Wednesday news round-up 05/03
This weekâs news features financial results from Paddy Power and William Hill and new apps hitting the market
Paddy Power CEO Patrick Kennedy hailed tablet as âcentralâ to the operatorâs future growth after revenue derived from mobile devices for the year ended 31 December 2013 grew 73% to â¬212m. The Irish operator has focused on bringing a number of proprietary tablet games to market â Roller Casino and the operatorâs native iPad sports betting app to name a few â with this push to continue over the course of the coming year.
William Hill has launched its first Android app which the operator claims to be the only Android sports betting application to offer both live streaming of horseracing and in-play radio. âThe success of the iOS app has been breathtaking, and with Android now the biggest selling operating system in Britain weâre delighted our customers with Android devices can have the best possible user experience,â Jeurgen Reutter, operations director at William Hill Online (WHO), said. The launch of WHO Android app comes less than a week after the operator reported strong growth from its mobile arm, with mobile gaming net revenue increasing by 175% year-on-year. Its mobile sportsbook represented 39% of total sportsbook wagering in 2013, and CEO Ralph Topping said more improvements were to come in 2014.
PokerStars has updated its core iOS app with a number of new features including the addition of an instant hand history from the table view. Players can also search for tournaments by name in the lobby and can view tournament tickets from the app. PokerStars recently held the fourth largest tournament in online poker history with 46,586 entrants generating a $9,317,200 prizepool.
Gaming supplier Yggdrasil Gaming has released Asian-language versions of its mobile video slots, keno and scratch cards games. Japanese, Vietnamese and Thai versions of the games have been rolled out to all existing clients and Fredrik Elmqvist, chief executive at Yggdrasil, said the decision to localise content had been made following customer demand.
Sales of Android-powered tablet devices overtook those of Appleâs iOS for the first time in 2013 as it became the dominant operating software with a 62% share of units sold, researched compiled by IT research firm Gartner showed. Of the 195 million tablets sold over the course of the year 121 million of them were Android-powered, almost double the 70 million Apple shifted, attributed to an increase in the number of first-time buyers looking for low-end devices.
Iceland-based app development firm Plain Vanilla has laid claim to be the fastest growing mobile games developer in history following the release of its QuizUp game on Fiksuâs platform. The quiz-based game, which managed to gain 5.5 million registered users within a month of launch, boasts a CPI of around $1, below the industry average. QuizUp gained 1 million users gained in eight days, 3.5 million in three weeks, and more than 10 million to date.