Cake Poker Team Discusses Development of Mobile Platform

Date: 2009-09-26
Author: Dan Cypra

One of the few online poker rooms in the industry with a mobile client is Cake Poker, a site that happily accepts customers from the United States. A considerable amount of effort has gone into bringing the Cake Poker software for mobile phones through to fruition. PokerSoftware.com sat down with its developers to learn about the background to developing its cutting-edge client.

PokerSoftware.com: Explain the origins of Cake Poker Mobile. Why is a mobile platform important?

Cake Poker: Cake Poker Mobile came about through a relationship with TurnRiver LLC, the developer of MobileBridge, a proprietary (patent pending) middleware system that connects mobile devices to server systems using only industry-standard HTTP(S). This enables Cake Poker to elegantly and quickly support all mobile devices and mobile operating systems with excellent performance.

A mobile platform is important because the smartphone market is growing at a very fast pace worldwide. More and more people use their smart devices for most of their daily computing (e-mail, Facebook, chatting, surfing the web, etc.). The problem with traditional online poker is that people are forced to sit in front of a PC, which limits them to playing at home.

The purposes behind mobile poker are:

1. To increase the hours in a day that people can play – even grinders. Mobile allows folks to multitask – they can play poker while watching TV or while sunbathing, waiting for a friend at a bar, waiting in a waiting room, and killing time at work (especially when your firewall or IT rules at work prevent you from playing traditional online poker). So, mobile is a great supplement for folks when they are away from their PCs.

2. To offer something fun and novel to the casual player. Some people are simply not serious poker players. They just want a quick, fun experience every once in a while.  Mobile poker accommodates these people nicely; whenever they have an impulse to play a few hands, they can fire up the mobile client wherever they happen to be.

3. To bring a new type of player into the online poker community: the mobile-only player. Many potential players around the world do not even own PC computers, but they own smartphones. With Cake Poker Mobile, we are reaching into this completely untapped market. We are already seeing validation of this “new mobile poker market” because some of our players simply never touch a PC except to deposit; which will change in the future when we add cashier functionality for mobile devices. Cake Poker has one player who has three cell phone batteries and a portable solar charger! He plays Cake Poker on a boat in the middle of a lake.

4. To enforce the brand. Which would you rather tell a Board of Directors, “We had 100,000 pageviews” or “100,000 people have our app installed on their mobile device”? Most mobile devices are on people’s physical person 100% of their waking hours. So, a mobile poker client is like having a walking advertisement.

PokerSoftware.com: You're one of the only sites in the industry with a mobile client. That has to feel good.


Cake Poker: It does feel good. It is always risky to blaze a new trail and innovate, but ignoring the mobile market is more of a risk. Mobile differentiates Cake Poker in the market place and we have really taken a leadership position. As the mobile client evolves and as people’s trust in the technology increases, we expect a whole mobile poker community to evolve. At some point, people will expect all major poker rooms to offer a mobile solution. For Cake to be in the lead is a great feeling.

PokerSoftware.com: What's the future of mobile gaming?

Cake Poker: I think that is a subset of the question “What is the future of mobile computing?” The answer to this, according to all research, is that mobile smart devices will become ubiquitous, that there will be a ”tipping point” where everyone realizes they have to have a smart device (like in the late 90s when the tipping point for cell phones happened). Smart devices are getting faster and more powerful all the time. Technology is advancing so fast that one day young people will wonder why their grandparents ever sat in front of big, hot, noisy PC computers.

Also, the app world is exploding and pushing the technology to its limits. The innovation is exciting and even changing the way we live our lives. Also, there is a whole new generation of mobile gamers out there who are six years old now and will grow up in a truly mobile world. So, it is not that mobile gaming has a future; it is that mobile gaming is the future.


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