Ólafur Andri Ragnarsson

Last week, the annual EL/WLA Sports Betting Seminar took place in Marrakesh, Morocco. Betware got the opportunity to speak and I did a lecture titled Opportunity knocks… The talk was about the shift to digital products and how lotteries can use this opportunity to innovate. As the net-gen is growing up and as older generations are turning to the Internet for social networks, TV, and games, this is too important of a trend to be ignored. The internet and the mobile is where the innovations will be in the future.

As result the market is converging. We are seeing gaming companies and igaming companies (primarily offering sports betting, Poker and casino games), converging or partnering. We are also starting to see traditional lotteries partnering with game providers in order to offer more games. This is likely to continue, and even more so if liberalization of traditional lottery products, like sports betting, continues.

Part of the talk was about social games and in particular social sports betting. It turns out that sport betting is very social activity and the lotteries have the perfect opportunity to use this fact to promote their products and sell tickets.

Of course I also talked about mobile and how the iPhone changed the mobile landscape. An interesting fact is that people with iPhone only spend 45% of their time using voice. This should say something about apps and browsing on a phone. One point I like to make is that there is only one web, even if we talk about mobile web. It is important to understand that the technology is the same for smart phones browsers as for desktop browsers. We should think more of how to optimize for different screen sizes than focusing on building a specific separate „mobile channel“.

An interesting trend with mobile is that there will be more mobile devices accessing the Internet in few years than computers. A fact that is hard to ignore.

The basic conclusion was that socializing the sports betting experience is an opportunity for lotteries, as well as the current mobile renaissance.

Slides are here:

Recently I did a presentation on software development in distributed environment. Since Betware has six offices around the world with twelve teams we need to manage distributed teams. Our PMO has good experience in dealing with teams where the members are located in different offices and timezones. We have found out what works and what doesn’t. But, at the end of the day, the best rule is this: don’t distribute your teams.

In the era of constant connectivity you might think that its ridiculous to worry about management of distributed teams. In fact, we exchange information in real-time. We can have text, audio and video in real-time. And that is exactly what we do. We deploy an IP phone station that links every employee’s computer (with speaker headset) within the company. Meeting rooms have speakerphones and cameras. With Microsoft Communicator or TeamView we can share desktops.

But in the end nothing works better than just sitting down with your coworkers and going over the details. Face to face communications. If you think about agile software methodologies the key is high communication bandwidth. Indeed, the important thing about development is the communications. This is the same with software architectures: don’t distribute you objects. Network latency will kill performance. For teams the same applies for communication.

Of course for practical reasons, it is not always possible to stick with a team in one location. There might be expertise required that is not possessed within the team in one location. The team in one place might not be enough and more team members from other locations need to help. Whatever the reasons, we always have some distribution and remote communication. Just like with distributed architecture, you need to choose your boundaries carefully. What we try to do at Betware is to define “project silos” that are subprojects with in projects. By defining the subproject carefully you can control the communication boundaries.

Communication technologies will improve, and more importantly people’s comfort level of remote communication will rise. Eventually remote or virtual communication will become better then the real world. Until then, don’t distribute your team.

On October 1, I gave a lecture at the 6th Icelandic Gaming Industry Meet-up. The title was Betting on games. In this lecture I talked about the world’s first on-line lottery and how the Internet disrupted the lottery industry.

How do you get people to pay for playing games? How to get them to pay up for each and every time they play? And still have fun. Well, let them make a bet.

The first on-line lotteries opened in 1996 and since then the lottery and i-gaming industries have moved into more entertaining games. While traditional lottery games appeal to the older crowd, the younger generation that grew up on-line, are playing more entertaining games, like Poker, Blackjack, and Bingo, sports betting games like live betting, multiplayer games like Yatzy and Ludo.

These slides are from my Technology and Products course, a one day seminar on technology and how technology changes and evolves. Why do some product make it in the market when others just as good don’t make it? What are the forces that drive technology change? The presentation discusses what technology actually is – and it is more than you think, and how how innovations takes place.

Introduction to the seminar can be found on Slideshare.

In June 2006, I spoke at the EL/WLA conference in Munich, Germany. US and European state-owned Lotteries are perfect example of companies that are facing disruption due to the Internet and new technologies.

In the lecture I talk about how interactivity has increased since the early web. I made a reference to a talk I gave eleven years earlier, in 1995, at a marketing conference in Myvatn, Iceland (see the picture in the slides) about the Internet and opportunities of a new media. I used the location, Myvatn, Iceland, to illustrate the change to come. You can be in the middle of nowhere and still buy a lottery ticket. I had a demo where I use my modem to dial onto the net and accessed http://www.1×2.is and bought a ticket. This was the first public demostattion of the world’s first Internet betting web site. History was being made. But to my surprise participants were not very excited. When they realized that you can be anywhere in the world, they simply wanted to know who is responsible for this so they can have the Internet closed.

Eleven years later, in Munich, I’m still talking about the promise of the Internet. The lecture was about new focus needed in sports betting technology.