Bet on the Mercury Music Prize
July 20, 2010
The nominations for the 2010 Mercury Music Prize have been announced, listen to them on Spotify (with the links below) and then make your bet with us!
Dizzee Rascal – Tongue N’ Cheek
The xx – xx
Paul Weller – Wake Up the Nation
Corinne Bailey Rae – The Sea
Mumford and Sons – Sigh No More
Laura Marling – I Speak Because I Can
Foals – Total Life Forever
Wild Beasts – Two Dancers
Biffy Clyro – Only Revolutions
Villagers – Becoming a Jackal
Kit Downes Trio – Golden
I Am Kloot – Sky at Night
Bet for who you think will win, or bet against the bands you hate!
Compare your skill with betting leaderboards
July 17, 2010
Exciting new feature time! I talked about the concept of ‘friends’ in the last post (a friend is a mutual follow relationship) and now it’s time to do something interesting with your friends. You now have a leaderboard on your profile page where you can compare your betting abilities between your friends. Awesome eh!
How does it work?
The Smarkets boffins put together a formula to calculate your score based on both your return on investment and the variety of markets you’ve successfully dabbled in over the last 30 days. We’ve designed it so you are comparing your predicting skills between your friends and not the amount of money you bet.
The leaderboard is then shown on your profile page with your current and best ever scores. Bragging rights abound!
Why are we doing it?
Well, we love comparing our winning streaks and best return between each other in the office and we wanted a way to do something similar between our friends. We’ll be extending the concept to create a leaderboard for all Smarkets members and we will be running competitions around custom leaderboards in the future. Find out who’s the ‘most accurate West Ham fan’ or the ‘most accurate bettor at Wimbledon’. But all that’s for the near future. At the moment it’s just a bit of fun between you and your friends.
Not keen on being on a leaderboard?
Don’t worry, you can opt out in your account settings and we only automatically added the people who already shared their visibility. So if you are set as ‘private’ we’ll never include you in new social features.
We’d love to hear what you think about features like this, so please get in touch either directly, or via the comments.
“Do I not like that… No, I like it!”*
July 9, 2010
So you’ve probably noticed all those Facebook ‘like’ buttons appearing on Smarkets. Why are they important? Well, Facebook are doing something a little clever with them. They are putting together a social search engine which weights the results based on the web pages your friends ‘like’. So if you have Arsenal fans for friends (commiserations) when you ‘like’ our Arsenal matches, they’ll appear higher in your friends searches. All interesting stuff.
We’ve also tweaked the following concept a little so when two members follow each other they become ‘friends’. This extra-strength relationship means you have more control of who you share your data with and we can do some fun things like leader-boards and challenge-a-friend. The ‘followers’ concept still exists but your followers will just see your comments in their activity stream at the moment.
Lots more social stuff to come like sharing your winning streak, fan accuracy, and putting things on other sites such as Twitter and your blogs. Keep your eyes peeled for the updates and get in touch with us with feedback about what you think of all this social stuff.
* Graham Taylor would have clicked our ‘like’ buttons!
Bet on the Tour de France
July 1, 2010
The 97th Tour de France rolls out of Rotterdam on July 3rd for 3,642km of racing over 20 stages and Smarkets is offering a plethora bets on the event.
Alongside the general classification, team and jersey winners, we’re also offering markets on head-to-head battles such as Cav vs. Tyler Farrar and Basso vs. Cadel. And, even though England are out of the World Cup, you can still support the Brits with Bradley Wiggins a contender for yellow and Mark Cavendish trying to finish in green. With eight Brits starting the Tour, we have a unique ‘Battle of the Brits‘ market to predict who will finish highest on the GC.
It promises to be an exciting tour this year with Lance hoping to retire with a bang and Cadel Evans and Ivan Basso turning into legitimate competition for Contador. As the race progresses we plan to add stage winner markets and bets unique to Smarkets.
