Smarkets is delighted to announce that Alex Lee [csensedesign.co.uk / Twitter] is Smarkets’ newest employee. Alex is a cycling-obsessed user experience specialist who arrives fresh off the plane from a year working on an American start-up.

He has worked with companies such as Yahoo!, RealNetworks, the BBC and Virgin Media. Alex has a record of successful and user-focused launches on some of the strongest brands in the UK, including Global’s Capital Radio and Yahoo! TV.

Smarkets is happy to have Alex on board…and we look forward to the inevitable Tour de France office sweepstakes!

Thank you very much to everyone who came Tuesday night! Hunter and I are very excited to release Smarkets, a simple and social way to bet, publicly for the first time. Smarkets is invite only at the moment. We will be sending out invite emails out over the next few weeks.

I’d also like to thank our co-sponsors of the evening, CSB Group. CSB has been instrumental in helping us get our company incorporated and applying for our gaming license in Malta

Other coverage:
Techfluff.tv and Russ’s Flickr set.

Ed Stone

Originally uploaded by intranation

Smarkets continues to grow! I am pleased to announce that Ed Stone [Twitter] will be joining our team. Ed has been involved in the web industry for over ten years working as a developer and later manager. He brings a wealth of web expertise to Smarkets and has worked in both London and Syndey.

Prior to Smarkets, Ed was the Web Development Manager for Yahoo! Search Europe, and then Project Director at Squiz UK, introducing them to web standards and progressive enhancement. I am really happy Ed has decided to make Smarkets his new home!

From N7 to W1W in London, Smarkets moves into its new office until the end of the year.

Smarkets is proud to announce the addition of Russ Garrett [russ.garrett.co.uk / Twitter] to our team. He brings an extensive amount of web experience to Smarkets and will head up our technical operations.

Russ loves working at startups. Prior to Smarkets, Russ was one of the first employees at Last.fm (via Audioscrobbler). He worked as System Architect for the past six years growing it from a small project to the top streaming music website that it is today. Russ also started the Hackspace Foundation which provides a collaborative environment for people to work on technology.

I am really excited that Russ is joining us. He’s one of the best in the business and will play a key role in helping Smarkets scale as we grow.

Hunter spoke June 26th at Erlang Factory to talk about our back-end software stack. He also gives some background information on the online gambling industry. Smarkets was built using many open source Erlang tools, including CouchDB and RabbitMQ. The core transaction engine is written in Erlang and provides a resource-oriented API. This talk shows how the Smarkets platform was built, an overview of the architecture, and why Erlang was the right choice for us.

Hunter’s slides

GEEKnROLLA 09 25

Originally uploaded by Benjamin Ellis

Smarkets is proud to announce a second round fund raising of £145k ($210k), exceeding the first round fund raising total of £100k in May 2008. Despite tough economic conditions, six private angel investors participated in this second round and funds will go toward the upcoming Smarkets launch.

Last week, London-based Smarkets was selected to pitch at Geek’n Rolla, a TechCrunch-sponsored daylong event for startups in the UK. CEO and co-founder Jason Trost pitched at the event Tuesday, April 21st.

In addition, Smarkets has completed its open RESTful API, a first for the betting industry. This is the first betting exchange platform built with Erlang, a computer language enabling us to process thousands of bets per second. We’re currently putting the finishing touches on our website and social profiles. We’re looking forward to our upcoming launch and making betting online simple, social and fun.

Coverage:
http://uk.techcrunch.com/2009/04/27/smarkets-raises-second-round-for-launch-of-social-betting-service/

Sports betting might be legalised in Delaware? That’s what Chad Millman writes in the latest ESPN magazine. The governor is looking for ways to increase revenue and betting is one way to generate a lot of tax money for the state. In the coming months, it will be interesting to see if any states follow suit. There has been a lot of chatter about this happening. With the popularity of online poker and casinos now popping up over the US, attitudes have changed greatly since the Atlantic City and Las Vegas only days.

Hunter, Jason, Karsten and Bradley

Originally uploaded by smarkets

Smarkets is proud to announce the addition of Karsten Wiese and Bradley Wright to our team. Both guys bring an incredible amount of talent and skill to the web.

Prior to joining Smarkets, Karsten [roboteralarm.de / Twitter] has worked as an interactive art director and designer since 1998. His portfolio is diverse, ranging from entertainment to B2B sites. Karsten’s work includes projects for leading global brands such as Siemens, Merck, Adidas, EMI and Virgin.

Bradley [intranation.com / Twitter] has worked as lead web developer on Yahoo! Answers which currently serves over 1 billion page views per month. He has also recently worked as a software developer for Global Radio/GCap Media, the UK’s largest commercial radio group.