Betfair’s mobile bets worth US$ 1.6 billion

In a year in which over 900 million bets were matched on the Betfair Exchange - on major events such as the Cheltenham Festival and the Football and Cricket World Cups - revenues from mobile products jumped 88%.

The company, which has a mobile tech centre of excellence in San Francisco, has led the way when it comes to mobile betting, with first-to-market applications for both the iPhone and iPad – applications which are available in 12 languages, across 14 Apple App stores, and have been downloaded over 200,000 times.

These two applications are joined in Betfair’s global mobile offering by their HTML-5 web based applications for Android phones and the new Racing on Your Mobile application, powered by Timeform.

As well as releasing its own in-house applications, Betfair enables third-party developers to build their own mobile products off of the Betfair Exchange through its API (Application Programming Interface). In an effort to further stimulate innovation in the mobile betting sphere, Betfair offered mobile developers a new revenue-share deal in March which sees 5% of the revenue generated through applications returned to the developers.

Commenting on today’s announcement, Raj Vemulapalli, former Head of Engineering for Real Time Communications at Yahoo! and Betfair’s recently appointed VP of Mobile Engineering, said:

“Betfair has had an explosive year in mobile and our sights are now firmly set on reaching even greater heights in the year ahead. Developing new betting methods and experiences for the increasing amount of our customers who wish to access Betfair through their mobile phones is a key priority of the business.

“The surge in global smartphone sales represents a significant opportunity for us, and we’re confident that our track-record of delivering cutting-edge technology for our customers will enable us to capitalise on this trend.”