At last Britain — inventor of the internet — has produced a world-beating online brand

One of the ironies of the internet age is that the life-transforming medium was effectively invented by a Brit, Tim Berners-Lee, yet all the big money it has generated has been pocketed overseas.

This country has never had a serious online commercial success story. It has now, in Betfair.
For businesses to really fly on the web they have to totally change how we go about things, like eBay and Amazon. Betfair is Britain's eBay, with all the potential that implies. It's not a bookie but an internet betting exchange — a way of matching buyer and seller (eBay) or the layer of odds and backer (Betfair).

It's a facilitator, a firm that makes it easy for those who want to act as a bookie and those who want to bet, to come together. But it would be wrong to suppose that Betfair's uses are merely confined to horse-racing. That's how it started only 10 years ago. But these days it covers 50 sports, including poker, and it's expanding into shares and other financial instruments. And overseas — this is an organisation that has grown to have three million customers worldwide.

Of course, traditional bookies may grumble. But theirs was an industry ripe for the taking. Anyone wishing to play bookie themselves was effectively barred — unless they chose to sit in the back room of a pub with a book of odds — while their actual branches were depressing, dingy places. Betfair seized the opportunity the internet provided and changed all that.

For having the vision and for continuing to invest in technology, and for not borrowing madly to fund the company's expansion (Betfair is debt-free) the founders Andrew Black and Edward Wray, and chief executive, David Yu, deserve acclaim.

In Betfair, Britain at last has a world-beating internet business.