Betting line goes wireless as Europe wagers on gambling via cellphone
DOUGLAS HEINGARTNER
Canadian Press
Saturday, April 12, 2003
AMSTERDAM (AP) - Forget about grand casinos and shady bookmakers. Europeans now can satisfy their gambling urges on the spot - with their cellphones.
"M-gambling" is gaining speed after a sputtering start in the late 1990s when it relied on slower technology.
In the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, Britain and Austria, mobile phones can now be used to buy lottery tickets, bet on sporting events or enter sweepstakes. Many countries in Asia are beginning to offer similar services.
Wayne Flohil, a 21-year-old office manager in Amsterdam, recently won an Apple iPod in a mobile sweepstakes.
To play that game, entrants simply send a text message to a certain phone number (at a cost equivalent to about $1.90 Cdn a pop). They get an instant reply revealing their numerical ranking, and the 2,400th message wins.
Flohil, who sent a few dozen messages to win the iPod, plays upward of a hundred such games per month.
M-gambling is a largely anonymous pursuit, which is part of its appeal to players and operators alike. The technology eliminates the need for face-to-face contact, and participants never see their competitors.
"They present it as if you're the only one playing," Flohil said. "In your mind, you've already won."
With sales of traditional lottery tickets falling and state-run lotteries looking to attract a new generation of customers, the time is ripe for m-gambling.
Government-approved mobile lotteries have recently been introduced in the Netherlands and Sweden, and the United Kingdom is likely to follow. These lotteries are based on existing formats, and players dial in their numbers.
The mobile gambling market is likely to surge in coming years, said Robin Bosworth, an analyst with British telecom consultancy Schema. The gambling company and the mobile operator typically split revenues.
Growth in m-gambling is based largely on the success of text messaging, or SMS, technology. In Britain alone, more than one billion SMS messages are sent every month.
Its ease coincides with the impulsive character of games of chance. Some m-gambling operators even allow bets to be placed after a sporting event has started, so users can bet from the stands.
For instance, if somebody is injured in a soccer game, "you can react there and then," says John Whelan, head of research at mobile software developer Alatto.
Siemens has tested "dynamic betting" on horse racing, ski jumping, soccer and other sports. After placing a bet, the player instantly receives a message with the new odds, which are updated every second. The player is then invited to bet again.
Mobile betting could still face legal problems.
"There aren't specific laws that really forbid it here, so the lotteries have to push regulators to either clarify the law or sort of nod and say it's OK," says Tymen Selman, chief executive of Openlot, a Dutch developer of m-gambling software.
"In most European countries, from a legal point of view it's not a problem."
In the United States, though, interactive betting is illegal.
And social problems associated with gambling don't disappear when it becomes wireless.
Instant games can be addictive and dangerous, and "they definitely shouldn't be offered through a threshold as low as the mobile telephone," says Roel Kerssemakers of Jellinek, an addiction-prevention centre in Amsterdam.
Some mobile service providers, worried that customers might rack up huge debts on their phone bills, are experimenting with prepaid cards.
Openlot's Selman also notes that m-gambling offers control mechanisms such as daily spending limits: "You can put much better checks on these systems than you could with buying lottery tickets."
© Copyright 2003 The Canadian Press
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