Here's our South African Team. What a great crew!

We handle all customer ops, editorial, engineering, QA, finance and admin from Cape Town, and have assembled a great team with lots of relevant experience. For now, we are 15 people down there, and we are continuing to grow. If you know great .net and C# engineers in Cape Town (or wanting to move to one of the most beautiful cities in the world and work for an exciting web 2.0 company), drop us a line. 

We got feedback that the standard little person picture wasn't fun and we wanted more people to upload a fun picture of themself, their cat, their favorite team, favorite moment, etc.  So, we've changed the standard picture that Pikum members start off with. Here's the new default picture.

 

We've already had some great new pictures put up by users... My favorite - DnChichi - and no, that's not Don - it's someone we know though. 

 

To upload a new picture, just use the link under the picture on  the dashboard when you login. 

 

To celebrate the all England champions league final, we've put £1,000 into one of Helen's champions league pikums!  Why not give it a go - the entry stake is £2.  For everyone outside the UK - if you're a football fan, you'll definitely want to find a pikle pikum to compete in.  Good luck!

We continue to get great feedback from many Pikum members. We really appreciate all the feedback. We continue to make almost daily updates to the site.  Over the coming weeks we have a number of larger ideas that have come from user feedback for further simplifying challenges, getting from finding a pikum to playing, and more.  Keep on using the feedback feature - it is really helpful.

 On another note, be on the lookout for a big announcement from us soon - we're going to be doing something pretty special around the Champions League final.  If you're already playing some real money Pikums, you know that Pikum played for money (only available in the UK) is a pretty intense.  We're going to make it even sweeter... what am I talking about?  We'll let you know soon.... 

Last night we held a small event to celebrate Pikum's launch into private beta.  Soccer AM presenter Helen Chamberlain joined us to help introduce some friends and journalists to what Pikum is all about.  We had a good time and we got good feedback on Pikum! and our plans going forward. Thanks to everyone who attended.  Here's a pic of the team + Helen.

 

The number of users in Beta is growing nicely, and we've got some hotly contested Pikums that will be decided this week-end.  There are also some bloggers picking up on what we're up to and spreading the word about Pikum.  Check it out...

Pikum introduces Friendly Betting
By Chris F. Masse
Pikum — A new kind of betting game created and played between friends; Pikum is a new kind of betting game that can be played for bragging rights. In each Pikum, you compete with other players to see who can best predict the results of ...
Midas Oracle .ORG - http://www.midasoracle.org

Bet against your friends on Pikum!
A new social networking game, Pikum!, has launched in beta. Similar to an office sweepstake or pool, friends can bet for money on the outcome of major sporting events. Backed by Virgin USA, members can also host ‘Pikums’.
MeriNews: News Articles from... - http://www.merinews.com/index.jsp

Pikum Goes Live...
By Mr. Brown(Mr. Brown)
This week marks the UK launch of a new social betting game that we recently invested in called Pikum.com. In the words of Sir Richard "Pikum! is a completely new way to make bets...it's web-based and innovative; you can have fun making ...
Silicon Bowery - http://siliconbowery.blogspot.com/

Today we officially announced Pikum!s beta launch.  The press release has just hit the wires.  Later this week, we have an event planned to introduce the media and our friends more fully to Pikum! 

Here's the full release:

Friends Win Big With New Online Social Betting Game, Pikum!

6 May 2008 – Friends now have an exciting new way to compete against each other thanks to the beta launch today of Pikum! (www.pikum.com), a new kind of betting game. Similar to an office sweepstake or pool, Pikum! pits friends against one another online to see who’s the best at predicting outcomes of major sports, such as the Barclay’s Premiership, and other topical events. Anyone can create a Pikum and players can stake cash or play for fun using Pikum’s own bragging currency, Pikles.

Johannes Larcher, CEO, Pikum!, says: “Pikum! is all about having fun and pitting your wits and knowledge against your friends, with the person who makes the most accurate predictions taking the prize pool. We’re starting with football and rugby, and will be introducing more categories on which players can create and play Pikums in the near future.”

