Bet on the Mercury Music Prize
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
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!”*
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
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.
World Cup 2010 betting. It’s not over yet…
We’re entering the final phase of the 2010 World Cup and so far it’s been an eventful tournament.
The defending champions are out, the French stormed off with a collective gallic shrug and the English, yet again, failed to live up to media expectation. But it’s not all doom and gloom, there are ten more games to play, so lots more of the World Cup to bet on.
Brazil are still favourites to win the tournament but both Argentina and Spain have put in some solid performances and could produce an upset. Gonzalo Higuain leads the Golden Boot betting (he wears Adidas boots by the way, so they might be contenders for top scoring boot).
There haven’t been any sendings off during a shootout yet, but the dirtiest team so far has been Chile. Take a look at the rest of the betting opportunities at the 2010 World Cup with Smarkets.
There’s lots to bet on in June
It can’t have slipped your notice that the 19th World Cup Finals kicks off tomorrow in Johannesburg. 32 nations will battle it out over the coming month (with Spain the current favourite to win) and Smarkets is offering markets on hundreds of different aspects of the tournament.
Of course you can bet on every match outcome, but who will be the dirtiest team? Which brand of boot will score the winning goal? And will anyone score a hat-trick?
Tennis, Cycling, F1, & Mars Missions
Football isn’t everyone’s cup of tea but there’s lots more to bet on with Smarkets. We’re covering the major tennis tournaments, the continuing F1 and cycling seasons and the continuing saga of British politics. We also have some markets unique to Smarkets such as “Who will be the first to leave the Mars500 experiment?“.
What about that free tenner?
We’re still offering a free £10 bonus when you make your first deposit as well as our refer-a-friend offer so get your friends involved.
Keep up to date
Follow us on Twitter and friend us on Facebook to keep up to get access to exclusive offers and news.
Subscribe to World Cup Fixture Calendars
Subscribe to the calendars produced by the lovely folks over at World Cup Kick Off and you’ll get the latest fixtures pushed to your Outlook, iCal, iPhone or Google Calendar (or any other applications or devices that support ICS calendar files).
They’ve also added links to the appropriate Smarkets betting market in the notes for each event so you can place your bets straight from your calendar.
So head over to World Cup Kick Off and subscribe. We’ll hopefully be adding live odds to the calendars in the near future too!
Walkers Flavour Cup Pt.2
Time for the next batch of Walkers Flavour Cup contenders to go head-to-head. Six flavours were rigorously tested at Smarkets towers, and this was the result:
| Flavour | Dislike | Like | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Australian BBQ Kangaroo | 8 | 7 | -1 |
| South African Chutney | 8 | 6 | -2 |
| Japanese Teriyaki Chicken | 6 | 10 | +4 |
| American Cheeseburger | 11 | 7 | -4 |
| Brazilian Salsa | 12 | 4 | -8 |
| Argentinian Steak | 6 | 11 | +5 |
A close run heat that one, but Argentinian Flame Grilled Steak takes the honours with +5.
Only three more flavours to test (Welsh Rarebit, Scottish Haggis & Irish Stew) and we’ll have a complete leaderboard. Check out the latest odds in our Flavour Cup market.
Want to join Smarkets?
We’re looking for an experienced front end web developer for a full time position with an immediate start. Sound interesting? Read on…
Job description
Our front end application is a collection of Django apps built on an exclusively Python API client (to a RESTful Erlang API), and we’re looking for someone to build out user-facing features.
Required skills and qualities
- Hand-written, valid (when required) (X)HTML (although Smarkets values HTML 4.01 Strict, and we’d expect a candidate to be able to explain the difference between XHTML and HTML in practical terms);
- Solid knowledge of Javascript, above and beyond frameworks, but also experience with the benefits of Javascript frameworks, including jQuery and YUI;
- Experience writing cross-browser CSS;
- Demonstrated understanding and experience of how the above things can affect accessibility and performance;
- Experience with Django, Pylons, TurboGears or any other modern Python-based web frameworks. We use Django at Smarkets, so bonus points for that;
- A good cultural fit for a small team that works under intense pressure, short deadlines, and a high workload; and
- A proven history of getting the job done on high quality websites.
Desirable skills
- Knowing your way around Linux;
- Solid Python experience, beyond just Django or Pylons;
- Using Git in a multi-developer environment.
Additional information
- This is a full time, on site job;
- The job is based in Clerkenwell, London, United Kingdom.
If you’re looking for a flexible, agile team to work with; want to work somewhere free of big corporate politics; would like a cool project to work on; and fit the above criteria we’d love to hear from you!
Fox on InTrade and the Wisdom of Crowds
A nice piece here from Fox TV (never thought I’d say that) on the wisdom of crowds and how prediction markets function.
The John Stossel show covered a bunch of other aspects of the American gambling industry in this six part series, all of which can be found on on www.midasoracle.org.
