SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
This years’ EiG 13 is bigger and better than last year as we have undertake extensive market research and feedback from all our delegates and exhibitors. The EIG team have introduced two new features EiG Workshops and EiG Tutorials to deliver a more engaging and personalised experience for our patrons.
Innovation is the watch word for EiG 13 of which we have the excellent start-up village, which is ” A mix of Dragon’s Den meets X-Factor”.
Opening remarks:
The Honorable Jon. C. Porter, CEO, Porter Gordon Silver
A very charismatic individual welcomed delegates to the session with ‘ I wanted to be a rock and roll star’ and promptly left the stage and mingled with the audience to convey his speech.
As a former Mayor, State Senator, in Nevada for some 35 years, he stated ‘we are reinventing electronic gaming everyday’. Educating the consumer is one of the biggest challenges for the industry, and the industry needs to do its bit to engage and figure out educating the consumer groups and activists.
He further added, ” We need the adoption of a community to educate and companies need to become more sophisticated in the business of politics not just be familiar with regulatory rules of the game and policy makers. He warned that politicians can flick the switch and need truly engaged if we are to be Game Changers”.
Session: Andreas Weigend, former chief scientist at Amazon.com and founder of Social Data Lab, Sanford University
A truly mesmerizing presentation on big data, which Andreas referred to as the ‘New Oil’. Big Data = Mind-set to turn mess into Meaning of which in 2012 more data was produced than the entire history of mankind from its beginning of civilization.
He further remarked during his presentation with key references to how:
- Amazon has changed how a billion people think about buying
- Google has changed how a billion people think about information
- Facebook has changed how a billion people think about their identity
The paradigm has changed from Transaction – Interaction – Relationships, its relationships with each other that are the new marketing currency. Businesses need to have a similar Goal to Amazon, simply how can we help people make better decisions by blending data to create the ‘secret sauce’.
Social commerce and mobile commerce where very much watch words in this speaker session, with Andreas stating, ‘your mobile knows more about you than your partner’, and he implied that you ‘most likely touch your mobile phone more than your partner’ all of which leaves an unbelievable stream of data record imprints.
eGaming companies need to experiment within this laboratory to look at five stages similar to what Amazon undertook:
- Manual (experts)
- Implicit (Clicks, searches)
- Explicit ( Reviews, Lists)
- Situation (Local, mobile)
- Social Graph (Connections)
There’s lots of data, which has given the rise to Data scientists or Data Detectives and he concluded his thoroughly entertaining session with the following further pearls of wisdom.
Start with a problem not with data
- Focus on metrics that matter to your customers
- Focus on actions & feedback, not the analytics and reports
- Let people do what people are good at and computers do what they are good at
But in the end I couldn’t help feeling that as part of the audience of this exceptionally bright physicists, that this was another lab experiment with the analysis and results to come.
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Content Submitted by Mark McGuinness – SBC Business & Marketing Correspondent
