PlayUp Brings Broad Strategy, $73 Million Warchest to Sports Social Media

An interloper from Australia, backed with a warchest of $73 million, entered the sports social networking arena this week.

PlayUp, released to U.S. markets on Oct. 20, is an iPhone and iPad application that allows people to get scores and stats for NFL, college football, NHL, NBA, MLB, and MLS games, and create private and public discussions by contacting Facebook friends or other directories.

“There is no better platform for social interactivity than sports, but until now the industry has been unable to marry live sports and social,” said Jonathan Press, CEO of PlayUp USA.

Greater than 56,000 free PlayUp applications have already been downloaded through Apple Inc.’s App Store since release, making it one of the five most downloaded sports social media applications downloaded to date. PlayUp plans to release a second version of the application in December, which will include the ability to buy premium content.  

Company backers include George Tomeski, a former managing partner at the advertising agency George Sydney, and Luke Bunbury, former head of strategy for the whole finance group of Austalia-based Challenger Financial Services Group, Ltd.

The company used three different investments rounds to raise more than $73 million, according to a report published by the Melbourne, Australia-based small business news website StartUpSmall.

The PlayUp slogan is “where sports gets social.”

Release of PlayUp changes the competition among developers of sports social media applications. First, PlayUp is looking to provide comprehensives sports scores and statistics to its users, as opposed to an interface that tightens the consumer’s social media focus on a single game. Second, it is most interested in an electronic-commerce strategy, as opposed to an advertising- or sponsor-driven model, which will force other developers to consider whether that’s the best way to make money through sports social media. And third, its tight intergration of Facebook as a means to invite interaction forces other application to developers to consider similar connectivity with the social media behemoth or face being left in the dust.