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Betting On Sports Smarts
Gary Schwartz, Financial Post
Published: Monday, April 16, 2007

Sitting at the Miami airport waiting

for a flight to Latin America for the fourth time this year, Marc Askenasi thumbs through his passport. "One stamp a deal," he says: "Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, Tanzania."---> wowsa!!!

Mr. Askenasi has never stopped playing for broke. Through soccer pro to business leader, the motivation and model holds fast. The 25-year-old heads up Wagerphone, a Toronto-based firm that is revolutionizing lotteries worldwide. His sports background has helped him challenge accepted business models.
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Eight years ago, as an up-and-coming soccer player, he set off to Europe. Still too young to party with the big boys, he was thrown into cramped living quarters with his chaperon coach. He toured Italy, Spain, France, and Holland playing in leagues where the average player was 10 years his senior. "Players where not only bigger but much tougher. I had to compete both physically and mentally."

Mr. Askenasi was beachwarming early in the season with his team down 1-0. With minutes to go, a player was injured and he was pulled into the game. In the first play, a defender elbowed his face breaking his tooth. That was the beginning of a bloody initiation, he recalls. "I found myself trying to beat that same player in the air and on my way down he landed on my foot breaking my toe. 'Welcome to Holland' he told me."

"With 10 minutes left in the game I had a choice: quit or play through the pain. I stayed on, toughed it out. I managed to take the ball from our end and made a 30-yard pass to our striker to score the tying goal. "I earned my spot on the team, the respect of my coaches and players along with the right to play the next three months with a broken toe.

"Sport for me was more about being able to achieve something that was far beyond my immediate skill set. It was a continual challenge: playing and being

pushed by bigger guys," Mr. Askenasi says in response to a reference to him being a proverbial Rocky Balboa.

That could also describe how he built his lottery business. In 2001, he and four McGill University team mates crammed into a rented Dodge Impala for a road trip from Montreal to New Orleans for Mardis Gras. They stopped off at the river boat casino on a Mississippi southern river way.

"I was having a crazy lucky streak and could not lose. I made US$1,000 at our first casino in 30 minutes, the same thing happened at the next river boat about a mile down the road. After the third boat, I remember picking up my cellphone to call home and I had a simple but profound realization: Why not gamble on a cellphone? You always have it with you."

Back at school, instead of studying for finals, Mr. Askenasi started looking into the mobile-gaming industry. At the time, there was next to nobody in the space. But within 12 months, there were dozens of companies claiming to offer turnkey services.

Underfunded and a lone wolf, Mr. Askenasi changed his target from offshore gaming to mainstream, regulated lotteries. He realized there were too many barriers to mobilizing online casinos. The content supplier has to port to thousands of handsets, across multiple countries and dozens of telecom carriers. Plus, there is a dependency on casino operators to market the product. It is a tough model, he points out.
"While doing some consulting for gaming, entertainment and e-commerce, I put together a business plan and decided after much research and diligence on the industry to focus exclusively on mobilizing lotteries," Mr. Askenasi says.

Lotteries are a huge, untapped and antiquated industry that needs to start following the consumer by expanding from paper to digital. Although Canadian and U.S. lotteries are slower to embrace this trend, national lotteries in parts of Europe and many developing countries are signing up for his digital lottery platform. Consumers in a growing number of Latin America and African countries are playing their lucky numbers on the phone or the Web thanks to Mr. Askenasi's platform.---> wowsa!!!
- Gary Schwartz is chief executive of Impact Mobile (www.impactmobile.com)a North American full-service mobile marketing company.

Source: http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=a1168a81-8f3d-450b-b213-7d23c3361faa&k=254....