Google Now is a great feature for Android users, and now those who are on iOS devices. The idea is that the more you use Google products, the more it learns about you and the better information it can spit at you proactively. However, if you try to interact with Google Now, specifically on which sports teams you’d like to follow, the app will crash. Not only will Google Now crash, but… → Read More
Like many avid sports fans, Shailo Rao, Sagar Savant and Vam Makam are well-familiar with how frustrating it can be to find quality, relevant sports content — especially on Twitter and other social media. Rao tells me over coffee that, as a PhD student at Stanford, he spent years trying to create and maintain a single realtime feed of content he actually cared about. Because no company or… → Read More
Predictive sports game startup PrePlay has closed a $4.7 million Series B round, led by Trilogy Equity Partners LLC. RSE Ventures, the VC fund founded by Miami Dolphins’ owner Stephen Ross and Matt Higgins, also participated in the round. → Read More
Major League Baseball is the stuff of Americana and nostalgia, but it’s also trying hard to keep up with the 21st century. Today, MLBAM, its interactive/digital media subsidiary, said that it has inked a deal with Qualcomm, for the latter to provide technology and engineering support to improve mobile networks at 30 Major League Baseball ballparks. The deal follows an agreement struck between… → Read More
As you’ve no doubt heard by now, March Madness is upon us, with the NCAA tournament officially kicking off tomorrow. Yes, March Madness brings April gladness, as the saying goes. In fact, difficult as it may be to fathom, but the NCAA men’s basketball tournament is turning 75-years-young in 2013. → Read More
LockerDome, a social media publishing platform designed to connect sports fans with their favorite athletes, teams, brands and sports properties, announced today that it has raised $6 million in Series A financing. The round was led by Cultivation Capital Growth Fund, a new venture fund created by Square co-founder Jim McKelvey, with contributions from St. Louis Cardinals President William DeWitt… → Read More
It’s a little ironic that adrenalin-fuelled, sometimes dangerous extreme sports like windsurfing, kiteboarding and skiing also have a very pedestrian angle to them: it’s hard to do them when the weather isn’t quite right. There have been apps developed to try to meet that challenge by tapping into weather data providers, but sometimes these don’t actually give a personal feel of how the wind or… → Read More
The UK’s BBC began to test the waters for BBC Sport apps globally last summer with the launch of a special app featuring content from the London Olympics, and today that game is entering its next quarter: BBC Worldwide today released a new BBC Sport app for iOS, the first that will be made available to consumers outside the UK. The BBC says that an Android version will also be coming soon. → Read More
For sports fans, and fans in general, nothing beats meeting your favorite athlete, celebrity or musician and getting to capture that experience — a signed photo, shirt, etc. — take it home with you and proudly display it to your friends. There are many that would happily stand in long lines to get their favorite author to sign their new book with a personalized autograph, but for many others… → Read More
It’s almost 2013 and you’d think that at this point every NBA team has probably had its own official mobile app for a few years now, but that’s not exactly the case. The Portland Trail Blazers, for example, just launched their own official mobile app for iOS in late November. Earlier this month, I sat down with Dan Harbison, the team’s senior director of Interactive Media, to talk about how the… → Read More
As second, third and fourth screens become increasingly popular among sports fans, Twitter has been among those platforms to see a significant increase in sports-related chatter. Social media and Twitter in particular have become popular destinations for fans looking to share their thoughts and engage in conversation during the action.
For the holidays this year, Twitter and ESPN have teamed up… → Read More
Sports is in the process of becoming the next big market to be transformed by the digital revolution, as fans are increasingly turning to mobile devices and second, third and fourth screens to consume sports content. In August, Turner bought sports blogging and content platform Bleacher Report for an estimated $200. More recently, Yahoo and NBC forged a digital sports partnership in the hopes of… → Read More
In 2011, Brian York founded Enthuse as a way to give fans the ability to connect with their favorite sports teams via their mobile devices and get rewards for checking into games, snapping photos and sharing the love. On the flip side, Enthuse enables schools and sports franchises to integrate with their API and SDK to quickly deploy social loyalty programs in their own branded apps. → Read More
Two years ago, Jason Glickman stepped down as the CEO and executive chairman of Tremor Media, a company he co-founded back in 2005 and helped grow into one of the largest video ad networks on the Web. After Tremor Media merged with ScanScout at the end of 2010, Glickman stepped down and began working on a new media project, this time focusing on sports. → Read More
With the NBA season now fully underway and our attention spans being continuously pushed to the max (not to mention Yahoo’s pissing off fantasy football fans), it seems like the perfect time to introduce you to The Chadwick Project.
Nikolai Yakovenko, a former Google Search engineer and rabid basketball fan, founded Chadwick earlier this year to bring some machine learning and artificial… → Read More
“There’s a major piece missing from the social graph,” Chris McCoy tells me over coffee, “and it’s sports.” Naturally, McCoy is a former baseball player, Quora devotee and a religious consumer of all things sports. But, perhaps surprisingly, he’s not alone in the way he views the current sports landscape.
