Personal portal now open to all

I've been going through the comments you've left me on this blog in the past few days, including opinions and suggestions related to the expansion of our Flexibet services which came into operation last Sunday. I'm glad this new measure has received positive response from our racing fans, some of whom have suggested that we further lower the investment amount to increase their betting flexibility. We will give these views further consideration as it is always our aim to respond to customers' needs.

Apart from giving our customers more betting convenience, we strive to enhance the dissemination of information, and make it as easy as possible for racing fans to study the latest form. Now that the Internet is so widely used in society, we've been putting special focus on our online services, trying to make them more user-friendly. You may be interested to know that more than 600,000 people log into the Club's website, www.hkjc.com, every raceday. To further enhance our web services, we soft-launched a new multi-functional web portal, myHKJC, in September last year. I'm pleased that this beta version of this pioneering service has proved popular, with more than 10,000 of our betting account holders already registering to use it.

Yesterday we formally introduced the production version of this portal, which means it is now available to all betting account customers by free registration. In addition to the popular personalisation features of the prototype, which enable users to set their own style of layout and race card content, the updated version includes new features like draw statistics, jockeys' performances and columns by experts, all of which can help bettors with their racing analysis. So I hope all our account holders and racing fans will give their staunch support to these enhanced services in myHKJC.

I guess many of you will be taking part in one of Hong Kong's other major sporting events this weekend – the Standard Chartered Hong Kong Marathon to be run tomorrow morning. I'll be one of the participants myself as I'm taking part in the Leaders Cup – an invitation event run over two kilometres.

As I regularly go jogging, the distance of this event should not prove too difficult as it's about the same distance I would normally run for a warm-up. However, I think the objective and meaning of participating in the Hong Kong Marathon goes way further than its distance, as all money raised will be donated to the charity Orbis, which assists people suffering from eye illnesses in the developing countries. So I feel very happy that I've been invited to join other local executives and celebrities to take part in this meaningful charity event tomorrow.

I'm also pleased to know that two Club teams, comprising eight staff in total, will compete in the half-marathon event earlier in the day. We actively encourage the Club's employees to take part in sporting activities as it helps to ensure a healthy work-life balance. By the time I am at the last stage of the run, my colleagues should have arrived the finish line and I shall be celebrating with them for our completion of this meaningful event.

But as you'll be aware, tomorrow is also a horse racing day, so naturally I shall be rushing to Sha Tin Racecourse immediately afterwards. Among the 11 races on the card, I'll be watching the performances of Lucky Quality, Mighty Winner and My Way. Lucky Winner remains undefeated at the all-weather track and won all his three previous starts on 1,200m. Let's see if he can make it four in a row at the same distance tomorrow.