Players of Pikum can invite their friends to join in their game - the more people playing the game, the larger the prize pool. With Pikum!, every game has at least one winner. If no-one in the Pikum gets all the answers completely right, the closest one wins. This means that players are playing each other, rather than the ‘house’.

Some of the very first players getting in on the game include Virgin Group president and founder Sir Richard Branson, and sports presenter Helen Chamberlain.

“Pikum! is a completely new way to make bets,” says Sir Richard Branson. “It’s web-based and innovative; you can have fun making bets against your social network, not just the house. So the more friends you have, the bigger the pool! Check out my own Pikums at www.pikum.com/richard.” You can also find Helen Chamberlain’s Pikums at www.pikum.com/helen. Pikum! received financial backing from Virgin USA.

Pikum! launches in the UK on 6 May and will be open to a select number of individuals who have been invited to participate. If you’re interested in playing Pikum, visit www.pikum.com and request an invitation. You can then invite your friends to play Pikum and they will be able to get in right away.

Notes to editors:

Need more information?

If you are a journalist and want more information on Pikum!, or would like to speak to Johannes Larcher, CEO, or Sean Glass, founder and UK managing director, please contact Kate Hartley on 020 7386 4862 or email her at kate.hartley (at) Carrotcomms.co.uk .
About Pikum!

Pikum! is a new kind of betting game created and played by users online at Pikum.com. The games can be played for fun or money (money betting services are offered through Pikum! Worldwide Limited, which holds a full eGambling license from the Alderney Gambling Control Commission).

The company has attracted top quality financial support and is backed by Virgin USA and First Round Capital. The company’s founders, Sean Glass, Logan Lindsell, and Johannes Larcher are serial entrepreneurs and have assembled an experienced international management team with experience from companies such as Yahoo!, Overture and Higher One.

 

Yeah, we know, lots of things to fix on the site - Thanks for all the feedback, it's been constructive and encouraging, and it feels great to have a responsive audience.  Please keep the ideas and suggestions for how to improve Pikum! coming as well.

It's going to be a busy weekend here at Pikum! Besides fixing bugs, enhancing functionality, implementing the new design (awesome - thank you Derek!), pushing code updates, and responding to user input; we are also going to have a nice number of Pikums happening this weekend in the world of Rugby and Football/Soccer. This means work for our Cape Town Operations Team, and Sasha and her team will be busy making sure that datafeeds are functioning properly, scoring works, and incoming CS queries get addressed. Well, at least the office's got ocean views!

Next week's going to see us lifting the veil on Pikum! a bit more. We haven't actually done anything yet to promote our launch, for reasons Sean and I have explained in our previous posts. So you'll see a proper press release, a promotional event in London, our first set of baby-steps on the affiliate front (Araz is jumping up and down with excitement already), more celebrity Pikums and a bunch of other stuff to help spread the word.

We will also continue product fixes and improvements. Our product has so much functionality, and is highly automated/integrated with data sources, payment processors, anti-fraud and anti-money laundering services; plus it is computationally quite complex; and so it comes as no surprise that not everything was perfect when we pushed the trigger yesterday. This is compounded by cross-browser issues (Emily had a hard time registering on her Mac yesterday - talk about a poor experience!) and new design still being updated in many of the product's pages - and you got quite the challenge (no pun intended). But we will get there, the team is working on it systematically and with a clear framework to prioritize the hundreds of known bugs and issues.

So now the big question is - who will be the first real-money Pikum winner? Can't wait to congratulate the lucky one.

Happy Piking, and pls stay tuned for more Pikum! news

-johannes 

 

 

 

The fix was just put onto our production system. I tested it and we're all good. Now when you challenge someone, the link in the email works and will take them directly to the Pikum you challenged them to.  Keep the feedback / bug reports coming. Our team will be working through the holiday week-end to continue to upgrade and tweak the site.

Thanks to everyone who's pointed out that the link that's included when you're challenged to a Pikum isn't working.  We found it first thing this morning. It's been fixed by our dev team, we're testing, and it'll be implemented onto our production application by tomorrow morning. In the meantime, you can get to all your challenges through the link on the challenge email. You can find any challenges there.  There are a number of cool pikums in the system - both for pikles and for pounds.  If you're in, make sure you've found one of the ones focusing on this week-ends premiership action.