Boolabus

Live betting in 2009? Just a warm up for 2010…

I haven’t posted anything of any interest to the blog in some time for the simple reason that we’ve been busy building and improving BetstreamTM, our live betting and sportsbook UI framework.

2009 saw live betting come of age. 2010 will see it mature nicely and we’ll see it really start to fire on all cylinders. The real time web is here and in play betting fits in nicely with web developments. We’ll see a lot of innovation, a better customer experience all round and hopefully increased revenues as a result.

What’s it been like for Boolabus? We did a lot of good foundation work in 2009 on the Betstream framework and we are now working on extending it in interesting ways and onto other platforms.

We released the first version of Betstream with Betfred, and despite some server performance issues it is doing well and we’re improving it each month. In the lab, the latest build improves the speed of core tasks such as market display by a factor of 10. We’ve also done a lot on matching betting markets with content, not the easiest thing  to do. Finally we’re making sure our customers can control and extend our applications through advanced configuration settings.

In November we deployed a new version of the Sportingbet application that delivers live video of Euroleague basketball adding another content distribution network to our list. The application continues to deliver but is starting to show it’s age a little. It was the best in it’s day!

We’ve done a fair bit on tracking, looking at Connextra’s toys and implementing Gomez tagging for one of our customers. We have to do more on user behaviour and fold the learnings back into development.

What’s next? We have been looking at how to work with and make sense of multiple media and content feeds from specialists such as ICS, Betradar, Sportingindex, Perform Group and more. We’re also looking outside of the core sportsbetting website and developing applications that drive traffic to the sportsbook.

There is a lot of product development going on in sports betting at the moment which is great to see. There are quite a few start-ups looking at a more social approach to betting – smarkets, betable, football3s. The list is long. It’s probably about time we joined the pack and built out an idea that has been brewing for three years or more. Hopefully 2010 will see that and a few other things come to fruition.

Happy new year to anyone who actually reads this and if you are around at ICEi in January lets meet for a beer.

Here’s a bit of our 2009…