Venezuelan Lottery Turns to Mobile Integrated Systems for SMS Lottery

Earlier this week, Mobile Integrated Systems Inc from Toronto, Ontario in Canada, announced that they will be working with Movil Game Solutions C.A. out of Venezuela to provide an infrastructure for a mobile phone lottery setup based heavily around SMS.

Under the new arrangement, Movil Game Solutions will be able to bring out for the people of Venezuela a new kind of lottery system in which paper tickets are no longer used, replaced instead with SMS messages as proof of buying in. This also represents the first such sale in the region for Mobile Integrated Game Systems, and a bit of proof of their new plan to focus on the Latin America region as a whole.


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Mobile Integrated Game Systems will not only build the new SMS lottery system, but will also operate it, in exchange for an unnamed percentage of the gross sales. The new SMS lottery is expected to launch early in December of this year.

The concept of a lottery that can be played without paper tickets is something of an interesting idea. While it depends more on users having access to SMS-capable devices like smartphones--which are actually on the rise in many sectors, especially in developing markets as a whole--it also reduces costs by requiring fewer consumable supplies. Though security would need to be tantamount in an operation such as this--it would be a disaster if an easy way were found to change numbers on a ticket after the drawing was staged--it's a fair bet that such a solution would be difficult or even approaching impossible to find.

At any rate, the key point remains that Venezuela's new lottery system is going to be a lot more technologically savvy than it was previously, not to mention more so than many other countries' lottery systems that use paper tickets, like those commonly found in the United States. This is likely to be something of a coup for Mobile Integrated Systems Inc. as well, and may well be the start of their dominance of the lottery system throughout Latin America, no small prize for one company in and of itself.