Betfair will this week announce its results for the year to 30 April 2007.
The past twelve months have seen a significant increase in the rate of investment by Betfair, as the company has sought to not only consolidate its position as the world’-s leading betting exchange operator, but also, to broaden its product portfolio, so as to create a one-stop-shop solution for online gambling, under the Betfair umbrella.
Betfair’-s Australian based betting exchange went live at the end of August 2006- and in recently filed accounts, Betfair’-s Australian partner PBL (50%) said that the business continues to build critical mass in its first full year of operations, and that its share of after tax losses for the year was $2 million.
In October 2006, Betfair Poker left CryptoLogic Inc. to move to an in-house technology solution- whilst in July 2007 Betfair announced that it had executed a non-binding Letter of Intent with Harrah’s License Company LLC, an affiliate of Harrah’s Entertainment, Inc which designated Betfair.com as the “Presenting Sponsor” of the World Series of Poker (WSOP) Europe through 2011.
In October 2006, Betfair broadened its product portfolio with the launch of an online casino. This followed the previous launch of Baccarat (launched June 2006), Blackjack (launched November 2005), Jacks or Better, Roulette and Omaha Hi (launched April 2007)- all with zero house edge.
At the end of November 2006 Betfair announced that it had acquired Portway Press Limited, the owner of Timeform for somewhere in the region of ?15m.
Looking ahead, Betfair will launch its betting exchange service in Italy and will also enter into the area of financial spread betting.
A decline in revenue growth and profitability is anticipated- with profit before tax likely to be down somewhere in the region of 33%.
There are those that will argue that the company should have stayed focused on its core betting exchange business- and I for one must question whether the company’-s investment in online poker is going to reap the forecast dividends.
[cross-posted from Betting Market]
) Actually, 
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Later this week, NewsFutures will have another great opportunity to introduce prediction markets into the consciousness of mighty American businessmen and women.
The event will be held at the famous Greenbrier, in White Sulfur Springs, WV, whose tag line is “-defining luxury since 1778″-! Needless to say, I look forward to this fantastic opportunity to evangelize this particular crowd about the virtues of prediction markets.
…- but we thought people might be interested in a new capability we just launched this morning since it’-s actually something everyone can try. You can now go to http://www.inklingmarkets.com and sign up for a free trial of a private, fully-featured marketplace. Just choose a name and URL for your marketplace, fill in your desired username and password, and you’-re off and running. From day 1, when we launched Inkling, we have been big believers in allowing people to try before they buy, and this is the latest extension of that –-hopefully making it even easier to try our platform beyond just being active on our public marketplace. This is something you can securely run inside your organization or publicly. We’-ve also created a new help/reference section you’-ll see as an administrator when you login to your marketplace. There are lots of lessons learned and best practices about managing a marketplace, providing appropriate incentives, creating effective markets, etc. Let us know if you have any questions/feedback or run in to any issues.