B E T WA R E
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Betware launched its ?rst mobile solution back in 2003, and while the early noughties’ phones lacked such iconic lumps as the infamous 80’s yuppie-bricks (connected to a car battery the user could enjoy a full 55 minutes’ use) thoughts of hi-res graphics and touch-screen interactivity were more likely to appear in a Vegas magic show than in someone’s back pocket. Since then, Betware has grown its mobile product portfolio to include an SMS solution, a non-smartphone (XHTML) solution and a sophisticated touchscreen web app for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry devices. However, advances in technology can produce problems as well as opportunities, as Betware’s Head of Mobile, Pall Palsson, explains: “With the modern smartphones we have a far greater ability to create a compelling user experience than we did previously, but this is a double-edged sword. It was hard to create a bad SMS/XHTML or WAP end-user experience because you were so limited in what you could do. The introduction of smartphones with touch screen interfaces and browsers that were really capable of delivering a good browsing (and app) experience changed everything. Suddenly we could design, develop and deploy solutions that offered a great user experience as well as a wider range of functionality.” The most basic of Betware’s solutions is for the novice mobile user who still hasn’t entered into the smartphone world. Here players can easily purchase items such as a Lotto ticket with a simple SMS text message, but is now mostly redundant: “The SMS solution is basically not used anymore,” explains Palsson. The non-smartphone solution also suffers in comparison to the ‘high-?delity’ solutions simply because the experience is lesser. “XHTML/WAP as a technology never really took off despite the alluring promise of having the internet with you wherever you go,” says Palsson. “While this claim was largely true, the browsing experience was so poor that the solution was never a realistic option.”
MOBILE FOCUS
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