Search Results for: Playup

Bleacher Report adds Group Interaction Feature to Team Stream App

September 5, 2012 by Paul Kapustka Leave a Comment

The popular Team Stream app from sports site Bleacher Report is getting more interactive, with the release of a new version that adds the ability for people to share their sports-team preferences with friends. Available initially only for the iPhone version of Team Stream, the “groups” feature will let fans share not only news but opinions with each other, bringing Team Stream into the field of smack-talk/interactive sports apps like PlayUp and others.

Bleacher Report, which was recently acquired by Turner Sports for approximately $180 million, claims to have 1 million users of its Team Stream app, which brings a constant “stream” of sports news, opinions, tweets and other content from the Web and organizes it by team for easy consumption. By adding an interactive feature Bleacher Report is seeking to keep fans embedded in Team Stream longer, instead of having to leave it to share opinions or news with friends who share the same team interests.

Fan interaction is hardly a new feature on the web, as sharing opinions and sports news seems to be one of the bigger things happening on Twitter these days. And standalone apps like PlayUp have already found big crowds of fans who want to set up or join sports-specific, game-specific or team-specific “rooms” or other online gathering places to interact. Team Stream, which has been focused on providing news and other content, is coming at the sharing equation from another direction, but one that seems to make sense as sharing apps like PlayUp have recently started adding news feeds to their feature set.

“We’ve found that most sports fans have small but distinct groups of friends they talk to about their favorite sports or teams, but still lack a simple way of sharing and reacting to news with them,” said David Finocchio, Chief Content and Product Officer at Bleacher Report, in a press release. “This version of Team Stream fills that void by providing a more efficient way for fans to quickly share the latest on their teams with the right group of friends and then react together.”

According to Bleacher Report, the new feature allows users to “easily add their friends to a group and share their favorite stories with them. Friends can open the group, read the shared stories and easily reply to the group all from their phones.” From an outside perspective the feature might also act as a good recruiting tool for B/R, allowing current Team Stream users to introduce the app to friends who might not have heard of it before. According to Bleacher Report the new 2.0 version of the Team Stream app will be developed for the Android and iPad versions of the app sometime in the future, but is only available now for the iPhone.

Filed Under: Apple, Apps, bleacherreport, iPhone, Social Media, Sports Social Media, Turner Sports Tagged With: Bleacher Report, iPhone, Mobile Sports Report, Paul Kapustka, Team Stream, Turner Sports

Pickmoto Looking to become Sports Pick Platform of Choice-Starts with NFL

August 22, 2012 by Greg Quick

Pickmoto

As the NFL season rapidly approaches many fans are preparing for fantasy drafts, closely scrutinizing daily camp reports and trying to discern who is actually playing well in preseason, but they are also doing these tasks for another reason and that is so that they can pick winners.

Regardless if they are betting an office pool, heading to Vegas, have a bookie, or just picking against the spread each week, fans want to show that they know their sport by picking the most winners on a weekly basis, and to meet their needs apps have started to appear.

The latest that I have seen is called Pickmoto and is designed to enable friends and others to compete on a regular basis and show who’s understanding of football, or luck, is the greatest over the course of a season.

The small three man startup, based in San Francisco is seeking to establish itself as the provider of a platform that enables fans to compete among both circles of friends and in larger groups that form around making correct sports picks.

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It is currently waiting for approval of its iPhones version of the app and then plans to branch out and develop for the Android and other platforms. Future plans also include expanding to cover additional sports.

It has a common approach found in other games as well as a few features that appear to set it apart. A player makes their selections based on who they believe will win, no points involved. It will use what the company calls crowdsourced scoring that makes the less popular picks more valuable. You can have head to head competition as well as against larger groups.

It also has a leader board, provides users with stats, has chat and notification features and provides trophies. It has a Facebook hookup but the game was built from the ground up to be used on a mobile device.

The company has been waiting almost two weeks for approval from Apple and expects to receive it prior to the start of the season. I will be interested to try it out and see what it can do compared to rivals. Other platforms seek to bring fans together to chat such as Bantr in soccer and PlayUp and Fancru as a more broad based platform. They are all different but have the sports scores and ability, in some cases, to provide contests that pit fans against each other in selecting winners.

Filed Under: Apple, Apps, Fancru, iOS, NFL, Pickmoto, Startup Tagged With: NFL, Pickmoto

SportStream’s rebirth Focuses on All Sports

June 20, 2012 by Greg Quick Leave a Comment

One of the first sports chat and fan interactive apps that we looked at here at Mobile Sports Report was one called SportStream, at the time the first app from a startup developer named Evri, which was also focusing on developing a real time content engine.

