The Fantasy Sports Trade Association will dole out its annual industry awards later this month at its winter business conference. Among the categories to be recognized is Draft Style Tool. Voting ends Monday, Jan. 5, and the finalists are as follows:
(For those of you you might have arrived late to the FSB party, here’s another chance to get acquainted with the first business we profiled.)
Company: Advanced Sports Media LLC
Sites: www.draftanalyzer.com and www.playersearch.com
Founder and CEO: Ted Kasten
Launched: 2004
Full time: 2004
Back in 2004, Ted Kasten believed the fantasy football marketplace needed a better draft companion than the “static and outdated rankings provided by magazines,” at least according to the company bio at draftanalyzer.com. To fill the void, he developed Draft Analyzer and launched Draft Dynamix, which now resides under the umbrella of Advanced Sports Media.
The plan that started the whole venture, though, began to form at least two years earlier.
“I began designing the Draft Analyzer prototype as a fun side project on nights and weekends in 2002, when I needed help as a commissioner tracking everyone’s draft picks,” Kasten says.
As those of us who play fantasy sports - or video games, for that matter - well know, it takes folks with such a geek streak to come up the innovations that enhance our games. Kasten’s fun, self-serving side project quickly started to grow.
After beginning with just the draft tracker, he says, he continued to add features that took the platform from merely keeping up with picks to helping him build a better team. Those features include the ability to draw in and combine rankings from various online fantasy-content providers into printable cheat sheets.
The Analyzer also carries a proprietary player-recommendation engine, for which Kasten submitted a federal patent application before launching his business. (Maybe I could explain the algorithmic workings of that tool if I hadn’t skipped out on math classes in college.) Once Kasten had Draft Analyzer build, he headed for the March 2004 Fantasy Sports Trade Association conference, a move he said was crucial to starting and growing his business.
I left the conference with three key partnerships, a better understanding of the fantasy sports market and the confidence that I could be a leader in this critical market niche,” Kasten says. “I became a staple at the FSTA conferences and had a booth showing my software every time. All of my partnerships have come from meeting people at the FSTA conference.
From there, Kasten has licensed his product to five of the top six fantasy football league-hosting sites - including ESPN and CBS Sports - and taken home two industry awards. Draft Analyzer claimed the FSTA’s Best Draft Assistance Tool prize in 2005 and 2007, and the player-recommendation engine was a finalist for best innovation in 2005.
With Draft Analyzer plugging along, Draft Dynamix became Advanced Sports Media in February of this year, the same time that it launched PlayerSearch.
“It took forever to dig through numerous websites to find the latest information on individual players,” Kasten says of his motivation to create a search tool. “There is an enormous amount of great sports content sites, and more and more of them are offering everything for free. We are simply trying to bring all of the great sports content to the surface of the Web, much like Google has for general search.”
PlayerSearch.com does just what it says, gathering news, video, blog posts and the like that relate to a particular athlete and grouping the links in categories national news sources, local video and podcasts.
“We are not trying to create another sports portal. That has been done,” Kasten says. “All of our links take users to the original article or video, so the publisher gets full credit for their work. The ultimate goal of PlayerSearch is to make it quick and easy to access the best sports content on the Web.”
In addition to its free-standing site, PlayerSearch offers a widget that can be picked up by other sites. SportsBuff.com, which is part of the same company that owns this site, is among those that carry the widget.
The online provider of fantasy league hosting platforms and fantasy content announced Monday the rollout of a fantasy football application for the iPhone.
Fanball.com Fantasy Football Draft ‘08 is touted as a full-season application that provides features such as player news, cheat sheets and stat projections, according to the company’s press release. The program, which sells for $1.99, seems particularly geared toward fantasy drafts, allowing owners to accumulate various pieces of important information without having to carry an unruly stack of papers or find a place to plug in their laptop.
Of course, the launch one day after the first Sunday of football season doesn’t set the application up to help on that front in 2008, which Fanball.com new media manager Seth Trachtman acknowledges.
“We got in late in the game, but there is still some value in the app,” he says. “It does have updated player news from Fanball Owner’s Edge. We are planning on rolling out an updated version soon.”
For just $2, the in-season features could well prove worth the price, particularly for fantasy football enthusiasts who spend their days on the move rather than tethered to a computer.
“This application is only the tip of the iceberg in what promises to be a long relationship between Fanball, fantasy sports and mobile technology,” senior vice president of business development Ryan Houston says in the release.
Here in the United States, getting together with our buddies to toss back a few beers, eat some unhealthy food and make fun of the first guy to draft a kicker is an annual event. Such live drafts have been taking place for as long as we’ve been playing fantasy sports.
For folks in Great Britain, though, is the same true? This article from The Times of London makes it sound as if our typical draft isn’t so ingrained into their fantasy “football.”
Of course, mainstream media can often lag well behind what the public is actually doing. In addition, considering the rabid nature of fan following for soccer as well as the seemingly richer pub culture than we have here with our beers, I’d be surprised if a lot of blokes haven’t been gathering for at least a few years to select their squads.
In any event, the article is at least an interestingly different view of the live draft setup. I started to glaze over a bit when names of actual soccer players began to fly and money was discussed in pounds, but I was on board with the talk about pizza.
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