Betable went live today with their pool betting product. Congratulations to the Betable team for launching! Betable has been under development in San Francisco for a year or so. Recently some of the team moved to London. It’s great to see other startups launching in the space. For those unfamiliar with pools, bettors put their money in a pot and the winners split the pot after commission (usually 10-20%). Pools have the advantage that participants don’t have consider the odds – the odds are computed after the betting has ended.

Pikum made waves when it launched a similar pool betting product two years ago. Pikum offered betting on football markets, but didn’t let participants create markets as you can on Betable. It ran out of money before it was able to gain any traction in the marketplace and folded a little less than a year after launching.

Bragster (formerly launched as Gottabet in 2008) aimed at mate to mate bets that users could create themselves. “I bet you £20 you can’t eat all the donuts”. They weren’t able to gain significant traction in bespoke bets, so they rebranded as Bragster to a social network centred around bragging rights. Not just a clever name! They were acquired last month by the Guinness Book of World Records.

Boolabus has taken an agency model and offer the big bookmakers (e.g. Ladbrokes) cool software that they can plug into their websites . Their focus has been largely what’s known as “in-play” betting – betting after the match has started. Even though the odds update in semi-real time, bookmakers still add quite a large profit market to their odds so the punter doesn’t get good value. The punter doesn’t have the option to lay a bet either.

Betfair pioneered the concept of betting marketplaces a decade ago. They have been building up their US presence after making the purchase of TVG, a horse racing TV network. Betfair is a fantastic product for the professional bettor, offering the best liquidity in the marketplace, but it has a high learning curve for the casual punter. Like the other major bookmakers, Betfair has almost no social features to speak of (although Betfair has a forum).

Smarkets is innovating betting marketplaces by bringing the power of exchanges to a wider audience. We’re creating a simpler user experience with a social layer. On Smarkets, the price of a bet changes in real-time. This type of market dynamic is perfect for live events. For example, betting on the cycling race where a crash could wipe out half the field or an election where a news story could decimate a candidates chances, Smarkets works very well. Also, Smarkets allows to participants to buy or sell an event at anytime up until the event has concluded.

We have a host of social betting features that we’ll be launching shortly. Our next major release includes the UK election markets. We’ve been hard at work at Smarkets for almost 3 years building a scalable and reliable technical architecture.

It’s great to see innovation coming to betting. Pikum and Gottabet failed, but the new crop of betting startups Smarkets, Boolabus and Betable are forging ahead in this massive industry begging for new blood.

Pretty impressive predictions all round. Andy Gray only predicted four matches, but he got all the results correct. Lawro got one wrong, but he did predict the correct score for the Sunderland v Man City game. Huw also got one wrong, but he doesn’t make correct score predictions.

Next week I think I’ll pay a little more attention to the pundits, maybe they do know what they’re talking about!

Lawro’s predictions have been pretty solid in the past so it’ll be interesting to see how it pans out. Nobody backing my beloved West Ham to beat Chelsea then… strange.

Out of the 116 companies submitted, we made the Top 20 selection. The top three startups will appear in the finals to vie for the Plugg Start-Up of the Year Award. Check out the list of other start-ups.

We will be pitching to the esteemed jury and audience on Thursday March 11th. Check out the schedule and if you are going to attend, make sure you come and say hello.

You’ll see a new ‘refer-a-friend‘ link on your profile page with your referral code. You can send email directly from that page or copy and paste the link into Twitter, Facebook, Myspace or wherever your friends are! There is no limit to the number of referrals you can make and the bonus money will be awarded for 6 months from the day your friend signs up.

The bonus works like this: if your friend wins £100 on a bet, then the Smarkets commission would usually be £5, but as you referred them, we’ll split the commission and pay £2.50 into your account to bet with. The more they win, the more you win! You don’t need to do anything, the money will be paid into your account on a weekly basis.

Check out the full Terms and Conditions and if you have any questions, get in touch.

Start referring your friends to Smarkets. More friends, more money!

We’ve quietly rolled out a few fixes and improvements today, and next week we’ll be introducing invite codes and a referral scheme. Exciting times. So, sign up for Smarkets.

There are very few betting exchanges, and the ones that we know of only allow you to bet with their house format. Betfair, for example, only allows you to use decimals. We’ve now released an update which allows you to trade using either percentages, decimals, American style or fractions.

This has been a big piece of work which involved changes across our entire system. We’ve not only updated the event and list pages, we’ve also updated the betting interface to make betting with each system as simple as possible.

Percentages still has the slider (but a better looking one!), fractions has drop down menus for each value, we’ve created a custom input box for decimal (for users familiar with the Betfair interface) and American has an input box. You can switch between formats with the ‘odds’ link at the top of every page.

Our odds explained page can give you more information on odds formats if you need it. I hope you find the new odds switcher useful. Please get in touch with any feedback.

The video shows Git commits to the Smarkets website over time. Each blob is a piece of code committed to the codebase. Backend (blue) is an Erlang application, Frontend (pink) is a Django application, and Middleware (white) is a collection of Python scripts.

There’s more information on greening up in the Smarkets help section.

Ever wondered what the difference was between a high-street bookmaker and a betting exchange? This video explains what we see as the main advantages of market betting.