Mobile gambling via smartphone: you can bet it's in your future

Imagine this: you're sitting in a boring presentation, and see a man in the row in front of you with his iPhone in his lap, playing blackjack online. As you watch, he wins a hand and $20 in real money. This is the dream of the mobile gambling industry, a dream that a new white paper by research firm Juniper Research concludes has excellent odds of coming true.

Juniper's white paper projects that gross wagers via mobile gambling platforms will reach $48 billion by 2015, on a combination of casino games, lottery, and parimutuel betting on horse races and the like.

In some ways, the smart phone is the perfect tool for gambling, if gambling revenue is your goal. If U.S. laws against it can be changed or worked around, the phone would allow you to gamble any time of day, in your office at lunch or in your pajamas at 3 in the morning. No more need to go to a casino, if you're concerned about your public image.