Bingo coming to mobiles?

The launch of a fully working bingo product for mobile phones was a hot topic at last week’s 5th Annual Mobile Gambling Summit.

The two day conference, held at London’s Marriot Regents Park Hotel, attracted around 80 attendees from mobile gambling software companies, mobile operators such as Vodafone and Orange, and gambling companies.

But while great strides have been made producing mobile versions of casino games like blackjack and roulette and a huge variety of slots games, developments in bingo are some way behind. Even poker, which in many ways is more complex to programme than bingo, has a playable mobile product, offered by Cecure Gaming.

Various gaming software companies are investigating linking online bingo sites on a mobile phone but they admit that it may take three to four years before the product will be good enough to attract a mass market audience.

Charles Palmer, co-founder of gaming software company mfuse, told the conference that he was developing new casino and bingo products for launch in the second quarter of 2009 but delegates later said they expected his bingo offering to be closer to a keno-style game than the online bingo products offered by most leading sites.

Charles Cohen, chief executive of Probability plc, an AIM listed sofware provider and gaming operator, said that mass market gambling on mobile phones was still some way off. “The public don’t yet know that it is possible to gamble on your mobile phone,” he said, admitting that mobile gaming was roughly five years behind its online competitors.

Most gambling operators at the conference admitted their priority was to get existing customers playing on their mobiles as an extra way of generating revenue. One head of mobile products for a leading High Street bookmaker told Bingo News: “You just need to get your really big customers playing on their mobiles because it increases the lifetime value of that player by two to three times. What is really amazing though is that they are not gambling on their way to work or in the office when the firewall blocks them. Most of the gambling is done on their mobiles when they are lying on the sofa watching telly and they can’t be bothered to get up and sit at their computer.”