Greetings Trek Gamers and Trek Fans

December and January were big months for Hailing Frequency as we have run a series of competitons giving away 150 Closed Beta Keys, 1000 Open Beta Keys and 3 copies of the Star Trek Online Digital Deluxe Edition!

These amazing competitions has seen our memberbase increase to over 4500 and our daily unique hits increase to over 2000 per day on average.  We also just broke a new record yesterday as over 14000 unique people visited our website!

As January continues, we will be running another few competitions - we have more Digital Deluxe Editions to giveaway and we are also trying to get our hands on some boxed gold/collectors editions of the game to hand out and some more open beta keys!

Podcasts

We've released several podcasts over the past month or so.  The first was our 2009 Christmas Special where we had an exlusive roundtable interview with Cryptic Studio's Craig Zinkevich, Christine "Kestrel" Thompson, Dan "The Gozer" Griffis and Joe "Rekhan" Blancato.

Download the christmas special at http://shows.hailingfrequency.com/HF-72-22122009.mp3

Getting Janurary kick started - with the lifting of our NDA on Star Trek Online, we broadcast two LIVE question and answer sessions, where we answered literally hundreds of questions from the community about Star Trek Online.

You can download the first Q and A session at http://shows.hailingfrequency.com/HF-SE-03012010.mp3

And the second Q and A session at http://shows.hailingfrequency.com/HF-SE-09012010.mp3

Star Trek Online Videos

We've also released a tonne of videos from the Star Trek Online Closed Beta (which is now well into open beta) - where we demonstrated various aspects of the game.

Check out all the videos at http://www.youtube.com/user/HailingFrequency

Star Trek Online Handle Exchange

We have started a handle exchange thread where you folks out there in the community can share your Star Trek Online, in game handles!

Please post your handle at http://hailingfrequency.com/boards/index.php/topic,2007.0.html

Expanded Star Trek Online Forums

We have always had a huge Star Trek Online Forum section, but it just got bigger and better.

If the Star Trek Online forums are too much for you, then please check out and participate in our dedicated Star Trek Online Forums at http://hailingfrequency.com/boards/index.php/board,13.0.html

Donations Needed

Due to high load on our servers through December and January, we are moving some of Hailing Frequency's files onto a CDN - thats a Content Delivery Network.

This will enable us to handle huge data spikes and traffic spikes to the website with ease, so we do not crash as we did the other day during the 1000 open beta key giveaway extravaganza.

In addition, we are also adding a new server to our cluser/rack to increase our available bandwidth and further enhance our ability to handle our growing community.

At the moment, all of this network expandature is being covered at a loss.  Hailing Frequency is not-for-profit and the only money we make is via donations, and that money goes right back into Hailing Frequency.

In order to afford to keep our website online into the future, we require as many donations at the moment, as possible.

We have monthly targets, however, any extra donations will be saved and used on months where less people donate.

So if you can spare $1, $10, $20, $100, $200 - whatever you can spare, and if you have an interest in helping us out, then please do donate either at:

http://hailingfrequency.com/boards/index.php?action=treasury

Or directly to our paypal account which is "donations@hailingfrequency.co.uk"

Sponsorship Requests

We are currently looking for corporations or individuals whom are willing to provide funding or long term sponsorship deals to us here at Hailing Frequency.

We mainly require hardware for sponsorship, servers, microphones, video and audio recorders, etc.  Funding for travel expenses would also be beneficial to allow us to continue to provide on hands reporting where possible.

Please see http://www.hailingfrequency.com/sponsor.php for more information about our requirements.

If you or someone you know would be interested in sponsoring Hailing Frequency, please contact zach@hailingfrequency.com

Information about our demographics and hits can be found at http://www.hailingfrequency.com/advertise.php

A shameless plug...

If you have somehow made it all of the way to the end of this post, I would just like to take a moment to shamelessly plug my company - ZDN Computers.

I am a web designer / developer providing a variety of services including:

#  Web Design and Development (HTML, XHTML, PHP, CSS, MySQL, JavaScript, jQuery,Actionscript)
# Web Hosting and Web Management
# Flash Design (Flash Websites, Flash Banners, Flash Template Modification, Flash Coding)
# Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click Campaigns
# E-Commerce Platforms including OS Commerce, CubeCart and Magento
# CMS Platforms including Joomla, Magento, Wordpress, Mambo and More
# Forum Platforms including SMF and PHPBB
# PSD/AI/PNG/JPEG to Valid Code for all of the above platforms
# Custom Portal Designs
# Copyrighting and Content Writing
# Public Relations (Representation of your company or product, online advertising, etc)

If you require any of the listed, please visit http://www.zdncomputers.com

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Many Thanks for reading folks, these are exciting times for Hailing Frequency and indeed the entire Star Trek Gaming Community, so we will see you all in Star Trek Online on/around February 2nd. 

Please do not forget to post your in game handle in the Handle Exchange we mentioned above and until next time, Keep those browser/sensors trained on Hailing Frequency Folks!