New Smarkets Profile & Account
We’ve made a pretty huge update this week. As Smarkets is all about simple, social betting we’ve carried out a complete overhaul of the profile and account pages to make it easier to find people and track your account activity.
Easy to Understand Accounting
We’ve always been frustrated by how complicated the account history is, on other websites so we’ve relaunched ours with the features we wanted to see. You now have a clear dashboard in your account which shows how much money you have in-play, what your potential winnings are, your balance and your profit and loss for the last 30 days.
We’ve also separated out all your bets by ‘active bets’ (that’s bets currently in-play), ’settled bets’ (with handy colour coding so you can see at a glance if you won or lost), and ‘financial activity’. This last section shows you all the money that went in and our of your account.
For each match you bet on, we’ve grouped all the information together so you can see each position and the amount that was matched by other fans. You can also cancel unmatched bets directly from the account page. I’ll put together a video in the next few days explaining the new layout.
Check out the new account.
What’s your winning streak?
We’ve tidied up the profile page so you can now see which matches your friends comment on and see who’s following you. We’ve also added some personal stats such as your success rate, longest winning streak and your highest winning odds. Don’t worry though, these numbers are hidden from other members: they’re for your eyes only.
Check out your new profile.
We hope you enjoy these updates, but get in touch if you have any questions or problems.
New markets added to Smarkets
We’ve battled through the snow and made it to Smarkets Towers to release some brand new markets. You can now bet on League One, League Two, Champions League and the FA Cup. That’s about sixty new teams and hundreds of upcoming matches for you to have a flutter on.
It looks like many of this weekend’s fixtures could be cancelled due to frozen pitches, but once the snow melts, it’s game on!
Smarkets in 35 seconds
We’ve put together this quick video to show the basic features of Smarkets.
We’ll be recording a bunch of videos to illustrate how Smarkets works and to introduce novice punters to the basics of betting. If you have any specific questions, check out our FAQs section or get in touch with us.
Gaming payout methods and eGaming Review Live 2009
Smarkets attended a fascinating presentation by Paul Davis from Counting House at eGaming Review Live last week. Paul talked about how there is a trend towards paperless banking in general life but online gaming is actually an exception. Counting House’s figures showed that electronic payouts were nine times higher than cheques by volume (from January to July 2009), but those cheques were actually worth 8 times more than the electronic payouts.
If gambling is frowned upon (or even illegal) then many punters will request large cheque payouts rather than electronic transfers. Cheques are easier to turn into cash without the accounting trail associated with bank transfers and cheques are a physical piece of paper, this makes bragging in front of your mates much more effective.
Another interesting slide Paul presented was this table which shows the percentage split of payouts:
| Country | Bank Transfers | Payments to Cards | Cheques | eWallets |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Austria | 44.49 | 8.33 | 10.22 | 36.95 |
| Australia | 20.66 | 18.49 | 39.64 | 21.21 |
| Belgium | 15.20 | 16.86 | 11.27 | 56.67 |
| Canada | 34.93 | 12.46 | 45.34 | 7.26 |
| Denmark | 1.02 | 49.93 | 6.14 | 42.92 |
| France | 16.38 | 49.3 | 0.00 | 34.25 |
| Germany | 37.84 | 7.82 | 8.46 | 45.88 |
| Hungary | 2.67 | 39.75 | 1.95 | 55.63 |
| Mexico | 7.92 | 18.76 | 25.64 | 47.68 |
| Netherlands | 49.79 | 3.40 | 0.02 | 46.79 |
| New Zealand | 2.73 | 45.90 | 9.74 | 41.63 |
| Poland | 6.98 | 5.67 | 0.16 | 87.19 |
| Portugal | 16.11 | 3.28 | 28.38 | 42.23 |
| Russia | 9.59 | 26.15 | 0.14 | 64.12 |
| Sweden | 13.63 | 43.61 | 1.86 | 40.90 |
| UK | 26.74 | 52.82 | 6.44 | 14.00 |
| USA | 48.47 | 0.00 | 51.53 | 0.00 |
Payment wallets (such as Moneybookers and Neteller) are gaining ground in popularity in many markets. This an area Smarkets has been investigating and (if we can get the costs to the right level) it’ll be something we’ll be adding in future releases.
