Fifa World Cup, Sports Betting & Internet Gambling

Steep, rising curve for bets

COMMENT
By LOURDES CHARLES

When the Fifa World Cup begins next month in South Africa, one sure bet is that millions of ringgit will be raked in by local betting syndicates. In the absence of regulated sports betting, illegal bookies will be laughing all the way to the bank.

IT IS estimated that billions of ringgit will change hands worldwide during this one football season alone.
Gambling is a thorny moral issue which elicits intense response from both sides of the divide.

However, the reality is that without regulated sports betting, the ones who benefit the most are illegal bookies.
Another reality is that Malaysians love to bet, and they bet heavily on the world's top three football leagues – the English Premier League, La Liga (Spain) and the Serie A (Italy).

Not to be spared are the Thomas and Uber Cup matches. Bookies are already accepting bets, and they make it so very easy for punters.

Bookies have gone hi-tech and punters don't need to make tedious trips to their outlets.

All one needs is ready money and a computer. Create an Internet account and you are set to go.
With so much money involved, the biggest loser currently is the Government, as hundreds of millions in taxes can be collected if betting is legalised.

Just take a look at Singapore. For years, the Singapore government refused to give in to regulated gambling, even when Malaysia had allowed a casino to be operated in Genting Highlands.

After several decades, the island republic changed its stand. Now it allows not one but two integrated resorts and casinos to be built on a grand scale in Marina Bay and on Sentosa Island.

The government there had also earlier faced strong opposition; views on how gambling would tear the moral fibre of society were hotly debated.

The Singapore government paid heed and locked in several measures to placate fears.

As for sports betting, it has exploded in tandem with technological advances in broadcasting and the popularity of the Internet.

The introduction of mobile phones and 3G has enabled punters to place bets anywhere and any time from the comfort of their homes or even offices.

The flip side of such technological advances is that they have invariably helped illegal bookmaking syndicates spread their operations.

Online betting is almost impossible to detect compared to the “old ways,” where one has to be physically present to place one's bets or fax in the bets.

From the police point of view, regulated sports betting would not eliminate the activities of illegal bookmaking syndicates in the country.

However, Inspector-General of Police Tan Sri Musa Hassan has said that it could, to a certain level, help deprive organised crime syndicates of having full control of such activities.

“Maybe regulating sports betting could be an efficient way of fighting the underground economy, as proceeds from illegal sports betting are used to fuel organised crime and support harmful criminal activities,” he said.

It is estimated that Malaysians splurge almost RM8bil on sports betting annually with various online betting syndicates as well as with local bookies.

The police have their hands full trying to nab those involved in the underground economy, and have enlisted the help of the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission to track the activities of illegal bookies.

They have been quite successful and have managed to shut down the operations of several syndicates with international links. Quite a number of those arrested under the Emergency Ordinance have also been banished under the Restricted Residence Act.

Police also announced recently that they have set up a special task force to monitor online betting syndicates, especially those hoping to make a killing during the World Cup football tournament.

What is argued as a positive aspect of sports betting is its capacity to raise money for the development of sports.

If more sports facilities can be built and more coaches hired as a result of more money being raised, the beneficiary of that will surely be Malaysia's sportsmen and women.

Better athletes can then translate into better attendances at the various sporting events in the country.
Regulated gambling in sports is not a new idea; almost all Western countries have done it.

The authorities should also consider allowing Internet or online betting to be hosted in Malaysia, on the condition that punters must open an account with a minimum amount before they start placing bets.

There are certainly advantages to legalising sports betting. And like Singapore, measures can be introduced to limit its influence.

The Government will be wise to keep its options open. With the vast amounts of money from taxes in this sector, this is one game too rich for us not to play.
  
Legalising sports betting makes fiscal sense

Making a Point - By Jagdev Singh Sidhu 

·Deputy news editor Jagdev Singh Sidhu is eagerly awaiting to see the World Cup in high definition.

ABOUT 11 years ago during my holiday in Britain, Liverpool was to play Manchester United at Anfield. Being a fan of the most decorated soccer club in British history, I decided that I would have a punt on the game and walked into one sports-betting establishment to place a small wager on Liverpool winning the game 3 to 2.

It was a storming match which saw Liverpool claw back to level the score at 2-2. In the dying minutes of the game, Jamie Carragher had an opportunity to head in the winner but sadly he missed and the game ended in a draw. Had he scored, which would have been a minor miracle considering his goal-scoring record, a chunk of my holiday would have been paid for.

My experience with betting is no different than what many a sports fan would do from time to time if given the opportunity. It's a choice people will make but sports betting is nowadays a thriving industry globally.

Be it in Las Vegas, Britain, Hong Kong, Singapore or other countries, bets on sports can be made over a counter at an outlet, online or over the phone.

