A roundup of recent posts on the FSB News page.

– Fantasy Joe is among the online communities recently launched by USA Today. Moderators Matt Pitzer and Pete O’Brien moderate, post content and promise to address reader questions.

– Advanced Sports Media has launched two ways to get its Draft Analyzer on your iPhone. The free Cheat Sheet app provides player rankings and offers pick recommendations. The $4.99 Draft Analyzer Pro — Mock Draft lets you simulate a whole draft from your handheld with malleable league sizes, draft positions and competition levels.

– Those who like to play in NFL survivor pools might find this fantasy game from FantasySportsMadness.com interesting: No player can be used more than once during the season. It should be easy to find a receiver of value each week, but selecting quarterbacks will take some forethought.

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Much of the crowd at each Fantasy Sports Trade Association conference is made up of industry veterans — people who have been attending for years and have made or are making their way in the business.

When Advanced Sports Media founder Ted Kasten asked how many out in the audience were in the first two years of starting up a company, roughly half of the 60 or so people in the room raised their hands. That’s what makes a panel such as Thursday afternoon’s “Fantasy Sports Business 101″ worthwhile.

Kasten was particularly candid about his experiences through the first five years plus of ASM, from discussing the benefits (cost) and downside (just about everything else) of hiring an Indian development team in the early stages. Although he preached thrift to anyone building a new business, he cautioned against looking solely at hourly rates — saying that more cost per hour doesn’t necessarily mean greater cost overall.

Lawyer Rishi Nangia of Winson & Strawn opened things — following an intro by Geoff Stein of Mock Draft Central — by running through the various ways of setting up your company and some good and bad features of each. Many single-person startups might favor a sole proprietorship and its dearth of necessary legal paperwork, but it’s an area that new companies need to consider carefully.

Some key reasons to do so came from panelist and accountant Kipp Imel of Professional Practice Consultants. Imel pointed out that incorporating in some way can bring with it legal protection, audit protection — he said sole proprietorships are seven times more likely to be audited by the IRS — and sheer legitimization.

No matter what route a company chooses, though, Imel cautioned to keep focus on debt management, which he called “the No. 1 killer of any business.”

Tai Ward of Fantasy Coverage spoke to the tech side and warned — as Imel did about hiring an accountant — that one needs to gather as much info as possible on potential design or development companies. Seek out recommendations, ask for samples and make sure that anyone you might choose to work with understands and fits within what you’re trying to do.

The fantasy sports industry is awash in startups and small businesses. Besides presenting a good product, those that make it will be those who are smart about the choices they make when getting going.

A roundup of recent posts on the FSB News page.

– Fantazzle this week launched baseball, golf and racing games to go with the football and basketball contests it ran for the first time in 2008.

– Sporting News and Zumobi have combined to create an application for iPhone and iPod Touch users that provides detailed SN content, including stats and player news.

– OK, that headline might be a little overly dramatic. The fact is that Fantasy CPR will join the lineup on BlogTalkRadio’s Fantasy Sports Channel beginning this Saturday.

– Unless you’re among the Major League Soccer faithful, you probably don’t know Taylor Twellman. He believes he can hang with you in fantasy baseball, though.

– FantasySmackTalk.com launched what it calls a “customer-driven fantasy sports advice website” earlier this week. The site appears to be heavy on videos, and the founders say they will focus on facilitating direct communication between its “experts” and users.

– For the first time in its existence, Advanced Sports Media’s Draft Analyzer is available as a Web application (no download). The product has been included in subscriptions to ESPN Insider and Fanball’s premium Owner’s Edge package.

The 10th Annual Sports Media & Technology Conference, presented by the Fantasy Sports Association, Sports Business Journal and Sports Business Daily, took place Thursday and Friday amid a tough economic landscape.

Leaders from around the sports media field met in New York City to discuss and learn about the way some top companies are dealing with the tough times and to find out what might be on the industry’s horizon.

Ted Kasten, founder of Advanced Sports Media — which develops the Draft Analyzer fantasy draft software and PlayerSearch, the first sports-focused search engine — was in attendance and shared his notes from the forum with FSB.com:

The economy was obviously a huge focal point. There were three related themes discussed throughout the conference:

1) Companies need dual revenue streams during the economic downturn: Companies with dual revenue streams (advertising revenue plus subscription revenue) will be in much better shape during the economic downturn than companies that rely solely on advertising revenue. Sports, in particular golf, will be hit hard because of their dependence on financial firms and domestic car companies for sponsorships. Jimmy Pitaro of Yahoo pointed out that they have always been tempted to provide all of their fantasy tools, such as the Stat Tracker, for free but never did as those premium products continued to grow every year and are currently growing faster than their free services. Considering the change in online advertising, that was a smart move to retain the premium features.

2) Major sporting events such as the BCS moving to cable: Broadcast networks that rely solely on advertising revenue are unable to compete with ESPN and their powerful dual revenue streams. Demonstrating this was ESPN’s recent acquisition of the rights to the BCS games from Fox. Fox was unable to match the $125 million/year bid from ESPN (Fox currently pays $82.5 million/year for the rights to the BCS). This will be the first time these games will not be available on free broadcast TV.

3) Flight to Quality: Panels repeatedly stated that a “flight to quality” will make the smaller companies feel more of the pain from the downturn in advertising than the larger companies and brands.

The first and third items should be of particular interest to companies within the fantasy industry. “Flight to quality” is a phrase said to originate in stock trading, and it refers to taking investments out of risky ventures in favor of the safest possible entities.

For the purposes of our industry, it could mean advertisers, sponsors or even investors veering away from smaller fantasy outfits or new ventures and throwing their money behind the familiar names.

Any lack of funding from those avenues feed directly into the need for dual revenue streams. Obviously, if a fantasy site can’t pay its way on advertising dollars alone, it has to find other ways to stay viable. That, in turn, brings us to the whole free vs. subscription quandary that not only faces many a fantasy site but all sorts of content and service providers around the Web.

If you’re reading this site, you’re probably already facing these issues, but maybe you’ll find it a little heartening to know that such things are on everyone’s minds throughout the industry — even the big boys.