A lot has changed since last September when the app was first being shown around it had a football focus, was part of Evri and ran on both Android and Apple’s iOS platform. Well that has all changed. iPad users will love the new version of the app, currently it does not run on other platforms.

That is not too surprising considering how prevalent it is for tablet users to employ the device as a second screen while watching sports and a bigger display is easier to follow all of the chatter rather than using your phone.

Evri has set the app free to be a standalone development, although it is being led by Will Hunsinger, who led its development at Evri. It has its own funding from Vulcan Capital, also the venture capital firm that has funded Evri. Its first round of funding netted the company $3.5 million from Vulcan.

There is also a change in focus or possibly an expansion rather. Initially available as a SportStream Football as a place for fans to gather, follow scores and post comments, and that is no longer available, although it said that it will add that feature when the season begins. It currently handles the end of the NBA season as well as MLB. Hockey will also be added when the season starts up later this year.

You can add teams as favorites, and their games will be automatically added to a feature called game picker, but you can add any game that you wish to that feature as well. Tap the screen to enter into viewing the game info and check in to a game from the game picker list to participate in the conversation. Once checked in you can also post to twitter or Facebook.

The app does have one very nice feature that many will probably find very useful, that is the ability to filter out twitter streams and block specific users that are uninteresting, rude, or for whatever reason that you might want including simply data overload. The app uses a Facebook check in, which seems to me to be a bit limiting because many might not want to use that avenue to access it.

It seems that almost daily a new chat app is available; some like Bantr and Golf GameBook aimed at one specific category of fans and others including FanCru, GrabFan, JockTalk and PlayUp open to a broader base of fans and so more directly compete with SportsStream. However almost all of its rivals have come out on iPhone first, while SportStream selected the iPad first.

It is hard to predict how the interactive fan sites and apps will work out, but I suspect that the market is already reaching its limits as to how many apps it will support. However having a big cash funding round should help serve SportStream very well. Many other apps appear to be mostly self funded and as Facebook has shown, generating ad revenue from mobile is tough and so may take longer than some developers have.

Filed Under: Android, Apple, Apps, Contests, Facebook, Golf, iPad, iPhone, PlayUp, SportsStream, Startup, Tablets Tagged With: Apple, iPad

Fancru Takes up the Sports Fan Chat Challenge

June 12, 2012 by Greg Quick 2 Comments

Fans like to talk with fans, at least ones that share similar allegiances, and Fancru is seeking to exploit that with its sports app that will enable groups of like minded fans to chat as well as allowing you to reach out to your friends.

If this sounds a bit familiar it is. There are several other apps that are seeking to establish themselves as platform for fan interaction and FanCru realizes that it has to step up to the plate big time to enable it to be recognized above the noise in this space.

The app, currently only available for the iPhone (it will work on an iPad but is not optimized) is the brainchild of John Wagner, Fancru’s co-founder and president and Bill Diamond, co-founder and CEO. Wagner is a self proclaimed sports nut who constantly watches games and saw this as an opportunity for fans to share experiences with others both attending the sporting events and those following elsewhere.

The app has several different distinct functions, and in some ways it reminds you of a host of other apps such as Foursquare, since you can log in your location, ESPN, since it gives you scores, and rival apps such as Recapp which provide news articles about selected teams.

Similarities aside it has a game feed that connects you to other fans following an event. Then on top of that there is the Cheer & Vent function that allows you to vent etc as well as post images from where ever you are.

You establish an account and then select the sports teams and leagues that you want to follow-NFL, NCAA Football, MLB, NBA, NHL, MLS and Brazilian Soccer. Add the teams you want and then you can connect to them via Facebook, Twitter, searching your address book, SMS and the old fashion way by including their names manually. You can check to see which teams have the most fans and earn points for prizes by doing various actions.

The company’s first version of the app, for all practical purposes a beta release, provided it with plenty of user feedback that it used to incorporate in its current offering. But it is not just listening to what fans think of the product that is important to the company. Available now for the iPhone the company is working on an Android release and then will optimize its iPhone app to efficiently run on iPads.

Fancru is taking an interesting approach in that it is seeking to engage teams and leagues into using its technology as possibly a front end to an app that the teams might be developing by opening up its SDK and APIs up to the market freely available.

