STATEMENT OF FACTS

It has come to our attention that certain parties have been publishing malicious and misleading information on the good character, reputation and integrity of the Dizzygoat.com website, and that of its founders, employees and shareholders. We assure our customers that Dizzygoat.com is unconditionally committed to providing the best service in the business, with honesty, reliability and integrity at the core of every thing we do, along with the aim of always providing our customers the best value for money. To achieve this, the founders of the Dizzygoat.com site began with the inspired vision of constructing the most up-to-date, cutting-edge hotel reservations website using the latest software technology available, for the sole reason that our customers would have an outstanding and even pleasing experience when they book hotel rooms with us.

As travellers ourselves, we envisioned a hotel booking website that was not only fast, secure and efficient, but also one that was also user-friendly with great features, such as instant reservation confirmations and the convenience of self-amendments or cancellations. To top it all off, the founders conceived of an engaging, lovable character called Dizzy Goat, who would be the online 'avatar' of dizzygoat.com, an affable, well-travelled free spirit who embodied the friendly interface we wanted our site to have.

In 2008 we appointed an IT company called BitSiren Co.Ltd, based in Phuket, Thailand, to begin developing a software platform to process hotel bookings. The managing director of BitSiren, Fred Munger, was entrusted with this task of constructing the dizzygoat.com website. However, over the period of several months and after lengthy delays, it became apparent to us that the software development being undertaken by BitSiren, led by Munger, fell woefully short of the standards we had specified.

By December 2009, it had became evident that the website built by Munger had major problems with stability and functionality. When we began to formally request the completion and handover of the website BitSiren had been paid to develop, in accordance with the terms and conditions of our agreement, Munger unilaterally terminated the software development contract. It was then too, that we were astonished to find that Munger had essentially stolen the www.dizzygoat.com URL by fraudulently misrepresenting himself as the owner of the site. (The domain name had been registered by us in 2006). Munger went further to block dizzygoat.com employees from the administration of the website, and we had to write to the domain registrar to reinstate our access to our own site. It is interesting to note that after this single abortive attempt, Munger has never since asserted any further claim to the URL, for the simple fact that he is NOT its legal owner. We began to realise then that we were possibly dealing with an individual with a propensity for criminal behaviour.

In a press statement given not long after this, dizzygoat.com co-founder Mark Kommer, said, “After numerous broken promises, missed deadlines and non-delivery of a commercially viable website, we were left with no choice but to sever relations with...BitSiren Co. Ltd”.

That was when the nastiness began. Read the full text of the press release here

We were completely blindsided by the utter vindictiveness in the subsequent actions of Munger, to whom all we had done was pay more than US$600,000 to build a website. To this day, BitSiren has NOT delivered the website we had legally contracted it to build, despite retaining all of the payments that it has received from us. Munger has kept all the money we had paid for the development of our website, and has given us absolutely nothing.

To add insult to injury, Munger proceeded to make a clumsy and farcical attempt to steal the intellectual property that had been created by us i.e. the Dizzy Goat character, falsely claiming that he (Munger) was the one who had come up with the character.

We have incontrovertible documentary evidence that this claim is completely and utterly false.

In an act of breathtaking absurdity and arrogance, Munger had attempted to take advantage of his breach of contract and unilateral termination of our agreement to abscond with intellectual property rights which legally belonged to us and which we had created and paid for, long before any association with him.

Prior to engaging BitSiren to design the website, we had spent much time and money in conceptualizing our business and on the creation of the “Dizzy Goat” name and character design. “Dizzy Goat” is a name that was created sometime in 2006 by Mark Kommer, a highly respected veteran with many years of solid experience in the Australian and international travel industry. In September 2008, Merchantwise Pty Ltd, an established Australian brand and retail marketing company, was engaged by us to conceptualise the pictorial representations of “Dizzy Goat” and related designs.

In an Intellectual Property Assignment Agreement dated November 2008, Merchantwise Pty Ltd assigned the copyright in their pictorial conceptualisations of the “Dizzy Goat” character and related designs to us. Thus we assert that we are the sole legal owners of these pictorial representations as well as the “Dizzy Goat” name, and anyone using the same without our express consent is in violation of international copyright laws.

Any claim of ownership of any “Dizzy Goat” intellectual property and trademarks made by Munger is blatantly false and illegal.

Further, Munger has also made a false representation to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) that BitSiren was the owner of the “Dizzy Goat” trademark, when the rights to “Dizzy Goat” were never vested in BitSiren. We refuted Munger's fraudulent claim by the simple expedient of providing copies to the USPTO the assignment of the rights in the pictorial representations from Merchantwise Pty Ltd, and also the software development license agreement to show that we were the rightful owners of the “Dizzy Goat” trademark.

It is clear that Munger has misrepresented to the USPTO or even falsified an assignment of the trademark application when none was ever signed by us, as the rightful owners of the trademark. The USPTO has accepted that the assignment was not correct, and has rectified the records for the application to continue in our name.

However, recently, it appears Munger has attempted the same again, and has somehow managed to dupe the USPTO into reassigning the trademark to BitSiren. Investigations are under way, and once we have all the details about how this was perpetrated, we will pursue this matter to the fullest extent of the law.

In addition to this and other unethical and possibly illegal acts, Munger further attempted to fraudulently represent himself to Amazon.com as the “registered US copyright holder of content and the registered owner of other intellectual property associated with (www.dizzygoat.com)”. This claim is also demonstrably false. An online search in the US copyright database, and trademark searches in US and Singapore trademark offices do not reveal any trace of such registration. If Munger or BitSiren had previously registered any intellectual property rights over the “Dizzy Goat” materials, we would have encountered objections during our own registration processes.

We possess documentary evidence to substantiate ALL of our statements above.

In the end, the unstable and unreliable website platform created by Munger was useless for our purposes. We had no choice but to completely write off the asset in our 2009 audited accounts (filed with the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority of Singapore, ACRA), and we have never used the website built by BitSiren.

Those were dark days, but we decided to begin again from the ground up, with a new team of software engineers, painstakingly rebuilding our dream site on a new platform, with new bespoke graphics and functionality. The present dizzygoat.com site is a completely new one in every way. And, unlike BitSiren’s previous effort, our new site functions very well, as the many satisfied customers that we have had since our site became operational can attest.

We believe that the truth will always prevail. So we would like to give you our guarantee that we at dizzygoat.com will always conduct our business with the utmost professionalism and integrity in order to uphold our good name and excellent reputation with you, our customer, now and in the years to come.

Yours sincerely,