Sports Betting on the Hoof!

The 5th Annual Mobile Gambling Summit was held on the 18th – 19th November 2008 at the London Marriott Hotel Regents Park, London and was attended by some of the biggest names in online and mobile gambling, and had some impressive guest speakers from the gambling and sports betting industry including Richard Hewitt, Mobile Product Manager for Betfair, John Cruces, Mobile Product Manager for Betfred and Robin Le Prevost, Head of E-Commerce Development of Alderney Gambling a department of the Government of Aldernay.

The conference focused on the likely increase in mobile sports betting and mobile gambling over the next 3 to 4 years. Although this increase was predicted some years ago, the influx of mobile betting that was foreseen in the industry didn’t ever materialise. Matthew Welch, Chief Operating Officer of Cecure Gaming believes that this in part was due to the slowness of the mobile gambling technology available at the time, speeds have improved substantially from a 16 second delay in a game of mobile poker 4 years ago to 0.2 second delay now, Matthew remarked “a hand of poker could take as long as 20 minutes, obviously no one wanted to play at those speeds”.

Social Networking the Gambling way

Mobile Gaming Software Company Mfuse believe that the market is to see a massive jump in activity in the mobile gambling arena with Mfuse’s Charles Palmer siting their clients receiving 100 million bets placed on mobile devices as evidence of this. This increase is likely to be partly due to the improvements in mobile phone technology, but also because more and more of the younger generation use the mobile phone as a vital access tool for all sorts of services, such as ebay and social networking sites such as myspace and FACEBOOK.

Mobile Nannies

Mobile phone companies themselves have been another factor in restricting increased mobile sports betting and mobile gambling activities. However with increased public demand they will have to wake up to the notion that gambling and betting are not dirty words. In fact if the Royal family and in particular the Queen of England participates in such activities, then is that not testament itself to the legitimacy of the leisure service that the gambling and betting Industry provides?