In Hong Kong, the sports-betting industry is large. A check with analysts puts the size of the market close to HK$60bil. In Singapore, it is slightly less than S$2bil.

The difference is generally due to how open the market is between both countries. Limiting the reach of sports betting will curtail the contribution that the industry will make to government coffers and in that is a lesson where the distribution channels and potentially a larger number of players is needed for the industry to significantly contribute to government revenue.

White-collar workers and fans of sports, thanks to the proliferation of Internet services and mobile services in the country, have had the opportunity to bet on games and events abroad through international players.

Whether sports betting cannibalises the number forecast operators (NFOs) is yet to be determined but it will certainly appeal to a different segment of punters who may not find betting on four-digit numbers exciting.
In Malaysia, NFOs are still the king of the hill when it comes to the general betting public.

The margin from the NFO business is seen to be more lucrative than sports betting where the payout ratio is normally higher.

The industry, although having seen its growth track GDP, churns out a steady stream of tax revenue for the Government which, based on estimates, amounts to around 5% of total government revenue.

Taxes the Government collects from other “sin taxes” such as the casino in Genting, the lottery, alcohol and the tobacco boys will bump up their overall contribution to a much more significant level.

Allowing a sports-betting licensee to operate therefore makes fiscal sense to the Government. The budget deficit has spiralled beyond healthy levels and more needs to be done to find new sources of revenue.

While there is no arguing over the moral issues a new betting licence will bring, it also bears to keep in mind that Malaysia is a country where its population is already exposed for decades to a number of gambling channels.

While I doubt anyone will advocate letting the gaming industry flourish, people have to be realistic in knowing that there is already a number of betting avenues available in the country and overseas.

Suppressing the legalisation of sports betting will only cement the industry digging its heels underground and will only benefit the black economy.

By legalising sports betting, it's an opportunity for the Government to maybe exert some sort of control on the industry and the money collected will go a long way in funding social, sports and development programmes.

Beyond sports betting, maybe the Government should also consider allowing a new integrated resort casino. Genting has long held a firm grip over the casino licence in Malaysia but, in today's world, just taking South-East Asia as an example, casinos have sprouted all over the map and have brought tremendous benefits to tourism and GDP if done professionally and on a large scale.

A Vegas-type casino, like the ones Singapore has allowed to be built, is a big asset to the island's economy and there is certainly room for one to be built in another part of Malaysia that is closer to one of the economic business centres. 

China tycoon in talks to buy Liverpool?

 

SHANGHAI (AFP) – A Chinese Internet gaming tycoon has confirmed he is in talks to buy British football club Liverpool, Chinese media reported Wednesday. Zhu Jun, chairman of Nasdaq-listed online game company The9 Limited, said the negotiations to buy Liverpool were "ongoing", but added that the outcome was hard to predict, the Beijing Times reported. Officials at Shanghai-based The9 said they could not immediately confirm the comments when contacted by AFP. Zhu, who already owns Chinese Super League club Shanghai Shenhua, has held two preliminary meetings with Barclays Capital, the investment bank hired to handle the sale, Britain's Independent newspaper reported, citing unnamed sources. Chairman of debt-ridden Liverpool Martin Broughton, who is also chief of British Airways, is looking for a new buyer to replace the club's American co-owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett, who have owned the club since 2007. Accounts released this month showed Liverpool posted an operating loss before tax of 16 million pounds (23 million dollars) in the year ending July 31, 2009. The 800 million-pound price tag circulated among potential bidders has deterred many potential investors while Zhu is among those willing to buy the club at a "decent" price, the Independent said, citing unnamed sources. A number of possible investors have been linked with the Anfield outfit, including former Syria international footballer Yahya Kirdi.

Intel chief commits to doubled profit, revenue growth

Chipzilla is dead. Long live 'The Continuum'

Intel will double its revenue and earnings growth rates over the next few years, and ship a billion microprocessors per year within the next five.

These were just a pair of the bullish forecasts that Intel CEO Paul Otellini unloaded on a group of reporters and moneymen on Tuesday morning at the company's annual Investor Meeting at its California headquarters.
Otellini also implied that it's time to retire Intel's 'Chipzilla' sobriquet. "Don't think of us as a chip company anymore," he advised. "We're a computing company."

But if you think "chipmaker" when you think "Intel," Otellini understands. He just thinks you're behind the times. "If you circle back to 2000, we were sort of just a chip company," he said. "The principal activity of the company was designing and shipping microprocessors and chipsets around them - a silicon-based company."

But that has changed, Otellini says, and he'd now prefer that you think of Intel as a company that's "building a 'computing continuum' around Intel architecture." The reason for the change in self-description is simple. "Over the years we've added a number of things, and if you look at Intel today, we've got platforms, software, and services increasingly being added onto the silicon capabilities of the company."

