UK Tidbit -- Vernons, one of the United Kindgom's large gaming companies, is planning to develop an online lottery to compete with the National Lottery. Vernons presently offers football pools online as well as an Irish lottery prediction game called Lucky Clover. The Vernons lottery, which will be called My Numbers, is scheduled to launch next month and will cost £1 for a chance to win a £3 million jackpot. "We can't compete direct with the National Lottery but we can provide an alternative," said Vernons' marketing director, Peter Ammundsen. "Punters want larger prizes for fewer numbers, so we're delivering a product they want."
New Stuff -- TradingSports, the new and fast growing person-to-person betting exchange, announced a new licensee that will help grow the exchange even more. The London-based company inked a deal with SBG Global, one of the largest offshore sports books in the industry. The deal will enable SBG’s customers to place live and in-play P2P bets on a variety of sporting events, including the upcoming NFL football season. The deal will see TradingSports become SBG Global’s official P2P betting partner and marks the sports book’s first-ever venture into the rapidly expanding P2P betting marketplace. The P2P offering will complement the betting and casino facilities already available to SBG’s customer base of more than 125,000 active users. Party Poker.com's Million II affiliated poker tournament's semi-final qualifying events will be held on Aug. 1-4, Nov. 21-24 and Jan. 30 to Feb. 2. The prize pool is estimated to be $1.5 million. Grande Sports on Thursday announced the launch of post-up service at its online betting site, www.betgrande.com. The service will allow players to set up accounts to use when betting with the company through either the Internet or telephone. The company said a monthly public statement of post-up funds will be held in an escrow account that will be verified by accountants. John Kellogg, administrative director, said 100 percent of players' deposits will be held in escrow.
Tidbits from Israel -- Overseas credit card gambling among Israelis increased 60 percent last year to $27 million, according to the Bank of Israel Foreign Currency Control Department. In 2000, foreign credit card gambling in Israeli totaled $17 million. Credit card gambling amounts to 2.5 percent of all overseas credit card purchases by Israeli residents, the bank said. However, Israel's flying casino has been grounded before it ever got off the ground. The business proposal, which would have allowed special planes to take gamblers on four-hour jaunts outside Israeli air space to escape the country's prohibition of gambling, was given initial approval by the transportation minister last month. The attorney general, however, nixed the idea, saying it would promote betting and wagering.
US Tidbit -- Business magazine Wired recently reported that the number of gambling Web sites that have signed up to use PayPal's online payment service has doubled in the first quarter of this year. Almost 500 sites agreed to accept PayPal in the first quarter, doubling the company's number of online gaming merchants. As of March 31, PayPal had 1,022 Internet gambling merchants.