While ESPN, BleacherReport, Twitter and countless others are busy digitizing the… → Read More
Mobile and social gaming have exploded in popularity over the last few years and both are quickly becoming multi-billion dollar industries. With an estimated 35 million players in the U.S., fantasy sports has become a sizable market in its own right, with growth expected to continue as it reaches new players through increasingly mature mobile and social channels. It’s no surprise, then, that Wedge… → Read More
Oh, it’s on. Over the last year or so, ESPN has been experimenting with better ways to present and distribute its content on the Web and on mobile. Essentially, they realized (or at least I hope they did) that their user experience on their digital properties wasn’t great and that others were sneaking up on and passing them — their dominance in TV notwithstanding. Yesterday, they launched a new… → Read More
Google’s report today shows just how integral the multiscreen experience has become in the consumption of digital content. For content of the athletic variety, it seems even more substantial. I struggle to watch baseball games without obsessively checking stats, figures on my tablet or tweeting from my phone. Many of us try to support startups or smaller app developers when it comes to multiscreen… → Read More
Most sports fans get plenty of enjoyment out of going to see their favorite team play live, maybe even with a little tailgating before the game, and if they’re lucky, watching court, field, or rink-side seats. Yet, for the average sports fan (and even the diehard), the access tends to end there. Fandeavor wants to change that.
The Las Vegas-based startup is launching today to give sports fans… → Read More
Update: TBS has now confirmed that it has bought Bleacher Report. The division will become a part of the Turner Sports division. That group currently manages digital properties on behalf of the NBA, NCAA and PGA, and it oversees ad sales for NASCAR.COM as well as a strategic sales relationship with Yahoo! Sports. It has 86 million unique visitors. The price of the deal was not disclosed but is… → Read More
With the Olympics due to start in just over a week, the International Olympic Committee has finally taken the wraps off a new social media hub, apart from its main website, for athletes and fans to cosy up to one another. It will include integrations with leading social media sites like Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook, foursquare and Google+, along with some content created on the site itself. The… → Read More
The two-week countdown to the Olympics is on, and the big broadcasters are getting their ducks in line for how they will be streaming, tweeting, sharing, and generally filling your digital life with their own twists on the global sporting event. The latest development comes from the BBC, which today released the iOS and Android versions of its Olympics apps featuring text commentaries, news… → Read More
Last week, Facebook staked out its claim as a prime destination for people looking for this summer’s Olympics coverage online. Today, the BBC threw its hat into the social media ring, too — it’s putting its sports coverage into a new Timeline app. The app, which is only accessible by UK users, is in beta form (pictured here) and live already: people can currently access streams of Wimbledon. That… → Read More
In both sports and the tech industry, you win some and you lose some. Even though OnSports chief executive Aaron Krane got a nasty black eye this week in a pick-up basketball game, his company just closed a $2 million round led by Mike Maples’ Floodgate fund.
The company, also known as Hitpost, makes this mobile app OnSports which has live discussions, polls and news about sports. It’s aiming… → Read More
Tribesports, a young, London-based startup, is attacking perhaps the most rabid of all those interest-based subgroups: Sports enthusiasts. The startup launched last year with the goal of motivating sports buffs to connect online to improve in their sport of choice offline.
To back up its beta launch, Tribesports raised $400K in June of last year. Today, the company is following up on its seed… → Read More
2012 needs to be the year sports teams around the world wake up and start realizing that their multi-billion dollar licensing deals with networks are about to become worthless. My company designs and manufactures TVs, and we see a gigantic spike in sales any time there is a big sporting event — the Soccer World Cup, the Olympics, etc. It’s clear that loving sport is an almost universal trait… → Read More
You may remember StarStreet from last year’s launch – it’s the TechStars and SV Angel-backed sports investing game that turns fantasy sports into a stock market system where you build up portfolios of top players as if they were stocks. Today, the company is launching a new, more addictive game that lets you play head-to-head with other players on a daily basis, both for fantasy wins or for real… → Read More
If you’re planning a marathon next year or just full of delicious stuffing and turkey, you may want to look into getting a sports watch. These wrist computers offer GPS, heart-rate, and pace measurements for runners, bikers, and, most recently, swimmers and they can help motivate you to get off your duff and, what’s more, help you shave some seconds off your time.
I’ve used all of these except… → Read More
Sports+ (formerly Hitpost) has launched a new iPad app for sports fans that features socially-powered feeds for every league, team and player you care to follow. These feeds include latest news, crowd-generated stories, and polls.
Hitpost’s apps allow you to follow your teams, players and leagues to get a comprehensive view into photos, Tweets, user-uploaded reports and news coming out of an… → Read More
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