It's the busiest time of year for online sportsbook operators around the world. The Super Bowl, the championship game of the National Football League in America, is the biggest betting event of the
year for many bookmakers. With over 350 side bets to the game, operators have been searching for easier ways to maintain their sites.
Hearing the frustrations of operators, Go Bet International has launched a Web-based service designed to optimize the administrative efficiency and customization of Internet sportsbooks.
The new service, Sportsbooksupport.com, is designed to give licensees of Starnet Systems International a leg up on the competition.
Richard Bonsall, the director and CEO of Go Bet, explained that the system eliminates need for FTP (File Transfer Protocol) systems, which are often used to update sites.
"If someone has multiple sites, which most operators do, they have to update everything through their FTP site for each book," Bonsall said. "With this system, they can update all of them at the same time just by entering the URL of each one."
So operators will be allowed this week to update the odds for over 350 proposition, or side bets, with the click of a mouse. They will also be able to update multiple sites at the same time.
Bonsall said the new Web-based system came out of the frustration experienced by his company, which does marketing and consulting for the interactive gaming sector, when it was time to update customers' sites.
Although the official launch for Sportsbooksupport.com wasn’t until today, Bonsall said the company did plenty of testing within its current client base first.
"We spent six months developing this," he said. "It was a lot of effort, but it was worth it."
Bonsall said the site has been operating under a test mode for the last five months, and the response from those involved in the testing phase has been good.
"We have gotten a lot of great feedback from the operators who have seen it," he said. "We were even getting a lot of calls last week before we launched as word kind of leaked out."
The system is powered by Cold Fusion, so the constant streaming of data makes the system rather secure.
"Unlike HTML, the code cannot be copied since it is constantly changing," Bonsall said. "Unless the licensee gives his password to someone, no one will able to access it."
To assist in the building and development of the new service, Go Bet enlisted the services of Digital Precision Creations.
"They did all of the Oracle database for us," Bonsall said. "The way it is set up it doesn’t matter if we have 10 or 100 clients on there. The bandwidth and the stress on the database doesn’t change."
Go Bet is eager to expand its services. Bonsall said it made sense to cater first to Starnet operators because they are the majority of sportsbooks. He said Go Bet is currently in talks with three other major licensees to include them in the system. He also said the company would make sure it uses good judgement in signing up new clients.
"We will use our due diligence," he said. "We want to make sure the operators are going to be around for a while."
Operators interested in the new service can contact Go Bet directly through the Sportsbooksupport.com website. There is a one-time setup fee for the service and monthly fees vary on the number of sites an operator has and how extensive they want the service to be.
Not only does the new system override FTP, but also it can be accessed from any computer that is connected to the Internet.
"If there is a hurricane or some other emergency where a backup number or system needs to be set up, it can be done from any computer in the world," Bonsall said.
Bonsall said he hopes the system can be integrated into as many sites as possible, making the entire support system easier to operate for Go Bet and its clients.
If the initial contacts are any indication, the company won’t have much trouble getting new operators to sign up for the service.
"We have already had 20 operators contact us today just since we launched," he said. "We want to get as many operators as we can."