of Android phones in Europe. The Irish Betdaq is staking its fortunes on Android apps, on the belief that while the iPhone has fueled the expansion of smart mobile devices in general, Androids may be the better long-term option, not least because getting an app approved for the iPhone Apps store is not easy.

There is little doubt about the future of mobile gambling. While currently only about 5% of the bets placed online are done on mobile devices, this number is expected to rocket to more like 50% over the next three to five years. A recent survey by Juniper Research on mobile gaming markets shows that mobile casinos are expanding rapidly, and could see mobile wagers exceeding $48 billion by the year 2015!

For the most part, the most popular games on mobile devices mirror the most popular games in internet gambling in general: slots, poker, and blackjack. An Android app titled “Video Poker,” which is not a web casino game, did not take long to garner 50,000 downloads. Another non-casino game, “Cherry Slot Machine,” is a free Android app and is also one of the top Android gaming apps. Clearly there is a hunger for these games, and it’s just a matter of time before online casinos embrace mobile casino apps en masse.