I wrote about bingo back in the beginning of december, Why do all bingo clients look the same? Where are the innovations?, but there are a few companies doing some innovations.
We have seen Live Casinos (where you play online against a real dealer) for a while and now it is showing up in bingo clients as well. One company doing this is Atac Media.
I think having a real person calling out the numbers will be more fun. The problem is that I couldn’t try it out. The bingo opens at …

I wrote a blog post back in October, Show Folded Cards - Great feature implemented differently, where I looked at PokerStars and Full Tilt and how differently they had implemented their Show Folded Cards feature.
Today when I played on Full Tilt I noticed that they had changed their implementation. Now it works like it should, showing the player his cards when he moves the mouse over his position. Good job Full Tilt!
As I wrote back in October, it isn’t always enough to have all the functionality, you also need to …

Gaming VC, an online gaming company with brands like Casino Club, Poker Kings and Betaland, said they will invest up to €7 million during 2010 to build the new businesses.
The have hired former PartyGaming marketing chief Jon Salmon and former Sportingbet head of sportsbook Jim Humberstone for the expansion.
It will be interesting to see if they will use some of the funds to design a great player experience around their offering or if everything will go towards marketing costs.
I believe focusing on the player experience and find ways that will let the …

I wrote a blog post, Betsson can make it easier for their poker players. Here is a suggestion!, giving Betsson a design advice back in September (read the post here).  And today when I played on Betsson I saw that Betsson had redesigned their poker section on Betsson.com and the solution I suggested is implemented.
My design advice back in September was “Today when you click on the “Play in the browser” button on the poker start page you don’t start the poker client, insted you come to a page with …

Rush Poker is a new poker game just released at Full Tilt Poker; this is a new and completely different way to play poker and probably one of the most innovative things to happen to poker in many years.
The idea of Rush Poker is extremely easy, insted of playing at one table you join a pool of players playing at many tables. When you are finished playing the hand you are moved to another table where a new hand is begins right away. You don’t even have to wait until …

It really doesn’t matter to which operator in online gaming you play with today. Gaming portals are very similar when it comes to everything from available games, user flows to registration and deposits. Bingo clients almost look identical from one provider to another. Why is that? Are software providers afraid to differentiate themselves by innovation?
I think that winners in the industry the next couple of years will be operators and software providers that put a lot of focus on the player experience. This is because you can have a really …

Is instant poker as good as the download versions? Not at the moment!
If you compare Full Tilt Poker or PokerStars mac client with an instant version from any of the competitors then you’ll see that Full Tilt and PokerStars is way ahead. It is faster to load, faster to start tables and have more features.
An instant version works well when you are using a computer on which you aren’t allowed to install software.
Many poker rooms today have both a download version and an instant version of their poker client.
You can …

NordicBet has launched a new download casino from Net Entertainment.
I was really excited about this and wanted to try it out as fast as possible since Net Entertainment produce really good games.
But I was really disappointed when I went to NordicBet’s portal to download the client, I found the download page but it doesn’t say what the system requirements are.
I’m usually on a mac and tried to download it on my mac. This didn’t work very well so I guess you need a PC to get it to work.
NordicBet could …

This year’s IGE is just a few weeks away and I’m starting to get excited about the event. It will be great to find out what will be the next big things in the igaming industry this year.
I believe the following topics (among others) will be very important for igaming companies this year:

personalisation
social media
retention
focus on the player
prototyping
innovation
development processes

I’ll be at the IGE all days so if you want to meet up and discuss igaming and user experience. I’m also working on a workshop covering many of the topics above that …

Do you develop gaming software?
Do you prototype?
If you do prototyping then great! If you don’t, then it is time to start doing it!
A prototype is a representative model of the final product.
Why should you build prototypes?
Prototyping is an interative and generative process. You’ll never get the best solution at your first try. Prototyping will give you many new ideas when you work through the prototyping process. It helps you get your ideas into something everyone can play around with. This will generate lots of feedback and ideas for new and …