Intel's foray into platforms began in 2003 with Centrino. Then came vPro and WiMAX, joined more recently by Wireless Display PC-to-TV technology, more cutely known as WiDi - which, of course, rhymes with WiFi.

Intel's software efforts, Otellini said, not only involve acquisitions such as such as Virtutech, RapidMind, and Neoptica, but also cooperative ventures such as MeeGo, plus homegrown Intel dev-support efforts such as Visual Adrenaline for game developers and the more-general Intel Software Network.

Speaking of acquisitions, Otellini classed the Wind River pick-up as being an example of Intel's move into the services arena, citing that company's "go-to-market service for hire," aimed at companies who want to create embedded applications and interfaces for handheld devices, for example.

Formerly a chip company, now a 'computing continuum'

"Everything we're doing in these areas is being looked at in terms of what value can Intel provide to our customers and/or the end users in the software and services arena that we get paid for," Otellini explained to the assembled moneymen. And then he told them exactly what they wanted to hear - that the expansion into platform, software, and services hasn't merely been in support of Intel's silicon profit center. "This is not a pro bono activity just to get silicon designs. We want to get paid for this. And we intend to get paid."

Not that the transformation to a "computing continuum" is a walk in the park. "It's a lot of work to do this. To transform an industry, it's not just [building] a chip anymore, you have to have all of the layers." Ah, but there are also competitive benefits. "Anyone who want to compete with us has to have all the layers, as well. It's not just a silicon play anymore."

But the foundation for all these new revenue streams remains silicon - and Otellini plans on shipping a boatload of chips. "I think if we execute on these plans we will be shipping a billion Intel-based microprocessors a year within five years," he told his audience.

"Much of that will come from what we know as the growth in the PC industry, much of it will come from gadgets around the PC industry, and much of it will come from making all these new devices smarter."

One new device that Otellini sees as a growth driver is what he called "smart television." After noting the strong projected growth in internet-enabled television, which he believes will be a major component of the growth in online video, Otellini used a smart TV as an example of the silicon, platform, software, and services quartet that makes up his "continuum."

A smart TV, for example, could include Atom-based silicon, a platform enabled by Intel's MediaPlay drivers, and the Meego OS running the tru2way two-way interactive television service, and it could offer downloads from Intel's AppUp online software-store service. And Intel will find a way to take a profitable cut at each level of the stack.

Intel sees plenty good money to be made in the growth of internet video

Adding to that data-center revenue, Otellini sees serious profits ahead: "We'll have revenue streams from servers, data centers - network devices, storage devices - and revenue and profit streams from software and services. It's a different view of the company than you've seen the past 10 to 12 years."

He's so bullish on this "continuum" that he sees a rapid and sharp increase in Intel's compound annual growth rates, or CAGR. "We expect the revenue CAGR and the EPS [earnings per share] CAGR to be in the low double-digit growth rates. To give you some perspective, the EPS CAGR in the last five years has been about half that. So we're essentially committing - forecasting - to double the growth rate of earnings and double-digit growth rate on revenue for the company as a result of these initiatives."

When with this doubling happen? "Over the next few years," said Otellini. "We're taking it up quite a bit."
Of course, when speaking to a room full of investors, a CEO should position himself as bullish - but he also has to be careful not to promise too much, or his optimism will come back to bite him.

But Otellini wasn't talking caution. "We're on top of a growth engine, and we intend to deliver," he said. "We're lean, we're efficient, we're highly profitable, and we're going to stay that way."

Otellini's vision of a value-added, money-making "continuum" is in marked contrast to the company's Chipzilla-only days, Otellini said. "It's the single best opportunity in front of us versus being a commodity vendor of licensed architectures. We were there. We tried that. Been there. Done that. It's very difficult to make money in that way." ®

By Rik Myslewski in Santa Clara • Get more from this author

Newscribe : get free news in real time

Bootnote

As confident as Otellini was during his talk to investors, he was also careful to back away from the edge. When one moneyman asked him for a breakdown of how different parts of the company would contribute to the doubling of revenue and profit growth, he said. "We went as far out on a limb as we've ever gone - that's as far as I'm going right now."

Where on the Web Is HTML5?

HTML5 does way more than video: Vimeo's Flash-free player showing a clip by Maxime Bruneel.

Unless you’ve been off snorkeling in the Alps, you’ve probably heard all the recent hubbub about HTML5 and its ability to replace Flash as the web’s default video player.

But HTML5 is much more than a hopeful successor to Flash’s web-video crown. In fact, watching a video without a plug-in only scratches the surface of what HTML5 offers.

HTML5 is the next generation of HTML, the language of the web. More than just a markup syntax like its predecessors, HTML5 provides a new set of features designed to make modern web applications work more like desktop applications.

The key features in the HTML5 stack: native video and audio playback, animated graphics, geolocation, hardware acceleration for in-browser events, the ability to keep using a browser-based app even if your internet connection drops, the ability to store application data on your local machine, dragging and dropping of files from the desktop to the browser, and the addition of semantic markup on pages, making them easier for both machines and humans to understand.

