Gambling News - June 2005 Edition

"Gambling Software Firm Chartwell Bets on Online Poker, Bing"

Canadian based online gambling software company Chartwell preparing for the wireless gaming market

The Canadian based online gambling software company Chartwell Technology Inc., is making preparations for its entry to the wireless gaming market. This activity will add to their original technologies and business model, which has served Chartwell well up until now.

During a conference call with analysts, Chartwell Technologies’ Darold Parken said, “we intend to stay focused on what we’ve been doing and how we’ve been doing it, because we are convinced that our technologies and the business model we use to exploit them are the very future of online gaming”. Parken added “Of course, this doesn’t mean that we’re not going to try anything new - we’re very aware of the explosive growth opportunities in things like poker, bingo, mobile and kiosk gaming and we’re making significant investments in all of those areas.”

Traditional casino games such as blackjack, craps, and roulette have been the bread and butter of the online gambling industry up until now, but the recent surge in the popularity of poker – thanks partly to the televised poker tournaments – has been of real benefit to I-gaming.

Online bingo is also undergoing an upswing in popularity and analysts are keenly watching it, anticipating that bingo will be the next big boon to the online gambling industry. “Several sources are predicting that online bingo will follow in the shoes of online poker,” Parken said. “We’re hoping that this will be so and of course we’re positioning ourselves to capitalize on that opportunity, should it arise.”

Another rapidly developing market is the use of cell phones to place wagers. This medium is becoming increasingly easier and popular and Chartwell has mobile technology tailored for just this market. Further, Parken believes that it is “one of the best-looking gambling applications that you can find on a mobile phone right now. The challenge for us is to figure out how to best commercially exploit the application … and we’re certainly working on that.” There are still technological and regulatory issues that have to be overcome when it comes to gambling via cell phones before it can become a major market segment.

Chartwell’s company assets rose to $29.3 million from 11.8 million in the same 2004 period. Following a sixty cent gain, shares in Chartwell then dropped by seventy cents. The company reported lower profits but higher revenues in the latest quarter. Chartwell also reported earnings of $934,000 or five cents a diluted share for the three months ended April 30, compared to $964,000 for the same period in 2004. The total quarterly revenue rose to nearly 3.9 million dollars from 2.9 million dollars.

Estimates on the growth of the online gaming industry are almost unbelievable, most of which predict a leap to 14 billion dollars in revenues in 2006 from five billion dollars in revenues this year. Revenues in 1996 were a paltry thirty million dollars.

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