LONDON (Reuters) - The number of private individuals trading currencies is rising dramatically, but regulators, concerned that new participants are not aware of market risks, are looking at ways to protect retail investors.

Twenty four-hour trading, a clear FX market trend in recent years, and easy market access via the Internet and even mobile phones has spurred investment from individuals.

They are unperturbed by the fact that many day traders got their fingers burnt in the wake of the dot com boom at the beginning of the decade.

"This market is active 24 hours-a-day and that drives customers. The comparison would be to Las Vegas lights -- they never shut down," said Paul Belogour, managing director of foreign exchange and trading at IFX Markets based in Boston.

Foreign exchange was once dominated by bank traders executing trades on behalf of corporate clients. Individual investors, typically baby-boomer retirees at ease with managing their own money, are now getting in on the act.

The birth of technology has given rise to so much information, and, in its natural life cycle, its marriage to creativity has created opportunities in marketing that couldn’t be conceived 10 years ago.

A good example of this marriage of technology and creativity is Affiliate Marketing. It is not rocket science, but in affiliate marketing, there is an entire technology process that supports it, and it is imperative that affiliates and advertisers are aware of how it works and understands the intricacies.

The simplest definition of currency trading is the practice of exchanging one country's currency for another country's currency. Basically, currency trading involves four main variables: currencies, exchange rate, time, and interest rate. The interplay of these variables creates opportunities for small investors to obtain investment returns that are generally unheard of in the traditional investment world. It is also referred to as foreign exchange, FX or Forex, but the essence remains the same that currency trading is the exchange of one currency against another.

Perhaps, in terms of trading volume, the currency exchange market is the world's largest market, with daily trading volumes in excess of $1.5 trillion US dollars (although the figures may differ, but this is just an approximation to show its importance). One thing is for sure that in orders of magnitude it is much larger than the bond or stock markets. For example, the New York Stock Exchange has a daily trading volume of approximately $50 billion. So you can easily imagine its importance in the trading world of today. Moreover, contrary to earlier thoughts, currency trading is not limited to just larger organizations and other large banks and financial institutions, but open to everyone who has enough expertise and determination to hard work.

Search giant Google is hardly just about search anymore. Its engineers are dabbling in dozens of projects, ranging from digitizing books to mapping your neighborhood. With a stock price topping $400 per share, a market cap of more than $100 billion and a war chest nearing $7 billion, Google is the "it" tech company of the moment. The search giant posted record revenue of $1.58 billion for the third quarter, up nearly 100 percent from a year ago. Certainly, Google's roots are in search, but the Mountain View, Calif., company is expanding its offerings at such a rapid clip that news headlines can barely keep up.

Google is simultaneously making waves in the publishing industry with its Google Book Search project, shaking up the classifieds market with its mysterious Google Base service, scaring instant message and telecommunications companies with Google Talk, wowing Web surfers with its 3D Google Earth mapping service and being a vague threat to numerous other companies with its forays into video, e-mail and desktop search.

Though many of the services are free, Google will no doubt figure out a way to charge for some of them so it's not so dependent on advertising. Right now, the company gets nearly all its revenue from advertising, either keyword-based search advertising or contextual display ads on partner Web sites.

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TIME's Adi Ignatius got the Google triumvirate of Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt and Larry Page to sit for a talk around a table covered with Lego pieces, for which they have a known fondness, during a break at Google's recent sales conference in San Francisco. Page, who as a student built an ink-jet printer out of Lego bricks, is snapping pieces together to make a kind of endlessly ascending staircase; Brin is working on a robot. Schmidt seems too grownup for this.

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