Betfair, who released their own app just before Ladbrokes also provide a real money sports betting product, which for the first time let users bet through their phone rather than through a web browser.

It was reported that during the FIFA World Cup 2010 the largest number of bets for a sporting event ever were placed using the mobile app. Over 100,000 wagers were received, four times higher than the number of bets received via mobile phones since Euro 2008, the last major international football tournament.

Ladbrokes also explained that turnover for mobile gambling for the last year was up as much as two times the level seen just after the launch of the application, and they had seen six times the number of customers betting exclusively on mobile phones.

John O’Reilly, Managing Director for Remote Betting and Gaming at Ladbrokes, said, “Since smartphones and particularly the iPhone have improved their user experience, mobile gaming and betting have become important growth markets. We’re very pleased that we’re the first major bookmaker to introduce a complete betting application for the app store, and we will follow up the successful World Cup application with the introduction of a broad range of other apps”.

Mobile Poker was forecast to be a multi-million pound business, however unlike mobile bingo and other casino games it did not take off as predicted. This was largely due to a lack of technology advanced enough to handle multi-player poker on mobile phones.

Now though, with powerful smartphones such as the iPhone and Androids becoming ever more popular, Bluff Poker magazine are predicting that the mobile poker industry will live up to original predictions. The magazine expects that major poker sites such as PokerStars who recently acquired mobile gaming company Cecure Gaming will flock to make mobile versions.

The popularity of Facebook has again been confirmed, this time by Marketers who look to harness the world’s largest social networking site. According to Comscore 19.7bn ads were served by Facebook during May 2010, demonstrating a massive increase from 11.8bn the previous year. The managing director of ComScore Europe, said: “Facebook’s popularity continues to surge not only with consumers but also with advertisers. With eight billion more ads on the site versus last year, there is a clear willingness to test Facebook’s ability to drive brand engagement.”

The figures indicate the strength of Facebook’s position as the largest online advertising platform in the UK with almost four times as many ads as Microsoft in second place (4.7bn) and over seven times as many as Google (2.68bn), eBay (2.71bn) and Yahoo (2.4bn) who make up the rest of the top five. Yahoo, AOL, Trader Media Group, Glam Media and Amazon complete the top ten.

These figures coincide with announcements from Procter & Gamble and Unilever, the world’s largest advertisers that they are to increase spend in digital and social media in particular.

However, the chief executive of semantic web service OpenAmplify, Mark Redgrave, offered a word of caution suggesting that the sites with the most ads are not the most profitable.

“The last year has been the first year advertising has really taken off on Facebook and I think advertising will increase by more than a third again in the next year,” he said. “But the key to the current growth is that it can only be measured in terms of volume, not value.

“Being there’s the easy bit, CPM rates are generally cheap, the hard bit comes when marketers try and fully engage. The technology now exists to really understand users based on conversations.”

Although PokerStars have not released anything official as yet we may be about to see mobile poker taking off as previously expected.

Zynga is the creator of many of the most popular games on Facebook, such as Texas Hold’em and Farmville and recently agreed deals to add its titles to Microsoft and Yahoo portals.

Japan’s Softbank Capital led the investment with a $150m outlay joined by $180m from Digital Sky Technologies. The investments helped Zynga raise close to $500m in the past year and although both Google and Zynga declined to respond to the speculation, sources close to the deal report that Google intends to make Zynga the foundation of its Google Games platform.

The new four month campaign headed by media agency Vizeum and creative agency Brave will see an ads sales deal worth over £250,000 coupled with a number of competitions driving teens to the website and on-pack activity on 70m packs.

The senior marketing manager for Coca-Cola stated that they are no longer expecting people to come to them and instead are going to where people already are to add value.

Included in the campaign will be a branded Capri Sun Summer Theme Park featured on Habbo, paid virtual ads and a number of prizes for users’ avatars.

Newspass marks the introduction of a new business model that will have a wide range of effects on consumers and create questions for the future of web-based news.  Consumers will be forced to pay for only certain types of news with flexible payment options and the ability to access multiple sites via single login.  How Google will distinguish between free and premium content will be a significant discussion point, as well as how it will transform the environment of online news and blogs.

Is Google’s moral compass pointing in the right direction?  Newspass will likely benefit producers much more than Google, but the new business venture will surely have antitrust advocates raising flags.

Jack Media is very excited to be working with Film Club our brief is to drive the number of new schools signing up to their film club. We are doing this through a combination of PPC, Online and Press.

No other poker operator offered the same 3D poker experience now, 5 years on and they are still at the top of the game recently winning the International Gaming Awards Online Poker operator of the year.

Jack Media is thrilled to have worked with PKR since the very beginning! We have been their exclusive international press buyer and their TV buyer in Sweden, Denmark and Germany.