Betfair Numbers -- Betexchangenews.com reports that Betfair is currently matching an average of £250 million worth of bets per week. Up to 1.5 million bets are matched each day, and at any given time there are likely 5,000 to 6,000 surfers on the Betfair web site. Betfair's trading system is apparently so stable that the London Stock Exchange has reportedly asked Betfair to serve as a consultant in helping to improve the efficiency of its own trading system. Betfair's commercial director, Time Levene, told Winner Online last week: "Our active client base is at 100,000. The last numbers we released, which was almost a year ago, we had over $50 million pounds a week in matched wagers. On our peak days, we are seeing over one million individual wagers. Tens of thousands of simultaneous wagers and transactions are hitting the system all at the same time. Not even the Nasdaq or the London Stock Exchange carry the load we do during peak times."
iTV Lotto -- Camelot has revealed plans to launch the National Lottery on interactive TV next month and on mobile platforms a little later in the year. Last week Camelot announced that its first ever online lottery jackpot winner raked in £5.9 million. A year ago Camelot put interactive scratchcards and instant win games on the Internet, but the main Lotto game and Daily Play game didn't go online until December.
Cost of Cyber Crime -- "Spammers, hackers and virus writers are beginning to work together in packs of organized crime, and small businesses must protect themselves if they are to avoid infection. A managing director would never dream of leaving their offices unlocked and unalarmed overnight, but many will sleep easy knowing their computer systems are unprotected."-- Sal Viveros, marketing manager of small to medium business at Network Associates, which owns the firm McAfee Security, which surveyed 500 small businesses in six European countries during the winter of 2003 in order to compile a report called European Security -- Counting the Cost of Cyber-crime. According to McAfee, 20 percent of small businesses across Europe were forced to close their offices for several hours in order to recover from a virus attack. In Italy the figure was as high as 30 percent and in France it was 50 percent. Each virus attack costs a company an average of 5,000 euros in repair and lost time.
BMM Certified -- BMM International has certified that www.StarLuckCasino.com, which uses iGlobalMedia software, complies with the Kahnawake Gaming Commission's technical requirements for fair, correct, and unpredictable gameplay, and that its system is stable and resilient.
Name Change -- Grand Central Sports Group, also know as GC Sports, (www.gcsports.com) says it has changed its name to MyBookie.com in order to better reflect its business model, which was completely telephone-based in 1998, but now conducts 94 percent of its business online. In addition to sports and race wagering, Mybookie.com also offers an online casino suite powered by Parlay Entertainment Group's software.
Emily Swoboda is the senior staff writer at IGamingNews. She lives in St. Louis, Mo.