Enlistment -- Ukbetting has enlisted Trevor Beaumont to revitalize the group's betting division. Beaumont, who has over 30 years of horse racing experience, had been director of racing and trading for Coral, director of Eurobet, and most recently racing director of the British Horseracing Board. Alex Holt, formerly marketing manager for William Hill's casino and poker operations, has also joined the company and will manage new product promotion. Ukbetting's recently released interim figures attribute a 103 percent increase in turnover to a strategy of buying struggling sports content sites, including teamtalk.com and sportinglife.com, which attract around 3.45 million users per month.
Wireless -- Jockey Club Technology Services Inc. has designed a newly launched wireless version of Equibase Co.'s Web site at www.equibase.com. The thoroughbred racing site features entries, results, scratches, and more and can be accessed with any wireless Internet-enabled handheld device.
Skill Games -- SkillJam.com, which features pay-per-play head-to-head tournaments for cash and prizes, hosted over 1.7 million unique visitors in August, according to Nieslsen/NetRatings. The site's popularity has more than doubled since January, when 787,000 unique gamers visited SkillJam. The company that owns SkillJam, eUniverse, plans to consolidate it and all of its other online skill-based gaming assets and holdings into a newly formed subsidiary called GameUniverse, Inc.
NDS -- NDS now has 2 million active subscribers in the Asia Pacific pay-TV market. NDS, which has developed customized electronic program guides for all of its Asia Pacific customers, plans to launch interactive services such as iTV games, sports and gambling applications soon.
C4 -- England's Channel 4 has begun utilizing attheraces to offer interactive TV betting on its horse racing broadcasts. This is the first time the channel has offered online betting, and although it could extend its wagering applications to other programs, it says that the recent move doesn't indicate an opening of the floodgates. attheraces was previously only able to provide tote betting, but recent enhancements by its digital agency, TenTenDigital, have given viewers the ability to compare and place fixed odds bets with Ladbrokes, Littlewoods and SkyBet.