FEATURE MOBILE SPORTS BETTING
The Sharp Project in Manchester plays host to Betfred Mobile
The new mobile platform features in-play and live events
The 250,000sq ft Sharp Project is home to creative businesses
normally end up working in more ‘exciting’ industries than gambling. “Betfred is quite a corporate company,” explains Sheffield. “We’ve got 20,000 staff and a big IT facility in Wigan. We felt we needed a more entrepreneurial start-up type environment and that the mobile development team needed to be able to attract and retain creative people, who are probably not going to enjoy wearing suits and the corporate structure. So we
started to look for a place we could put them outside of the business and let them run themselves.” Daniels has positioned the team – which has grown to 25 employees with a budget to reach 40 by the end of 2013 – to behave like an external agency, whereby it is given requirements by Betfred’s product managers which it must then pitch development proposals on to the business. “That allows us to get away from the
business processes that tend to swallow up time better spent on development,” explains Daniels. “We don’t see ourselves as separate to Betfred but we have got our own culture, our own atmosphere and goals. The atmosphere and the kind of people that want to work in a place like this, you won’t get them going to work in a high rise office block.” And the change in culture doesn’t stop there. “We try to be at the bleeding edge
www.egrmagazine.com
43