Each of the major browsers supports different pieces of HTML5 right now, and we expect to see all browsers on the same page in a year or two. You might think, given variances in browser support, that no one is using the future of the web. But you’d be wrong. HTML5 is everywhere you turn. In fact, some of our favorite web apps are making heavy use of HTML5 — to paraphrase William Gibson, the future of the web is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed yet.

Did you know that Google’s homepage, one of the most trafficked pages on the web, uses HTML5? Technically, the Google homepage just uses the HTML5 doctype — the rest of the page is actually quite archaic (and invalid) code — but other Google apps take advantage of HTML5 much more.

Gmail, one of the bigger webmail apps on the web, uses HTML5’s offline storage mechanism to allow you to work with your e-mail even when you don’t have an internet connection. Google Docs also uses the HTML5 offline tools, as do the online office suite Zoho and the WordPress blogging system. Check out Mark
Pilgrim’s excellent rundown on how to add offline support to your apps if you want to start using this feature).

Scribd's new document reader: all web standards, no Flash.

Aside from video, HTML5 is replacing Flash in other ways. Document sharing site Scribd recently made a splash by announcing it will be switching its document viewer from Flash to HTML5 and web standards. Scribd is a great example of what is possible when combining HTML5 elements (primarily the Canvas element, which powers animations) with attendant tools like cascading stylesheets. Scribd makes especially nice use of the @font-face element to load fancy fonts, and it uses the new CSS 3 standard to power some animated transitions between pages.

The combination of tools allows Scribd to convert PDF files into pure HTML documents while maintaining the structural layout, fonts, embedded images and layered elements of the original.

Most impressive about Scribd’s new HTML5 features? They even work in IE6. Check out this example, which manages to render even complex mathematical equations in pure HTML.

They came from space, and the W3C spec: Canvas Invaders

While Scribd might have the best implementation of the canvas element we’ve seen, there are plenty of other very cool examples already on the web. The site Canvas Demos has collection of experiments with canvas, showcasing everything from online games to apps like Rainbow, a browser extension that can pull any color out of a website.

Probably the best-known examples of HTML5 on the web are the current video experiments by YouTube and Vimeo. In both cases, the HTML5 versions of the sites are still opt-in, and there’s no code to embed the HTML5 version of a video on your own site, but it’s a start.

Another aspect of HTML5 that browsers are beginning to support is a set of geolocation tools. Technically, the geolocation API is not part of the HTML5 spec, but it is governed by the W3C and will arrive alongside HTML5 the markup spec. Using the geolocation API, a web app running in the browser can obtain your whereabouts, making location-based web searches more relevant.

Click on the little circle above the yellow guy to tell Google Maps where you are.

Google Maps uses it. The site’s interface now offers a small circle icon just below the navigation wheel — click it and maps will zoom to your current location.

At the moment, the geolocation API isn’t widely supported by desktop browsers (only Chrome and Firefox 3.6+), but Google makes a plug-in called Gears which offers a fallback solution for older browsers.

That’s the tactic Twitter uses for its geo-aware tweets, tapping into the geolocation API when it’s available and falling back to Gears when it’s not.

In the end, one of the most powerful changes in HTML5 may not be as flashy as any of the examples listed above. HTML5’s biggest contribution to the web may well end up being its new structural tags, like <header>, <footer>, <section> and <article>.

These new tags allow web authors to better define their content, which means search engines will need to do a lot less guessing when they index the web. That will mean better, more relevant results and faster links to the information you want.

There are countless sites already using HTML5’s new tags, though you’d never know it without viewing the source of the pages. If you’d like to see some examples, head over to HTML5Gallery, which features hundreds of sites using varying degrees of HTML5.

To use the new structural tags on your own site, check out our tutorial on Building Web Pages With HTML 5. And there’s no need to worry; with a little JavaScript helper, these tags will work in any browser.

HTML5 can also be extended to offer even more semantic structure through Microdata. Using standardized data formats (similar in many ways to microformats) websites can offer not only data, but definitions of what that data is.

Ultimately, microdata exists for the benefit of web browsers and search engines. Eventually, search engines could use microdata to find your friends on the web and browsers could use it to connect you with those friends no matter what flavor-of-the-month social site they might be using. To experiment with these extensions, head over to Google’s Rich Snippets Testing Tool.

While there’s no question that HTML5 is still in the experimental stage, it’s already gaining traction, and it’s doing a whole lot more than just playing video on your mobile phone.

By Scott Gilbertson
Newscribe : get free news in real time

  See Also:

• Embed Videos in Your Web Pages Using HTML5
• Building Web Pages With HTML5
• Add Semantic Value to Your Pages With HTML5
• Who Needs Flash?