There's no cause for alarm, but the bet-bots are emerging from the underground - and will start a revolution in exchange trading. Industry giant Betfair has issued an official call-up for software companies to design a new range of off-the-shelf bet-bots - or automatic trading software - which will give its bookmaker rivals, and ordinary punters, access to this hitherto hidden world.

The Betfair Development Program (BDP) is going to help bring these software products to the masses courtesy of a new shop-window website, bdp.betfair.com, and a new bit of kit called the Application Programming Interface (API) - which becomes the third way of accessing Betfair, alongside betfair.com and the telephone call centre.

The API presents all the data and functions of Betfair in raw form, accessible to third-party software - it's effectively an entrance specially designed for bet-bots. The man who'll be taking their coats and making sure they wipe their feet is Betfair's head of product development, Tom Johnson.

'People have always been able to write programs to read the data that we publish on our website, and place bets,' says Johnson. 'What we've done with the API is introduce a much more secure and reliable way of accessing our data.'

'Firstly, customised betting. If you have a particular way of trading, and we haven't published the appropriate features on our website in exactly the way you want them, then you can buy an application to access the site via the API that will do exactly what you want.

'The second reason is that it enables us to do business-to-business integration with bookmakers. For example, if you are a bookmaker, and you have a number of customers who are known winners, normally you would set bet limits for those people, but instead you could now use the API in conjunction with your own risk-management system, to automatically pass money into the Betfair betting engine.

'Because we want to know who's building applications, we've introduced a licensing system - we don't vouch for the application itself, and we require licensed vendors to provide all technical support for their own customers, but it's one of the ways we control the risk of malicious or incompetent usage.'

WHAT'S in it for ordinary users? 'It depends how you use Betfair at the moment, but the possibility is there to save a lot of time. Let's say a user is arbing between bookmakers and Betfair. Using an application that accessed Betfair via the API, it would be very easy to take market information and present it in a central spreadsheet alongside prices taken from bookmakers.

'You could add a transaction element on top of that, which could give you a one-click bet, taking both prices to the required amount, to lock in a profit.'

'I don't think so. In the end advantage/disadvantage will come down to same old rules: how much discipline you have in your betting, and how good you are as a judge, and as a punter. All the API does is provide you with a tremendous flexibility in the way you can act on a decision you have already made.'

What about speed? Some of the applications already for sale via bdp.betfair.com hint at the ability to get in ahead of snail-like users.

'The Winning Online company were our first licensed vendor, and when they first did their advertising we had to get them to change the wording, because a lot of it was very misleading. Where there can be a difference in speed is with your particular betting style - say you seek to back and lay in certain situations - then you might find that an application enables you to carry that out more quickly. But that will only be because the interface you have bought is more suited to your betting, not because you are being able to view the data more quickly.

'I don't think ordinary users have anything to fear. I doubt that anything like a majority of Betfair users will ever be using API software, but we are in the very early stages of the BDP - only 15-20 per cent of the way there. Hopefully in the next few months the number of off-the-shelf applications will grow, and they'll be something for everyone.

'Previously there's been a lot of speculation about what some people are up to with this sort of software,' Johnson adds. 'The BDP has a more inclusive approach, and will introduce more openness.'

Source: Betfair Press