Show Us the Data (It’s Ours, After All)

An interesting article by Richard Thaler, professor of economics at Chicago Booth Graduate School of Business, makes the case why consumers should own their ever growing personal data generated as a result of digital social and commercial interactions.  Data is big business.  Why?  Because sophisticated organisations who can accumulate and mine data use it to generate insights, and ultimately sales.  But whilst organisations invest heavily is using data to drive sales, Thaler focuses on the consumer and how access to personal data could help to provide better services.  In the mobile phone sector, for example, transparent pricing can not only help to stimulate the right kind of economic growth argues Thaler, but also that consumers could save considerable amounts of money by switching to the right plan. But to pick the best plan, you need to be able to estimate how much you use services like texting, social media, music streaming and sending photos.

James Beckland also discusses personal data and psychographics in this interesting Mashable article.  Buckley breaks personal data into three categories; social profile data, behavioural data and customer lifecycle data. We have discussed customer lifecycle data in our previous blog on marketing and we have also shared insight into our research on the analysis of gambling behavioural data too. Social profile data provides a rich new source of personal insight.  For example, organisations would very much like to know which affinity brands influence their best customers, which celebrities they follow, and the themes of the messages they regularly share.

Given that personal data is now i) exponentially increasing and ii) becoming increasingly valuable, what if your personal gambling data, data that describes in detail the games you play during each session you log on, all of your transaction details, details on your wins and losses, your social media interactions, chat room data, etc, could be easily downloadable and made available to share in a friendly format with other websites offering value-added services?  It is not inconceivable that one day players will be able to fully control who can see their personal data so that they can leverage it better, not only to get better deals, but also to make smarter decisions about their health and wealth. At Bet Buddy, one of the ways we are using data is to allow gamblers to make more informed decisions about their gambling.  For example take a look at Advisor, our player facing app, which provides rich, relevant, and interactive data insights for gamblers to help them make more informed decisions about their gambling.

The FarmVille Slot Machine - A Billion Dollar Game?

Keeping on the social media, gaming and gambling theme from my previous blog I wanted to highlight a video on TED that gives us a perspective on the future impact of technology and games on us. It’s given by Jesse Schell, a game designer who has worked at Disney and who teaches at Carnegie Mellon. He is quite an energetic and entertaining speaker, although be warned, this TED talk lasts nearly 30 mins... In his talk he makes some interesting predictions about how technology and games will influence and affect us in the future. They will become even more authentic and real and will reward people with points for good behaviour because tracking all of our behaviours will become ubiquitous e.g. taking your medicine on time and walking rather than driving (which will be tracked by the ‘digital shoes’ you will be wearing) will in turn reduce your health insurance. This will come for sure he says!

He also makes a point (which is really a joke...) to Brian Reynolds, Zynga’s Chief Game Designer, telling him he is stupid if he doesn’t develop a ‘FarmVille Slot Game’, where whilst you lose your virtual currency (remember you paid for this in legal currency), it pays out in real money. This, says Schell, will make Reynolds the richest man in the world! OK, so I’m not saying it will happen now but what’s the difference with 'FarmVille Slots' and buying virtual chips and playing poker if the player places equal value to legal and virtual currency? This area will surely get more attention from regulators and academics in the future.

Is playing with virtual currency gambling? Zynga and virtual currency.

An interesting article in TechCrunch on a move by Zynga to patent virtual currency.  Whilst the question of virtual currency and whether it can be patented in an interesting one, I was more interested in a couple of quotes within the patent application.   Zynga state that “in some cases, players want to play gambling-style games, but without the regulated gambling aspects” and that “one advantage of the approach described herein is that virtual currency can be used to purchase virtual items, but neither the virtual currency nor the virtual items can be transferred or redeemed in such a way that would be considered gambling proceeds.”  So purchasing $100 of virtual poker chips with legal currency and winning $200 of virtual currency isn’t considered gambling.  The first thought that sprung to mind was if such gambling and casino style games were designed in such a way that they payout in virtual currency more frequently and thus make the game more fun, then could this lead to more people moving to regulated gambling sites to try their luck?

Your social media gaming avatar?

With the ever growing influence of social media it was interesting to read about a new application launched on Facebook called Piggyback which allows parents to monitor their child’s game play (thanks to @appleface_co for the tweet). The service is free and is targeted at the parent’s of kids who participate in social media learning games. Without doubt a very useful service for parents.

But what about the rest of us who play online games but who are past the age where it’s ‘cool’ to have your parents watching over everything you do on the web? Today around 58% of social network users play at least one game and a check on the social media application leaderboard shows us that Texas Holdem Poker is the third most popular social media game with over 35 million active users. Given growing concerns about the impact of social media on youth gambling and given the power of technology, is it not inconceivable that millions of gamers will soon have their own virtual gaming avatar keeping an eye on their gaming to help keep it safe and fun?

EASG Conference – Some Links to Interesting Presentations

I was fortunate enough to attend the European Association of Gambling Studies conference in Vienna a couple of weeks back and the EASG have kindly posted the presentations on their website. There is a lot of really interesting information posted, and whilst it will take a long time to review them all, I’m going to give you some links to some of the sessions I attended.

Alex Blaszczynski from the University of Sydney gave a thought-provoking presentation on approaches to better understand the relationship between internet addiction and gambling whilst John McMullan from Saint Mary’s University (Canada) demonstrated an immense knowledge and understanding of online poker marketing and promotion and what this means from a responsible gambling perspective.

For a more detailed look at new thinking into problem gambling detection, I heard Tony Schellinck from Dalhousie University (Canada) give an overview of the work they are undertaking on developing FLAGS, a screen which acts as an early warning system to measure problem gambling risk. Joerg Haefeli from Lucerne University (Switzerland) gave an interesting overview of early detection research based on call centre data and his colleague Suzanne Lischer built on this when talking about early detection processes for problem gambling.

An increasing area of interest in academia is the link between youth gambling and social media, with presentations from Jani Kinnunen from the University of Tampere (Finland) and Jennifer Reynolds from the University of Toronto.

Finally, Sally Gainsbury from Southern Cross University (Australia) in Parallel Session 1 talked about the effectiveness of online interventions in the treatment of problem gambling and Henrietta Bowden-Jones told us about the great work she and her team are undertaking at the UK’s first NHS National Problem Gambling Clinic.

I could go on and on as there were many many other interesting talks and presentations but I would be here for some time!

Power to the people

Here’s a new service called pownum that allows customers to rate pretty much any organisation. Pownum say that “Whether its sheer frustration or absolute delight, wouldn't it be good to let such organisations know how you feel? Whether we want to express our feelings on organisations' attitudes towards customer service, the environment, their employees or society in general, the harsh truth is we are powerless to be heard.” The idea being that collectively, people can make a much bigger impact and make corporations listen and act.

I did a quick comparison of some of the betting operators to see how punters are rating them: Betfair (6/10), PaddyPower (7.5/10) and 888.com (7/10). I must stress that this is a very new service and the number of people rating these organisations is currently very low, but other organisations are beginning to get quite a few ratings from customers telling them how they feel about them e.g. Waitrose must be delighted that customers are rating it 8.5 (compared with 6.53 for Sainsburys and 4.7 for Tesco).

Social media is still very much in its infancy so the impact of it on companies and society will take time to evolve. But perhaps one day punters will be using services like pownum to tell the world which are the best and worst betting operators and why, which will bring a new transparency to how we choose who we bet with.