GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 32 - June 2015

Travel the world with these four affiliate webmasters Our affiliate interview series travels the globe this issue to find webmasters in Israel, Portugal, England and the U.S. Our interviewees have a heavy sports betting and horse racing focus, with a sprinkling of casino sites for good measure. Their favorite vacation spots include India, the Madeira Islands, Hong Kong, Disney World and, of course, Las Vegas. What is the most important trait they share? They depend on the GPWA to keep them up to date and to connect with others in the industry. *Due to space constraints, we could not print the interviews in their entirety. The complete text will be posted at gpwa.org. If you build a state-of-the art odds comparison site, (users) will come When did you launch your site? My main site, Odds1x2.com, was launched in Sept. 2004. It was half a year after I’d returned from five months traveling in Asia – main- ly India. The trip was extremely inspiring and opened my mind to new ideas and made me think about how I wanted my life to unfold. I decided to follow my own path when I returned from my travels and combined two things I love: computer pro- gramming and sports. What is it about your odds-comparison offerings that give visitors to your site a unique and valuable user experience? Unlike sites that focus on offers and ban- ners, I think that odds comparison is all about the customer and finding the right tools to get the most from their betting experience. Our cutting-edge technology means faster and more accurate data pre- sented through our unique and attractive user interface, which is focused on help- ing our users by simplifying things as much as possible. This is what makes us stand out from the crowd: less superficial glitz, more substance. How long did it take to develop the odds-comparison offering? What were some of the challenges in getting it up and running? I’m a software engineer, and all the core technology was based on my knowledge and past experience. The core application was developed in six months, but since then we have been constantly improving our product on an almost daily basis to meet the challenges and needs of our customers in an ever- changing landscape. The most important aspect of an odds comparison site is a fast, automated appli- cation that fetches and analyzes data from the operators and then presents it to the users in an attractive format. We’re talking about millions of fragments of data that need to be updated in a matter of seconds, and automation is the only solution. One of the biggest challenges we’ve faced is the plethora of different methods the operators use to deliver the data, and getting the data from different operators to match our own systems. The biggest variation between operators tends to be the league and team names. For instance, you could find on our system more than 20 variations just for Manchester United (Man Utd, Man United, Manchester Utd and so on). The application needs to match all those variations and the relevant fixture quickly and efficiently, otherwise the data presented to the visitor will be inaccurate and irrelevant. How often do you redevelop or revamp your code? Our approach to things is proactive rather than reactive, and we’re constantly working on improving our of- ferings and giving our customers better products, even if there are no changes with the operators’ integrations. We brainstorm on a weekly basis, trying to build new tools based on the feedbackwe receive and our experience in this industry; we place the customer at the center of everything we do. Daily maintenance is required as new teams and events enter the system from operators, but major updates in the way we integrate their systems are not so fre- quent. If an operator happens to change its method of integration, it requires a whole lot of programming work, redevel- oping the code (sometimes from scratch) and changing some of our systems. ASSAF stassaf GPWA Affiliate Interview Series GPWA Affiliate Interview Series