Case Study: Betfair Mobile Betting
Betfair Mobile – the story behind the first dynamic, real-time betting solution that works on any mobile phone
Groundbreaking Rapid Mobile technology means bets can be placed from any type of mobile phone, anywhere, anytime.
Online betting has experienced rapid growth, with Betfair leading the way. Where once betting was limited to smoky betting shops, online betting has meant that a punter can join the fun from the comfort of home, or from anywhere they can lug a laptop PC and access the Internet. No wonder so many pubs now offer wireless networking along with the beer and karaoke! And dedicated punters can bet on pretty well any sport, anywhere in the world, at any time of day or night.
Until 2005, online betting was available only on a PC or PDA-based web browser linked to the Internet. The flexibility and convenience offered by mobile phones had been talked about but not yet effectively exploited.
Betfair was already investigating how it might harness the power of mobile. “After all,” says Alistair Harvey, Betfair’s Mobile Product Manager, “with mobile phones achieving 117 per cent penetration of the UK market and with more mobile phones being lost than umbrellas, there was obviously vast acceptance of the technology.”
Rapid Mobile, meanwhile, was addressing the biggest challenge in mobile development: device diversity. There are thousands of mobile models each with its own technical or interface idiosyncrasy. And new devices are released every week. Most mobile developers build applications or services for specific devices and have little choice but to port the application to work on additional models one at a time. This is expensive and time consuming. It has the additional disadvantage of being reactive, leaving the newest and trendiest handsets unsupported. Rapid Mobile solved this at a stroke with its Active Provisioning system. This learns about new devices automatically as they appear, building applications specifically for them in a matter of seconds. So there’s no expensive porting and no delay.
A meeting at the end of 2004 between Rapid Mobile and Betfair launched a working relationship that was at first tentative. Betfair was understandably thinking hard about what Rapid Mobile was so enthusiastically proposing.
“Betfair’s initial caution was completely understandable,” says Richard Marshall, Rapid Mobile CEO. “It was something that had never been done before – a dynamic, real-time betting solution for mobile phones.”
Betfair saw usability as a major issue. A mobile phone screen is definitely not a computer screen. “We asked, ‘how could you replicate a web site on a mobile phone?’” remembers Alistair Harvey. “Rapid Mobile’s commonsense answer was that we shouldn’t try!”
Instead, Rapid Mobile created a mobile application with a simple, clear and easy to use interface that was capable of doing everything Betfair punters needed to do. No more no less.
To prove the concept the two companies agreed on a live 12-month pilot project with Rapid Mobile operating the on-mobile betting service (then called Mobet). Richard Marshall explains what happened during that first year. “We processed some £50 million worth of bets. Punters who used both web and mobile betting placed 40 percent more bets than those who used web alone. This was clear and lucrative evidence of customer acceptance. And while all this was going on, our Active Provisioning system quietly and efficiently deployed applications for 700 different handset models.”
Alistair Harvey says that mobile phone betting “wasn’t a difficult sell”. “We just had to educate our customers about a highly usable tool. And we found that many avid punters are early adopter types.”
And no wonder. There are few pursuits as excitingly time-sensitive as betting. Decisions are based on months of painstaking research or a momentary hunch; a bet might be influenced by years of form, a sudden burst of performance or a confident tip.
Mobile phone betting allows punters to escape their PC and still maintain their position. From just about anywhere they can bet on a race or a game, even one that’s still in progress.
Betfair decided to buy Mobet and re-branded it Betfair Mobile, a brand and a tool known and used by thousands of mobile punters. “It made commercial sense,” says Alistair Harvey. “It’s the best product in the market and had resulted in a significant increase in revenue. It has created an anytime, anyplace, anywhere betting option.”
On-mobile betting has quickly become established as central to Betfair’s business. “We’ve tens of thousands of punters on our registry and a good and expanding core of regular users,” says Alistair Harvey. “We experienced a huge volume of mobile bets this year and during the Cheltenham Gold Cup. All the trends are upwards.”
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