Pikum launches into invite only beta :-)
Yesterday we decided to release Pikum! into invite only beta. The core site processes are working, and we felt the best way to go from here (a good product) to a great product is to get users into the site so we can get feedback. It’s all about getting feedback and iterating.
It’s been great to see people getting in, entering pikums (we already have a couple with double digit entrants), and sending out invites. We’re also accomplishing what we wanted in that we’re finding the key issues and pushing them to the top of our list to fix (for instance, we’re finding that we still have a lot of work to do on email deliverability - something we thought needed work, and realize we REALLY want to focus on!). I was also the first person to win a Pikle Pikum on the live site (Johanne’s “German Quickie”) 
… We’ll see who the first winner of a real money Pikum is.
We’re going to be blogging ongoing at blog.pikum.com as we find issues, implement updates, etc. Stay tuned!
May 3rd, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Interesting commentary about Pikum. I checked out the site and it look like it has a tremendous amount of potential. How competitive is the landscape for casual gaming in the UK currently?
May 4th, 2008 at 5:11 am
Thanks Ryan. The largest casual betting sites in the UK are the bingo sites. Aside from that there are casual gaming sites like POGO and King.com. Pikum’s quite different from those. We see it as having the appeal of fantasy gaming - the Guardian’s Premiership fantasy game had well over 1 million players this last year - combined with the excitement of poker or lottery type games (small entry, can win a lot). We’re already seeing that there’s also appeal to players who also want to just play using the fun currency - pikles.