One of the gambling industry’s largest conferences covering the entire industry as a whole will be swapping venues as of 2013. Clarion Gaming’s ICE Totally Gaming conference has decided that West London is so last year and has shifted to the other side of the city to set up shop at the ExCel Centre.
Upon signing the deal, Julian Graves, Managing Director of Clarion’s gaming division, commented, “We are really excited about the move to ExCeL. The huge investments they have made in the last 12 months in their facilities and infrastructure, the upgrades to the Docklands Light Railway and Jubilee line, the Olympics legacy, as well as their close proximity to London City Airport means that ExCeL is the right venue to enable us to meet our ambitions to further grow ICE and our international audience, to ensure it remains the leading global B2B Gaming event in the industry.”
The deal runs for five years with the first show taking place from 5-7 February 2013. We can only speculate as to how crazy Fire and ICE has gotten by then. If this year’s anything to go by then expect anything.
Meanwhile, William Hill and the Racing Post have gotten themselves rather excited and may be overcome by a fountain of joy when the millionth bet is placed using their mobile app. It was expected that the bet would be placed on Saturday afternoon. As we haven’t heard anything, we can only speculate that they passed the milestone and celebrated by sitting in a branch of William Hill with 24 cases of Special Brew for the rest of the weekend.
Michael Byrne, head of mobile at William Hill, commented late last week that, “At 3pm on Friday we had taken on 983,198 bets. So we’re expecting to breach the million mark at some stage on Saturday.”
He continued, “The Racing Post, Shake-A-Bet, Sportsbook and Match Predictor Apps have all contributed to an 800% year-on-year increase in our mobile turnover. Mobile betting now accounts for around 5% of our online turnover and we’re expecting that percentage to keep rising.”
More proof there, if you really needed it, that mobile is where it’s at, bitches! The millionth customer
