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Crowdpark, a startup developer focused on social betting games, today announced investments totaling about $6 million from Target Partners and existing investor Earlybird Venture Capital. This brings the Berlin-based company’s total amount of funding to approximately $8 million. Waldemar Jantz, partner at Target Partners, will also join the board of Crowdpark.

The funding will be used to enhance the technology, develop cross-platform, create new games, and hire more talent in game design and development.

Crowdpark products offer players the opportunity to bet on real life events in sports, entertainment, business, politics and other topics, and to compete against each other in betting events, using virtual currency. Since the game runs in real time, players can change their bet at any time, as the event or news unfolds.

The company said this is made possible by its patented dynamic betting technology that enables forecasts in social gaming in real-time “similar to how people play the stock market.”

Popular bets at the moment are: Will Netflix Oust Its CEO?; Project Runway Week 12: Who Goes?; Michael Jackson’s Lawyer Guilty of Manslaughter?; and dozens of sporting event outcomes.

“Crowdpark is defining an entirely new genre of social betting games based on actual events,” Ingo Hinterding, co-founder and chief product officer for Crowdpark, said in a statement. “Two of Europe’s leading VC firms — Target Partners and Earlybird — share our vision. We aim to extend our growth and build amazing games based on our dynamic betting technology, and in other hot growth categories such as casino games.”

Related links:

http://www.crowdpark.com

www.targetpartners.de

www.earlybird.com

2 COMMENTS

  1. The main online poker story in 2011, and to some the only story that mattered, occurred on April 15th. Typically April 15th is known as tax day in the US but to online poker players it will now forever be known as the anniversary of Black Friday. This was the day that the U.S. Department of Justice seized the domains of PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet/UB.com. Criminal charges were filed against the poker room management and processors. Civil forfeitures were also filed against the online poker rooms and the U.S. Government seized tens of millions of dollars. Within hours, PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker banned U.S. players. The Cereus Network, consisting of Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet, stopped allowing U.S. players to deposit. It would take about a month for Cereus to outright ban U.S. players. Black Friday affected the lives of tens of thousands of players, affiliates, employees and vendors around the world.

    Related to Black Friday, Full Tilt Poker and Cereus closed their doors this year. Full Tilt Poker was shut down on June 29th by the Alderney Gaming Control Commission after failing to pay players after Black Friday. At the time, Full Tilt Poker was the 2nd largest online poker room. It was later discovered that Full Tilt Poker had been accepting echeck deposits from U.S. players but did not have access to the U.S. banking system. This meant that they could not collect on these deposits. The U.S. government alleges that the board of directors continued to pay themselves out of player funds knowing that the company could not cover player deposits. It is estimated that Full Tilt Poker owes out over $300 million to players while having little, if any, cash reserves. Groupe Bernard Tapie appears to be well on their way to reopening Full Tilt Poker although it will be without U.S. players.

  2. Casino games didn’t just come out of nowhere. Every game has a history. Some go back to ancient times, and some are more recent inventions, but every game originated somewhere, developed over time, and culminated in the Internet casino games that we play today.About 30 gaming industry representatives attended the first public hearing on amendments to Regulation 14, which sets rules for manufacturers, distributors and operators of inter-casino linked systems, gaming devices, new games, slot metering systems and cashless wagering systems.Currently, companies wanting to introduce a new game or system would go directly to the state, which has maintained its own gaming lab for years.

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