Another project of firsts, this was also a lesson in entrepreneurship for me. Commissioned by on course bookmakers to build the first online horse racing site which paid out once the race ended with no human interaction required, much of my involvement was in designing the integrations, and learning domain-specific algorithms like Rule 4 for horses not running.
From visiting the SIS studios (Sports Information Systems) where there’s rows of screens and people typing in all the information as it happens so we could gain an understanding of how the data feeds are produced; to designing the first Java language interfaces with the payment systems - WorldPray and Datacrash as we called them back then - I enjoyed the more analytical side of the project than just producing code required to display products in a catalogue.
During the project we received a call from one of the big betting shop companies saying their main competitor had publicised the launch date of their online site so they had also done the same. They were, however, very behind schedule and had heard we were quite close to having a working product and wanted to do a deal. The on course bookmakers declined with the belief the technology was their competitive advantage, whereas brand equity along with vast resources is more often than not the winner. This is especially true on projects like this where there is no particular IP, and those who own any you may require talk to the highest bidder. Which is why we don’t see the 2bet site around today, even though technically it was first past the post.
