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by: Gene Koprowski.
Revenues from people playing poker, roulette, blackjack or betting on sports on their cell phones is finally starting to soar, as experts have expected.


At the 5th Annual Mobile Gaming Summit last week in London, gaming executives were sounding quite optimistic about near-term growth.

According to Charles Palmer, co-founder of Mfuse, a mobile gaming software developer for sports betting, “in the past year our clients have taken more than 100 million pounds in bets through mobile devices, which suggests the market is developing very quickly. “We are developing casino and bingo applications for launch next year and we see real evidence that users are very enthusiastic about mobile gaming.''

Mfuse's clients include some of the world's largest gambling companies, including Ladbrokes Plc, William Hall Plc, Bet365 Group Ltd., Gala Coral Group Ltd., and Rank Group Plc's Mecca unit. Mfuse recently attracted investment from online gambling pioneer Mark Bladford, the founder of Sportingbet.com.

Executives at the conference generally agreed that mainline acceptance of mobile gaming was imminent. One of the main barriers for mass acceptance in the U.K. will be when the generation of mobile-savvy kids reaches the age of 18, at which point they can legally gamble.

Gaming experts agree that until recently the speed of interactivity meant that the gaming experience on mobiles wasn't good enough for many young consumers. The debut of Apple Inc.'s iPhone was regularly cited as a big driver to getting people to load new applications onto their mobile phones, however.

“Figuring out how to get playable speeds has taken years,'' said Matt Welch, chief operating officer of U.K.-based Cecure Gaming Ltd., which offers poker on mobiles. “We now have a 0.2 second delay for a decision in poker, which is pretty much the same speed as online. Four years ago that delay was 16 seconds, which meant a hand of poker could take as long as 20 minutes."

Getting clients to gamble on their mobiles is compelling because it increases the lifetime value of a customer by a factor of two to three. "It is massively valuable for us to convert a customer to mobile,'' said Richard Hewitt, mobile product manager for Betfair. “Mobile betting is currently one of the three most important things in the company.”

Pritpal Bains, product manager at British Sky Broadcasting Group Plc's Skybet unit, said, “We expect it to grow rapidly once we have the correct services in place.”

Operators such as France Telecom SA and Vodafone Group Plc. have during the past 12 months the mobile operators have started to offer gambling content on their own home pages, or portals, and Vodafone launched a betting portal last week.


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