Bookmaker
William Hill will launch a series of interactive mobile gambling
services next year after completing implementation of a new
technology infrastructure.
The company, which
has 1,600 outlets across the UK, hopes the MCS server from Volantis
will help it capitalise on demand for mobile gambling, which will
generate global revenues of £1.15bn by 2006, according to Juniper
Research.
The Volantis
platform will allow William Hill to make betting applications
available to all wireless devices, said Julian Graham-Rack, head of
e-commerce business development at the company.
“Potentially,
mobile gambling is a huge market, but technically, offering
agnostic network and handset access to our content is quite a
challenge,” he said.
“The Volantis
implementation was driven by the need to make sure anybody can use
our services – removing technology-related barriers.”
Before the
implementation, William Hill, which has been offering limited
Wap-based services since 2000, only specifically supported six
handsets from some of the main suppliers, Graham-Rack said.
“As latest
handsets came out from those manufacturers, it was unclear as to
whether they worked or not on our site,” he said.
“In addition to
that, our service was designed to the lowest common denominator, so
we were unable to take advantage of the advanced features of modern
mobile handsets.”
Now that Volantis
is in place, William Hill will be able to expand its mobile service
offering, Graham-Rack said.
“We are now able
to identify, for example, the top 10 mobile phones in use so we can
start to create optimised services using the features on those
phones such as colour, screen size and audio capabilities,” he
said.
William Hill’s MCS
server, which went live last month, is a J2EE-compliant native
application server designed to manage the presentation of content
across multiple devices.
The software
contains a database of 450 devices, supporting PCs, PDAs, 2G, 2.5G
and 3G mobile phones, interactive digital TV, internet appliances,
games consoles and Voice XML portals. The user interface of a
website on a given device is defined by policies held in the device
database.