ME Awards nomination recognizes Slotland.com’s pioneering contribution to mobile gambling
The world’s most popular slot machine web site has been selected as one of five finalists in the ME Awards “Best Mobile Gambling” category. Slotland.com began offering their popular online games on mobile phones and PDAs last September and is already recognized as a leader in the new field of mobile gambling.
Mobile Entertainment Magazine, which produces the Mobile Entertainment (ME) Awards to honour excellence among those that provide content for mobile devices, announced this week that Slotland.com has been short listed by a group of industry experts as one of the top five mobile gambling providers in the world. The winner will be announced at a gala reception in London, UK September 19, 2006.
If you’re under thirty-five, and especially if you’re North American and/or female, you might think of that Nokia the kids talked you into buying as merely a phone. But if you’re young, male and European, your mobile has probably become an everyday portable entertainment device replacing everything from your MP3 player to your video games. In 2002, when the first Nokia colour phone with Java entered the market, visionaries at Slotland.com recognized an opportunity to be key players in the birth of a totally new entertainment platform. Already leaders in online entertainment, they were uniquely positioned to bring the experience of the web to phones and PDAs. In many important demographic respects, mobile is a whole new game, requiring the company to adapt. But one thing this company knows after providing online entertainment for eight years is that players have an insatiable appetite for new games and that those games have to be unique. The company has opted to develop its own proprietary games and systems so that they can set priorities based on what they know players want.
“We are excited to be one of the pioneers of mobile gambling and strive to emerge as one of the leaders in mobile games in terms of quality and uniqueness of our games, customer service, security and banking, as opposed to sheer quantity of games and services,” said Martin Smith, Slotland.com’s Mobile Games Manager. “This has always been our goal in the web-based gaming and we are sticking to it in the mobile games arena as well.”
”We don’t want to be the 101st vendor offering the same content as the previous hundred. Our games and related services are world-wide unique, they are simply not available from other operators,” adds Smith. “What we have learned in the past is that customers value our uniqueness.”
The award for Best Gambling Company will be given to a company that has created a downloadable gambling game or set up a server platform for handling billing and player registrations – or both. Other categories, such as Best Adult Services Company, Best Music Label, and Best Video & TV Service Provider show that on the new mobile entertainment platform content is king. However, the list of awards also includes Best Handset Company and Best Payment/Billing Provider.
Slotland.com is being recognized in part for the resources they have devoted to developing games for the mobile platform – a daunting task since each game has to be re-designed for every phone model – but also because Slotland.com is a different kind of company.
“Our players choose to play with us because they know we are constantly designing new and better games for them, because they know they can trust us, and because we give award-winning customer service,” said Hannah Morante of Slotland.com. “But they also know how we support amateur sports around the world, and that we’ve built a wonderful new school in an impoverished African village. We’re a different kind of company in that respect.”
Juniper Research estimates the current mobile gambling market to be worth approximately $315 million worldwide and forecasts that the mobile gambling sector will be worth up to $16.6 billion by 2008. Experts predict that by then more than 450 million wireless subscribers will be playing some form of mobile games and that four out of five mobile users – 200 million people in Western Europe and the U.S. -- will be playing internet games on their phones. The Asia-Pacific region currently hosts 70 million mobile gamers with wireless gaming revenues totalling $1.1 billion.
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