Betting open on the World Cup 2010 group stages
We’ve been watching the World Cup draw with interest here in the Smarkets office. With a multinational team, the question of where the USA, England and Australia would be placed was close to our hearts.
England appear to have drawn a reasonable group (despite being in the same group as the USA) and Australia have a chance of going through too, so it looks to be shaping up to be an exciting World Cup next year.
In a fit of excitement we’ve opened the betting for every team’s first match, so place your bets on the World Cup group stages, there’s only 188 days to go!
Updating the betslip
It’s been a bit quiet on the blog recently, but that’s because we’ve been hard at work improving Smarkets. The latest releases saw some pretty big improvements all round, but in this post I’ll talk a little about the bet slip in particular.
Original bet slip
The bet slip (or widget) is the area on the right of the screen which displays the current status of the users matched and unmatched bets. The piece above the bet slip is called the user card and this is where we display the profile links, avatar and account balance. As you can see, the original user card was pretty hard to read.
The bets used to be grouped by ‘matched’ and ‘unmatched’ with the name of the bet and the amount remaining. A matched bet was where 100% of your stake had been matched by other Smarkets users, an unmatched bet was one where only part of your bet had been matched.
We knew the look and feel needed updating but, after some user testing (conducted on a laptop with rough mock-up prototypes in Omnigraffle), we came across a lot of confusion about what ‘matched’ and ‘unmatched’ bet actually meant. So we went back to the drawing board.
New bet slip!
First we reorganised the user card so the avatar was bigger and the account balance easier to read. Then we tidied up the betting slip with a new layout, removed some of the visual clutter and created cleaner headings. Rather than list the full team names in the match, we’re now showing a short code version of the team names to make it easier to scan.
We’ve also introduced new groupings. All your active bets are shown together at the top of the slip. If your bet isn’t fully matched by other Smarkets users then you’ll see the percentage matched in red. You can cancel unmatched bets with a little cross icon and if you’ve made bets at different odds then you’ll see a pop up window asking you which bet you want cancelled.
Rather than digging around account history pages to find out what happened to your settled bets, underneath your active bets we show your two most recently settled bets along with how much you won or lost.
These changes will make it a lot easier to see the state of your bets, but we’re always interested in your feedback so get in touch.
Alex Lee joins Smarkets
Smarkets is delighted to announce that Alex Lee [csensedesign.co.uk / Twitter] is Smarkets’ newest employee. Alex is a cycling-obsessed user experience specialist who arrives fresh off the plane from a year working on an American start-up.
He has worked with companies such as Yahoo!, RealNetworks, the BBC and Virgin Media. Alex has a record of successful and user-focused launches on some of the strongest brands in the UK, including Global’s Capital Radio and Yahoo! TV.
Smarkets is happy to have Alex on board…and we look forward to the inevitable Tour de France office sweepstakes!
Smarkets Launch Party
Thank you very much to everyone who came Tuesday night! Hunter and I are very excited to release Smarkets, a simple and social way to bet, publicly for the first time. Smarkets is invite only at the moment. We will be sending out invite emails out over the next few weeks.
I’d also like to thank our co-sponsors of the evening, CSB Group. CSB has been instrumental in helping us get our company incorporated and applying for our gaming license in Malta
Other coverage:
Techfluff.tv and Russ’s Flickr set.
Smarkets adds Ed Stone to the team
Smarkets continues to grow! I am pleased to announce that Ed Stone [Twitter] will be joining our team. Ed has been involved in the web industry for over ten years working as a developer and later manager. He brings a wealth of web expertise to Smarkets and has worked in both London and Syndey.
Prior to Smarkets, Ed was the Web Development Manager for Yahoo! Search Europe, and then Project Director at Squiz UK, introducing them to web standards and progressive enhancement. I am really happy Ed has decided to make Smarkets his new home!
Smarkets new office in the West End
From N7 to W1W in London, Smarkets moves into its new office until the end of the year.
