eSports betting platform Unikrn has raised $15 million in a pre-sale participated by some big name investors, including Mark Cuban.

The Seattle-based company launched its initial coin offering (ICO) pre-sale last Friday for its UnikoinGold tokens, which are exclusive for its skill-based betting platform. The digital currency is designed as a decentralized token on the Ethereum platform, which means that it can be bought, sold and traded on digital currency exchanges that deal with Ethereum.

Friday pre-sale was limited to big blockchain groups, which Unikrn founder Rahul Sood said they “felt would work to build commercial opportunities for the UnikoinGold ecosystem,” according to GeekWire. This was followed by a “crowdsale” on Saturday, and Unikrn said it plans to open the token sale region by region gradually.

Also among those who participated in the ICO were ethereum co-founder Anthony Diiorio, Blockchain Capital and Pantera Capital as well as Draper’s Dragon Fund, a joint venture between Draper Fisher Jurvetson and DragonVenture.

Unikrn, which has partnered with CoinCircle for the ICO, plans to sell $100 million worth of its cryptocurrency tokens and will use the money raised from the ICO to help fund the growth of its business.
Created in 2014, Unikrn offers real money betting on eSports events in the UK and Australian markets. A year later, the start-up raised $10 million in venture funding from investors including Cuban, Ashton Kutcher, Binary Capital and Indicator Ventures, among others.

Although it was announced months ahead, Unikrn’s ICO comes amid increased scrutiny from regulators who are concerned with possible cases of fraudulent fundraising and speculative investment.
UnikoinGold is the offshoot of the virtual coin Unikoin, which Unikrn launched in 2015. The original version of the virtual currency—now called UnikoinSilver—were available only on Unikrn’s platform, but the start-up said

UnikoinGold can be purchased or sold on third party exchanges, or even withdrawn from Unikrn altogether. This allows the company to bypass some betting laws, according to the UnikoinGold whitepaper, but it didn’t specify which laws.

Online gaming and betting operator Betway has been named sponsor of the 2017 ESL Pro League, the longest-running professional CS:GO competition in the esports sector.

The latest edition of the tournament began on Tuesday August 22nd with 14 US and European teams competing for a share of a USD$1m prize pool.

Initially played online, tournament matches will be held three times a week, on Tuesdays, Wednesday and Thursdays. The league culminates in the ESL Pro League Finals, which are held live in the Danish city of Odense between December 8th and 10th.

It is the second event organised by the Electronic Sports League that Betway has supported this year, having sponsored ESL One Cologne in June – the world’s largest CS:GO tournament.

That event saw Betway adding live odds complied by its esports trading team to the tournament broadcast, which proved particularly popular and will now be repeated throughout the ESL Pro League.

“We are very excited for the next few months as some of the world’s best CS:GO players will battle it out for its biggest prize, the ESL Pro League, as well as the seven-figure prize pool. Our experience sponsoring ESL One Cologne was a huge success, and the feedback we received from our first-of-its-kind live odds feeds into the broadcast has inspired us to increase our involvement across tournaments and teams in the coming months and years.” Betway director of marketing and operations Anthony Werkman.

Mark McGuinness has more than 22 years’ experience in digital marketing director roles with both private and publicly listed iGaming operators. He is a co-founder of http://www.esportsbet.com a resource for gamers and sports bettors who wish to start betting on eSports.

Stand-first

Web 2.0 is dead long live the new king! 2016 is being heralded as the new era in digital and mobile commerce due to the enormous growth and usage of conversational interfaces that can hear you, understand, and respond to your every need. Combine this with that rise and rise of messaging apps such as WeChat, Telegram, Viber and WhatsApp; these new super social conversational platforms the next opportunity for Eastern European operators and affiliates.

Amazon Echo calling earth

No not the Hollywood movie of the same name, we are of course referring to that digital behemoth and chameleon, Amazon and their much-hyped Amazon Echo product.  If you haven’t yet heard about this product, do please do take note as Amazon is investing millions of dollars in developing an ecosystem for the Echo product.  Why you may ask? Well Amazon Echo is a wireless speaker and voice command device; that springs to life with the voice prompt ‘Alexa’ which is capable of many services. It’s sort of a modern day version of the Genie and the Lamp and your wish is my command master.  The Alexa activated services range from voice interaction; music playback making to-do lists; setting alarms; streaming podcasts, playing audiobooks, and providing weather, traffic, and other real-time information.  It can do all the mundane ‘daily stuff’ allowing us mere mortals to get on with living our lives.

Similar to the Genie and Lamp analogy, you can have a ‘conversation’ with Alexa, thanks to the advances in speech recognition technology, of which Alexa can also start to learn how each of us talks, different dialects, idioms and all.  Conversational interfaces are pervading every facet of our lives. Our smartphones and cars now support the likes of Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, of which you can ‘talk’ too Siri or Google’s Cortana for travel directions, reply to a text message and so on.

These conversational interfaces shall continue to become part of the digital fabric or our lives. Why, well simply we have too much information at our finger types and too many apps to navigate. We need a filter or equivalent of a digital Personal Assistant which in effect the conversational interface provides that layer or barrier. This single point of contact conversational interface will and shall effectively help control our working and social lives.

The explosive growth of messaging apps

So we’ve talked about conversational interfaces. Let’s also take a look at messaging apps, which in effect are another short form of conversational message exchanges of tasks and information between individuals or groups.

Let’s look at the messaging platform numbers. China’s Tencent’s WeChat a mobile messaging app first released in 2011 has a reported 697 million monthly users. Furthermore, 40 percent of WeChat users are aged between 25 and 34 years of age a very desirable customer segment with money to spend.

If we look at WhatsApp, they had 1 billion active users in February of this year up 700 million on the previous according to research firm Statista. Other messaging platforms such as Telegram started by Pavel Durov, who was also the founder of VK.com one of Russia’s largest social networks has according to their official blog, 100 million monthly active users and 350,000 new users joining every day is stellar growth.

Messaging Platforms and conversational interfaces are the future of digital communications and services.  Facebook is another tech behemoth investing heavily in the space with the launch of their Messenger platform. David Marcus, VP of Messaging Products for Facebook was quoted as saying, “Every month, over 900 million people around the world communicate with friends, families and over 50 million businesses on Messenger. It’s the second most popular app on iOS, and was the fastest growing app in the US in 2015.

I fully ascribe to these trends and comments. Why, well if you consider the growth in conversational commerce, digital assistants or chatbots that use highly structured messaging to funnel the conversation to a desirable outcome, whether for business or person-to-person use. It is so straightforward and intuitive and therefore can be regarded as a killer application. Then why would you go to a traditional website and fret over the User interface and UX experience with your ever-growing in-house design team, developers, and data scientists in order to sell your business services?

Furthermore if you wrap or layer on top of these platforms, intelligent services such as digital assistants, chatbots, the argument becomes even more compelling.  This is a key trend, that won’t go away, the era of conversational user interfaces, personal assistants, AI and chatbots where users request data and converse in the natural language form that sit on top of the messaging platforms infrastructure have arrived and won’t regress.

Many pundits have rightly dubbed 2016 as the era of conversational commerce. Therein lies the opportunity for Eastern European gaming operators and affiliates to consider how they build products that fit into these fast growing platforms, whether that is a conversational and messaging application to seek the best odds, bonuses’ to placing the bets or just a companion app. The technology is there, it just requires some imagination and those that do, shall ultimately dominate that service space for the next 10 years.