Bet Buddy Wins Entrepreneurial Venture Award

Bet Buddy have been celebrating after winning the Association of MBA (AMBA) 2013 Global Entrepreneurial Venture Award. Simo Dragicevic, Bet Buddy CEO and a Cass Business School alumnus, is pictured receiving the award from Peter Cullum, a Cass alumnus who is founder of Towergate and who set-up the Cass Entrepreneurship Fund. Businesses which have received investment from the Cass Entrepreneurship Fund (Cass's £10 million venture capital fund) have now been finalists in this award category for three consecutive years.

Simo says, "We are absolutely thrilled to have won this prestigious global competition. Bet Buddy has gone from strength to strength in the past 12 months, winning clients in regulated markets in North America and Europe. This award provides further validation that using data the 'Bet Buddy way' is becoming increasingly important to operators in regulated gaming markets around the world.

"I'd like to give thanks to not only to the core team at Bet Buddy, but also our extended team at Cass. The business school was an important springboard for nurturing some of the concepts behind Bet Buddy. Publishing my own peer-reviewed academic research in partnership with Cass academics was critical in the early stages of the business. After graduating and starting the business, the Peter Cullum Centre for Entrepreneurship has provided invaluable support. They have opened opportunities for commercial partnerships and helped us fundraise via their own venture fund, the Cass Entrepreneurship Fund, and through their extensive investment network."

Nick Badman, Chair of the Peter Cullum Centre for Entrepreneurship, says, "I wholly congratulate Simo on his success. We have been lucky enough to work with him since Bet Buddy's inception and to watch the business grow has been highly rewarding for the team at the Centre. "His success reflects all the hard work both he and the team at the Centre are doing. This is great achievement and validates our approach to supporting the creation of new businesses."

New research from Bet Buddy and GTECH: Analysis of demographic and behavioural data from internet gamblers and those who self-exclude

We are very happy to announce that the latest output from Bet Buddy's and GTECH's research collaboration will be published in the Journal of Gambling Studies. This new peer-reviewed paper focuses on self-exclusion as one of the main responsible gaming interventions, and is split into three sections. Firstly, it sets out a three tier model for assessing at-risk gambling behaviours which examines player exhibited, declared and inferred  behaviour. This is an important model that we will be building on in our research projects during 2014 and beyond. Secondly, the paper presents a literature review relating to who self-excludes and whether self-exclusion is effective. Finally, it reports the results of an analysis of the exhibited behaviour of internet self-excluders as sampled from a research cohort of over 240,000 internet gaming accounts self-excluders.

Bet Buddy will be presenting the research outputs during the New Horizons in Responsible Gaming conference in Vancouver in January 2014, hosted by British Columbia Lottery Corporation. Simo Dragicevic, Bet Buddy CEO, will also be participating in a panel discussion titled Player Behaviour Panel Presentation: What Have We Learned from “Big Data” in Responsible Gaming? Does it Change the Way We Play?

Bet Buddy and GTECH have been collaborating on research into responsible gaming since 2011. This latest paper has been co-authored with  Dr. Jonathan Parke, Christian Percy and Aleksandar Kudic from GTECH. Previous research published by Bet Buddy, GTECH and City University London analysed casino data in relation to high risk behavioural markers and was published in International Gambling Studies.