Stats -- According to New Media Zero, U.K. Games operator Vernons says that 10 percent of its lottery games sales come from the Internet, though hardly any came from the net two years ago. The company predicts that by 2006 Internet sales will make up 30 percent of its revenue. This week Vernons launched a new daily draw game called Florida 4, which it says is 15 times more likely to pay out its £30,000 prize for a £1 stake than is the National Lottery's new offering called Daily Play.
Bingoland -- Bingoland and Playtech worked together to develop a networked bingo solution that enables players to plug into an established game with existing traffic and to bring the immediate benefits of high prize values that are directly related to player numbers. Today Bingoland added two new games to the network, Kiwi Bingo and Tiki Bingo, both of which are independent offshore operations that are owned by the Christchurch Casinos Group. Both products include fully programmable games and patterns, full support for marketing offers and promotions, in-game player messaging, chat management tools, automatic, an integral referral program, multi-tier affiliate programs, online financial reporting and player tracking.
No Ads -- Paul D. Bernstein, a hearing officer with the Division of Special Revenue in Connecticut, has ruled that a TV channel may not broadcast horse racing and run ads for a telephone betting service because doing so would violate the state's moratorium on additional off-track betting parlors.
Quoteworthy -- "We have always had a good deal of sympathy for the principle of protecting the racing product and extracting the proper value that every jurisdiction is striving for. However, we do have a different regulatory and legislative structure to the Asian countries. Unlike them, we have no control over the betting operations in Britain. We also have to be aware that when the government changed the general betting duty structure to a gross profits system, it did so in the hope and expectation that Britain would expand into becoming a global center for betting."-- British Horse Racing Board Secretary-General Tristram Ricketts, as quoted in the Racing Post, responding to a request by Hong Kong Jockey Club CEO Lawrence Wong. At the 37th annual conference of the International Federation of Horseracing Authorities in Paris on Monday, Wong had asked jurisdictions in Europe and the Americas to join the Good Neighbor Policy, which seeks to eliminate off-shore gambling problems.