THINK AGAIN FEATURE
MOBI
LE
MOBIL E FIRST
SPOTLIGHT:
DEVELOPING A ‘MOBILE FIRST’ MENTALITY
F IRS T
M
obile has long been touted as one of the key innovations in driving operator revenues in the past few years, but by their own admission egaming companies have been slow to properly embrace it. GTECH G2’s head of mobile, Shaz Mirza, notes: “When 2011 came around, it was suddenly all about mobile, so operators started to refocus advertising and product budget to this ‘new’ channel.” Of course, mobile gaming at its roots is almost as old as the industry itself; OpenBet ?rst launched a WAP-based ?xed-odds sports betting product in 2002, and Cantor Gaming, the gaming subsidiary of ?nancial services giant Cantor Fitzgerald, launched the ?rst real-time ?nancial and sports spread betting products around the same time, developed by Mirza. But despite a number of early progressive steps, online gambling took time to react, something that Probability CEO Charles Cohen puts down to a skewed focus when it comes to innovation. There are two types of innovation in egaming,” he explains. “There is sustaining innovation, which is somebody like Playtech or Microgaming spending lots of money on improving what they’ve already got, and that’s like Kodak building better ?lm processing, or introducing 35mm ?lm. “And then there is disruptive innovation, which is a company or person doing something completely different in a market that just simply doesn’t attract or interest the traditional suppliers, such as manufacturing digital cameras.” Such an example comes with a veiled warning; Eastman Kodak was forced to ?le for bankruptcy protection in January this year after almost a decade of decline, having been too slow to react to the advent of new technology. The company now focuses on building printers, scrapping its camera and ?lm manufacturing business.
surpass £5m a week – a target it had originally aimed to hit by mid-2013 – while Paddys saw mobile net revenues grow 299% year-on-year to €43m in 2011. Around 30% of its sportsbook revenues are now generated on mobile devices. Cohen says that the driving force behind mobile gaming’s rise was ultimately the mobile sportsbook offerings launched by Mfuse and Mobenga in the mid-2000s: “I think they spotted this as an opportunity in sports betting, and effectively invented mobile sportsbook. Amazingly, they then managed to sell the idea to the online bookmakers, which is really quite something,” he explains. Key to Mobenga and Mfuse’s successful launches, Mirza explains, were technological advances, allowing companies to develop more sophisticated offerings, most notably the introduction of mobile HTML browsers. Again, operators failed to capitalise, with only Betfair launching an offering at the time, spearheaded by Fu Sheng Interactive’s Charlie Palmer, co-founder of Mfuse, who served as the exchange’s head of mobile from October 2009 to June 2011. Palmer explains: “At Betfair we had a product that wasn’t really in a bad state but the focus of the company wasn’t on mobile, which, at the time, was led by online. I had to ensure everyone was considering mobile at the conceptual stage and engage the marketing team with the product team at the development stage, and build up a mobile marketing team. This allowed us to bring out a native app on the iOS platform in 2010.” This “desktop-?rst” approach is the key stumbling block for mobile development, according to Mirza, who explains that “mobile is still following desktop. Innovation cannot truly happen until we adopt a mobile-?rst mentality as Google and Apple have done”.
K E Y FA C T O R S
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