Midas Oracle .ORG » BetFair

History of BetFair, from the concept to the startup —in Andrew Black and Edward Wray’s own words

Chris F. Masse — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 10:35:52 +0000

I already linked to it, but you should re-read the 2008 TIME interview of BetFair’s two founders.

Awesome literature, if you are an entrepreneur.

Take 10 minutes today to read that.

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BRITISH CRETINERY: The Financial Times features the InTrade probabilities —not the BetFair ones.

Chris F. Masse — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 21:16:02 +0000

This is really stupid. The decerebrated journalos at the FT chose to feature the illiquid, Ireland-based, un-regulated InTrade prediction markets instead of the very liquid, UK-based, regulated BetFair prediction markets on the next British congress.

Makes no sense at all.

The BetFair PR boys have an omelet on their face. They should work harder.

DISAMBIGUATION: The “illiquid” adjective refers to the UK political markets on InTrade —not the US political prediction markets.

Bookmaker laying a la BetFair

Chris F. Masse — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 19:06:13 +0000

At Ladbrokes, you can now bet on an anti event —so to speak.

Via Mark Davies —who rejoices.

BetFair App for the iPhone and the iPad –> BetFair Rattle

Chris F. Masse — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 18:17:26 +0000

As I understand it, BetFair has one iPhone App for the British bettors (only).

And they’ve just released a new one (BetFair Rattle), also only for the UK Apple App Store.

BetFair:

BETFAIR LAUNCHES FREE IPHONE APP FOR FOOTBALL FANS

BETFAIR, the world’s biggest online sports betting company, has released a nifty new application for football fans to compete against each other in order to make their club the most supported on the iPhone.

The ‘app-tly’ named Betfair Rattle provides a quick and easy interface for fans to check fixtures and then turn their phone into a rattle with which to back their side. Support for a particular team increases according to how much fans shake their phones before the match kicks-off.

In time, Betfair hopes to release a Betfair Rattle league table, so if you’re sitting bottom of the Premier League and have lost 10 in a row your team can still get three points at the weekend if you get your rattle out. For instance, Portsmouth fans will be glad to know they got three points at Anfield last night, even if they don’t have the bragging rights in real life.

Betfair’s Mobile Manager Richard Hewitt said: “First and foremost we wanted to create something where fans compete against each other to show support for their teams, but we also wanted to provide something that was genuinely useful by making sure it was the most simple way of checking upcoming fixtures on the iPhone.

“So many apps are slow and clunky when all a user wants is the information there and then, and that’s what this app provides.

“Above all else though, it’s a bit of fun and we hope football fans across the country will be seen shaking their iPhones at stadiums around the country come 2:55pm every Saturday.”

To download the app go to:
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/betfair-rattle/id360162909?mt=8

http://iphone.betfair.com/

GREAT NEWS: Stephen Burn is now the big boss at BetFair USA [*], and Gerard Cunningham is out. – [VIDEO]

Chris F. Masse — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:13:53 +0000

BetFair won’t release any public press release on all this, but they told me what’s on this site is accurate: Stephen Burn (previously director of horse racing) is taking over BetFair US leadership, including TVG.

We have decided that the strategy for the U.S. is to enhance our horse racing offerings and to support our global product development initiatives and therefore, at this point, Betfair wants the U.S. horse racing and engineering teams to integrate more closely with [United Kingdom] operations. Given these changes, Gerard decided to leave the company to pursue alternative opportunities.

More info:

Stephen Burn will now run Betfair’s US horseracing business and Los Angeles office, reporting to Betfair’s UK-based managing director of exchange, Mathias Entenmann.

Ravi Keswani will continue to run the US engineering and product management teams and assume responsibility for the San Francisco office, reporting to Betfair’s London-based chief technology officer Tony McAlister.

If you wanna know what Stephen Burn looks like, here’s an old video:

MY VIEWS: Some years ago, I e-mailed Stephen Burn (2 or 3 times) for info on BetFair (not knowing that he was not in the PR department), and he graciously forwarded each e-mail to right person at BetFair (instead of killing them, wrong recipient), and my requests got always satisfied. So, to me, the chap sounds like a nice gentleman. As for Gerard Cunningham, I was told by one betting exchange industry insider that he was not very enlightened.

[*] Technically, David Yu is the upper boss at The Sporting Exchange USA, if I remember well. Go to http://corporate.betfair.com/ for more info. (Well, actually, you won’t find that info there. Their corporate site is quite elliptic.)

BetFair TV ad makes fun of the French people…!!!… – [VIDEO]

Chris F. Masse — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 10:48:02 +0000

Filed in “Humor”…

Smarkets want you to believe that they are going after a much bigger betting market than BetFair’s one.

Chris F. Masse — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 10:07:01 +0000

Their CTO (Hunter Morris) is the first to present in the video. Watch out for his slide on casual and social betting.

Startups Rally – Part I – Elevator Pitches (4 of 4) from Plugg Conference on Vimeo.

Download this post if your feed player does not show you the video above.

External Link: Smarkets

Any people from BetFair’s marketing department?

Chris F. Masse — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:05:53 +0000

Got an idea I’d like to discuss with some higher-up in BetFair’s marketing department.

Would you mind contacting me. Thanks.

Insider trading in the InTrade prediction market on health care reform?

Chris F. Masse — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:45:58 +0000

InTrade CEO John Delaney:

…it is a reasonably active market but atypically a lot of the trade is coming from the DC area when normally we might see trade coming from all the major urban areas.

ADDENDUM: For your information, in Great Britain, sporting insiders (such as athletes or jockeys) who trade on betting exchanges (such as BetFair) are actively monitored.

Mark Davies spills the beans on how BetFair became #1.

Chris F. Masse — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 23:26:49 +0000

Mark Davies:

[E]veryone did it a slightly different way. it wasn’t first-mover advantage at that point, because we weren’t first! But we were first to do it with a model that aggregated demand, whereas everyone else had a different model.

The Flutter model, for example, was basically a glorified bulletin board: you took prices which directly opposed yours, but if you wanted to bet £100 at 2/1 and someone wanted to bet against for £50 at 3/1, you didn’t match. The result was that people split their £100 bet down into fifty lots of the minimum £2, so that they could get taken by as many people as possible.

An analogy would be you walking into your local greengrocer and asking him for 10 oranges, at 10p each. If he replied that he didn’t have ten oranges, he had 50; and anyway, they weren’t 10p each, but 5p each, you’d tell him to stop being daft. But that was effectively what happened with the other sites: the two things were not seen to be a match.

In contrast, we aggregated demand, and we gave best execution, so we quickly generated liquidity where others were generating none. It took 9 months before anyone was able to replicate the technology, and by that stage, first-mover advantage was important. Although many people generated levels of liquidity which were well past the level at which people started to take note of us, those levels were by then dwarfed by the levels we had reached, and looked insignificant.

To be fair to our technology team, though, I think there is more to it than simply the liquidity issue. The fact is that it is not an easy thing to run when you get into big volumes, and I think customers understood that there is a difference between matching bets at speed when you aren’t doing many of them, and still doing so when you are handling millions of transaction. I [think] it’s easy enough to make your site LOOK like BetFair; but it’s another thing for it actually to have the same capabilities. Those capabilities haven’t come cheaply. I think that it’s been the continuous investment that has allowed us to stay where we are, but of course we had to get there first, and that was where being the first people to get it right gave us a huge boost. So, thank Bert!