French social networking company to offer sports betting

Index Multimedia, a subsidiary of Japanese company Index Holdings with interests in Europe, is to beef up the interest-levels in its French social networking website Tchatche.com by adding a sports betting element.
The company is teaming up with French online sports betting provider France Pari in a strategic co-branding alliance that will see the launch of the new platform at Tchatche as soon as June 2010.
“In line with our strategy of development, we have decided to open our Tchatche.com SNS platform to third parties’ valuable applications and to shift to the gambling segment as part of our positioning policy on promising markets,” said Takuo Tanimoto, chief executive officer for Index Multimedia.
“We will offer an ethical and user-friendly betting service to our clients that are keen on sports and betting through France Pari’s dedicated powerful platform for the common benefit of our companies.”
The French sports betting market, which is set to liberalise later this year, could be worth an estimated Euros 800 million in 2010, said Tanimoto. He added that the strategic alliance with France Pari would see the two firms become leading players in the French online gambling sector with a common goal of recruiting 12 000 players by the end of the year.
“This partnership will significantly increase our attractiveness with premium access to this very large community of Internet users looking for interactivity,” said Herve Schlosser, CEO of France Pari.
“It strengthens our ability to recruit players as soon as the market opens to new players such as France Pari that will ask for a licence from the French regulatory authorities.”

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