Image 1. A winner’s alert.
Let players post results on their social networks!
Why not let your players be your marketing people? One way of doing this is to make it possible for them to post results on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social networks. By doing so friends there will read about it and your gaming portal!
In the image above you see one example of how this could be done. You only need to associate the player account with their accounts on social networks.
I hope we will see more social feature integrated …

Image 1. bwin’s skill games site provided by Jadestone.
Can it be more frustrating than getting an error message saying “Compability problem, you need to have Windows and Internet Explorer or Firefox to play”? (I am using a mac)
Yes it actually can!
And that is when I have logged in to the site, looked around for a while and only get the error message once I try to start a game. That is lousy player experience! It would be much more fair if they earlier would tell me that I can’t play on …

Image 1. PokerStars tournament lobby.
I’ve enjoyed playing a tournament at PokerStars tonight. But since I pay a lot of attention to details when it comes to the user experience when I play I noticed something I think PokerStars can do better.
There is a little banner area in the top right of the tournament lobby view, which is good real estate.
I was surprised to see that PokerStars didn’t use this area to promote relevant information. In the middle of the tournament I saw an ad for “Extended Registration Available” but if …

Image 1. Svenska Spel’s start page.
I’m a member at Svenska Spel and play there every now and then. Today I went to svenskaspel.se to see how much money had in my account there.
The start page had two big buttons (in the circle in the middle of the image),
“Check out the site” and “Become a member and play!”
I was very surprised to see those options, especially since my member number was already filled in. So Svenska Spel knows that I am a member and shouldn’t display that start page for me.
I …

Ever played poker on Facebook? Or on your iPhone? Maybe on MySpace? Or on Yahoo?
Then you probably have played on Zynga Poker.
Zynga Poker is a social poker community where you don’t play for real money. But they are doing something right. Right now they have 284,740 players online.
Online poker gaming business can learn from Zynga and their poker product.
Here are a few things all poker software providers need to address in the coming year or so.

Integrate with social networks. Let the players play where they are and don’t force them …

I attended EiG Expo this week and listened to many of the sessions, here are my reflections from the week.
Multiplayer and social games: Monetising the communities by Jörgen Larsson, Founder, AhaBingo, Playzeek, onGolf and esn.
The talk pointed out that you should use viral marketing insted of spending money on marketing. You should also make emotional and entertaining content which is social by nature and customers want to consume social content socially. This can be done by integrating with larger social networks and let players play real money games with friends.
This was …

Will Lytle from eGaming 2.0 talked about “proactive development” where they try to indentify and address high value players within 7 days, and alsoe about rewarding players who generate the most revenues insted of using the more common loyalty programs out there today.
Both Will and Alistar Craxton talked about the importance of knowing your players and get feedback from them.
They also pointed out that time was important, not having to wait months until you know if your campaigns are succesfull or not.
/Staffan

Image 1. EIG Expo, Copenhagen.
The CEO Panel discussion was very interesting to listen to.
On the panel were the following:

Norbert Teufelberger, Co-CEO, bwin
Gigi Levy, CEO, 888
Jim Ryan, CEO, PartyGaming
David Yu, CEO, Betfair
Ed Andrewes, MD, Ladbrokes eGaming
Henry Birch, CEO, William Hill Online

The main key points from the panel were for me

B2B business will be more important and many on the panel see that media companies will go into online gaming to increase revenues and especially 888.com (with Dragonfish) and PartyGaming work hard with B2B.
Focus on CRM and retain players
bwin have put a …

The Start-Up Launch Pad was a fun session where four startups had to pitch their ideas.
The Start-Ups were:

Tailorbet offers an automated, peer-to-peer service that allows customers to create customised bets on anything statistically quantifiable in sports, with or without odds.
USM is developing new casino software technology that will challenge current business models and offer an alternative to gaming operators.
Jacky Betting from Sweden is bringing a new proposition for sports pools with a strong social media context.
MasterGrinders is a French start-up developing an innovative, community-based, consumer facing affiliate platform for mass-multitable …

The first panel session at EIG Expo talked about the future and what trends they see.
The main areas were:

innovation
entertainment
mobile
social media (voted as the trend that would have the biggest impact on the online gambling)
user experience (understanding the customer was voted the most important key factor to succeed in the next five years)

It is great news to hear that the gaming industry see the importance of social media and user experience.
The panel had the following speakers:

Mark Blandford, Chairman, Valhalla Investments
Dietmar Knoechelmann, CEO, Wirecard Payment Solutions
Adriaan Brink, CEO, iCoins and MD, Genesis …

Image 1. Friend Alerts in a poker client.
Retain your players by adding social features in your poker client!
People are social and are interested in knowing what their friends are up to but in poker clients today there are hardly any social features.
I believe having social features is good business, it will make players be more attached to you which means they will come back more often.
One social feature can be what I call “Friend Alert“, this feature shows up as a little window in the poker client when a one …

Image 1. PokerStars poker table and chat.
PokerStars can make it easier for players to join tournaments advertised at the poker tables!
When I play at PokerStars I see information regarding tournaments soon to start in the chat window but also as a “banner” on the table (see image above).
It is a real hazzle having to go to the tournament lobby and find the tournament so I don’t do it very often. A much better solution would be to let the player just click on the text in the chat window or the …

Image 1. The steps to place a bet on NordicBet’s iPhone site.
I read on the Gaming Intelligence website that NordicBet has released a iPhone version of their sportsbook together with Mobenga.
I thought I would try it out since I love my iPhone and gaming. So I started Safari on my iPhone and typed in www.nordicbet.com in the address field. But then I got to the ordinary website insted of the one optimized for the iPhone. After looking around a little on the website I found a banner about the iPhone site, clicked …

Image 1. Betsson’s unnecessary step when starting the instant poker client.
Betsson should remove the unnecessary step in the player’s user flow when it comes to starting the instant poker client.
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 information about Java. As a poker player I would expect the poker client to launch right away without this page.
Showing this page is good when you don’t have Java installed but not …

Image 1. PartyPoker’s start page.
Earlier this month I wrote a blog post “PartyPoker could make it easier for mac players!“. Today when I went to PartyPoker’s start page they’ve removed the movie banner and replaced it with a big button saying “Instant Play”.
I think this is a good change to the start page and I am know that it will be seen in the logs that many players click on the button to start playing the instant poker client.
Good job PartyPoker!
/Staffan

Image 1. Full Tilt Poker’s login view.
I really like Full Tilt’s poker client. The look and feel is really fresh and it seems like they really focus on making a great player experience.
In the image above you can see one example, giving the player the option to either save the username or both the username and password. In an earlier blog, Why do I have to log in twice when playing poker?,  you could see that Microgaming has a different solution which doesn’t work as well.
Full Tilt Poker’s solution isn’t …

Image 1. PartyPoker instant sign up form.
One of the most important things for gaming operators is to make sure all the basic functionality works 100%!
Today I tried to sign up at PartyPoker using their instant poker client and everything worked fine until I got to the second step (in the first step it was a real hazzle to find a username not already taken).
But I couldn’t complete the second step. As you can see in the image above I got error messages saying “Please select your country from the list” …