Smarkets in NYC
I just spent last week in NYC with 20 other great UK-based startups selected to participate in UK Trade and Investment’s Digital Mission. The goal of the Mission was to encourage and support British companies entering the American market. The best part of the trip was meeting other startups and asking them questions on their approach to setting things up.
Here’s a video from Danvers. I may have to get a Flip camera now!
Also a podcast from Alex Bellinger interviewing some of the Digital Mission companies.
Many thanks to Sam, Emily and Aoife from Chinwag, Barry and Danvers from Winston & Strawn and Stewart from Sun for making the trip possible!
Smarkets to pitch at international gaming conference
EiG is one of the leading online gaming conferences. Around 1,300 gaming industry executives and insiders will attend September 23-25, 2008 in Barcelona. A new feature of the conference is a platform for entrepreneurs to pitch their latest innovations in the gaming world in front of a panel of experts. The winner will be named EiG’s Popular Start-Up of 2008/9. Smarkets is pleased to have been invited to present.
I will be pitching Smarkets as the new face of online gaming. I’ll be joined on stage with Alex Czajkowski of eGaming2.0, Adam Burkitt of URBet, Dave McDowell of FSB Tech and my friend Sean Glass of Pikum.
Further links about EiG LaunchPad:
Smarkets to take part in Digital Mission NYC
Along with 20 other UK startups, I’ll be representing Smarkets on Digital Mission September 14-19th, a program put on by UKTI to promote UK based companies to the American market coinciding with Web 2.0 Expo. London is making great progress becoming a startup hub, and I’m confident this trip will show the tech world that it’s not all about Silicon Valley anymore.
I will be introducing Smarkets, the simple way to place bets on your favourite events, to potential investors and partners in New York, my former hometown. I’d like to thank Sam Michel and his team at Chinwag for their hard work organising the trip.
Other coverage on the web:
Smarkets gears up for launch
Smarkets has received Stage One approval from Malta’s LGA. The full online gaming license is a three step process. The first stage is an assessment that the company is fit and proper. The Authority does this by vetting the business plan and carrying out financial and criminal background checks on the shareholders.
Stage Two verifies the business and technical ability of the company. All corporate policies, internal and external, are audited and scrutinised. Once Stage Two has been approved, the company is granted a six month provisional license. Smarkets anticipates receiving this within the next few months at which time we will begin trading with real money.
Stage Three is a full security, compliance and operations audit. After Stage Three approval, Smarkets will receive a five year license.
It’s no longer all about sport: Smarkets raises $200k
Smarkets is a pre-launch betting exchange based in London. We focus on making betting simple with a clean interface that clearly displays what users can win. No knowledge of odds necessary, no history of betting required. Smarkets is revolutionising the speed and ease of betting, offering more entertainment bets on celebrities and current events. It’s no longer all about sports.
We’re going to offer an open API for people to develop their own betting applications, which means, users can create their own software to connect to Smarkets infrastructure.
Smarkets has raised $200k with a convertible note from five private investors. This will be used to finish initial product development, obtain a license from Malta and conduct a private beta launch.
Smarkets is planning a private launch for summer of 2008 and a public launch fall of 2008. Public demo and alpha coming soon.
Main competition: Betfair, worth $3 billion. Other betting exchanges include intrade.com, tradesports.com, and betdaq.com. Other general competitors include hubdub.com (play money), pikum.com (real and play).
Founded by Americans Jason Trost (27) and Hunter Morris (26), computer science graduates of Northwestern University in Chicago. Their professional experience is a fusion of technology and finance. Jason was an equities trader and Hunter developed and designed trading software for an options market making firm. Smarkets headquarters is in London.
Online coverage:
Want to work at Smarkets?
We’re looking for a front-end web developer.
Type: Full-time
What: Front-end web developer
When: ASAP
Pay: Cash + equity
Where: London (NW5)
Smarkets is building an online prediction market system with a keen focus on usability. We believe strongly in web standards, accessibility, and a user-centred approach to designing interfaces. As a front-end developer, you would work on creating and implementing new interface ideas, requiring experience with all levels of UI development from markup and styling to interaction.
Skills:
HTML, CSS, Javascript, UI & UX design, web standards
Gravy:
Erlang and/or Haskell (or functional programming in general), git, RESTful web service design, message passing, non-relational databases, distributed systems, and scalability
Bonus:
You can write closures without memory leaks in IE.
Send us an email at y_o_u_r_l_i_f_e [at] smarkets [dot] com with the underscores removed. Spam bots are starting to read the [at] [dot] syntax.
Smarkets Goes to Gibraltar
Since Hunter and I are from the financial industry, it’s been a major goal of ours to make acquaintances within the betting world. So, when a leading bookmaker based in Gibraltar invited us down for a meeting, we jumped at the chance.
As travel often goes, we encountered a few glitches with transportation, learning that the hardest part about starting Smarkets is getting out of Gibraltar.
Talking Smak: London Erlang User Group presentation
Last night I gave a talk at the London EUG about how we use Erlang at Smarkets to build web applications. If all was successful, a video of the presentation should be available shortly. The slides of the presentation are available here as a PDF.
The main purpose of the presentation was to cover the application stack that we use including MochiWeb, Erlang Web Gateway Interface, SG Template Engine, and Smak, the beginnings of our open source framework. (The name? Polish for flavour).
Thanks to everyone who attended the talk!