It is hard to predict how that will work out for the larger, more established leagues such as the NFL and MLB. Right now MLB has AtBat as its official app, which it own. However MLB has been very proactive in trying to engage fans via a series of apps and contests and having like minded fans chat during games would seem to fall into the direction it is taking. There is also an effort to allow teams to add a local flavor to AtBat so that while the league might not adopt the technology local teams might have that option.

In addition Fancru has been accruing analytics about what its users are doing and so it would enable teams to better meet fans wants and needs, Wager points out. He sees the app as a valuable tool to teams that want to bring fans out to the events in a day when many have huge high definition televisions and are content with watching at home.

By enabling a team to have contests that could be centered on a game, a player or a section of seats it can bring fans into more active participation and with that more active attendance.

A challenge to an app of this sort will be breaking through the noise. The Apple App store has almost a million apps currently. There are slightly older rival apps that either point to a single sport such as GolfGamebook or are also more broadly based such as GrabFan, PlayUp and Kwarter.

Being a relatively new category helps since there really is not established leader and they are all facing the same uphill battle. In addition stadiums and leagues are only ow upgrading their wireless capabilities to enable in-game fan interaction. I suspect that within a year or two a huge number of fans will be using a chat technology that connects them to others in and out of the stadium.

Filed Under: Android, Apple, Apps, Facebook, Fancru, iOS, iPad, iPhone, Major League Baseball, MLS, NBA, NCAA Football, NCAA Hoops, NFL, PlayUp, Startup Tagged With: Apple, Apps

JockTalk Gets Pub, Plans to Enter Crowded Sports Social Network Field

April 19, 2012 by Paul Kapustka 1 Comment

Since we haven’t yet talked to the folks behind JockTalk it’s hard to surmise exactly how their proposed sports social media network is going to be better than anything out there today. We read some of the stories, we get the basic idea — create a space for athletes and fans to hang out, and monetize on the traffic — but so far we have seen nothing in any of the stories in the media rounds the company has made that sets JockTalk apart from the crowd.

The idea that athletes should find a better place to monetize their social media presence other than just Twitter or Facebook isn’t exactly new. Here at MSR we have been closely tracking three such efforts, including PlayUp (which regularly hosts pro player “hangout” rooms online), Viva Vision and Gridiron Grunts. The leaders of Viva Vision, ex-NFLers Joe Tafoya and Kerry Carter, have been especially vocal about seeking to help individual players build their own online interaction centers, either for profit, charity or exposure. The Viva team is working on a prototype app for Dallas Mavericks star Jason Terry that is comprehensive, with lots of multimedia hooks and commerce opportunities.

And the Gridiron Grunts team, led by ex-NFLers Jeb Terry and Ryan Nece, already have an extensive crew of “grunters” contributing in a unique fashion, by simply calling in their takes on their phones so that fans can listen in a like fashion.

If JockTalk is able to create some kind of top-athlete commons that attracts a lot of traffic, it might be able to grab some space in the market. But from a fan standpoint when it comes to aggregation we like the approach taken by Bleacher Report, which curates the best content from anywhere on the web and presents it segregated by teams, which is how we think most fans still follow sports. So good luck to JockTalk, which we are excited to see. But do note that this game has already started.

Filed Under: Apps, bleacherreport, Facebook, NFL, PlayUp, Sharing Sports Media, Sports Social Media, Twitter Tagged With: Gridiron Grunts, JockTalk, Joe Tafoya, Kerry Carter, Ryan Nece, Social Networks, Viva Vision

Spothon Debuts Sports Social Media Viewing Application

December 27, 2011 by John Evan Frook Leave a Comment

Ready to slug it out with PlayUp and OneLouderApps is Japan-based Spothon, Inc., which allows people to interact on mobile devices at the same time they are using their mobile devices to watch a game.

Spothon is the latest in a growing list of mobile sports application developers looking for ways to enhance the sports fan’s viewing experience via mobile devices and tablets. All of them may be slightly ahead of the market because, although significant numbers of people are moving their viewing experience to mobile devices, sponsors and advertisers tend to be reluctant to step up with significant commitments to the direct marketing opportunities popular applications enable. Today, sponsorship and advertising dollars are centralized around big brands.

Spothon’s twist is that it allows people to participate within a virtual stadium, which is has dubbed “real view.” Today, Spothon supports professional Soccer, Baseball, Football, Ice Hockey and Rugby. The application is available for Android.

Here’s a demo:

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Search Results for: Playup

Pickmoto Looking to become Sports Pick Platform of Choice-Starts with NFL

SportStream’s rebirth Focuses on All Sports

Fancru Takes up the Sports Fan Chat Challenge

Spothon Debuts Sports Social Media Viewing Application

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