This week’s FSTA summer conference presented a stronger set of elevator pitches than we saw at the winter conference in Vegas, but the winner wasn’t a surprise.

FightMetric hit the stage with a well-planned, simple-to-follow presentation and a comfortable, confident presenter in Alon Cohen.

The company focuses on the collection and dispersal of statistics for mixed martial arts and related to the crowd that it had recently signed on as the official stat provider for the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

There’s no denying the explosion in popularity over the past few years for MMA, so it’s no stretch to think of fantasy MMA as an area with enticing growth potential. That, no doubt, is the key reason that FightMetric pitched to fantasy folks on Wednesday afternoon, and the company seemed to draw the desired result.

The other participants, who still were able to get their word out to the crowd:

FantasyPro.com — This new site that doesn’t appear to be live yet on the Web will allow fantasy teams to compete against those outside its league. The creators are seeking deals with existing league-hosting sites to enable integration and will not host its own leagues. Users will be able to challenge others via the Fantasy Pro platform in free or pay games and take part in games put on by the site itself.

Fantasy Sports 4 Kids — As a slightly emotional Brian Riggs told the group, this is not a new site seeking to host kids fantasy games; it’s a much more worthy outlet. FS4Kids, which currently lives online only as a blog, will seek to connect fantasy leagues with charities, while also spotlighting the good works of children’s charities and NFL players who have helped children. Participants will enter their league fees like in your normal pay league, but the winners will be able to put their prizes toward charities that will be easier to locate via this community. Riggs told us that the idea was borne from his own daughter’s fight with cancer (it’s in remission) and that he already had 126 leagues interested. Here’s hoping the concept comes together well.

Pickemfirst — Alain de Raynal had presented to the FSTA crowd previously (and won the pitch session), but this time he came with his company’s newer concept: the blog aggregator. Whereas the initial application enabled fantasy players to quickly check on a player’s availability in multiple leagues while reading online content, the new aggregator pulls in articles via RSS feeds and presents them via popup window when you encounter particular player names in Web content. For example, de Raynal showed us an article in which he came across Diamondbacks pitcher Edwin Jackson. The Pickemfirst blog aggregator showed the three most recent article mentioning Jackson from three differen online outlets. Anyone interested in being included needs only to give Pickemfirst the OK to pull material.

RosterSlots.com — FSB.com previously presented a full writeup on RosterSlots, so here’s just a quick summary. It’s a fantasy baseball game (which also treated the Olympics in February) that plays like a slot machine, incorporating enough trades and player decisions (plus no cash involved) to steer clear of gambling.

WaiverWire.com — Another veteran of the elevator-pitch session, WaiverWire.com’s primary pursuit is a tool built on Wall Street analytics that serves as a virtual assistant coach throughout the season, crunching all the pertinent numbers to help you make lineup and player-movement decisions. New for this year was a revenue-sharing model for fantasy sites interested in a partnership.

Fantazzle — Ryan Parr’s site does its primary business in short-window fantasy games, but his pitch focused more on his white-label offerings. Fantazzle presents various options for games that can carry the hosts brand as well interesting in-game advertising potential, such as positioning logos on virtual race cars for a NASCAR game.

PASPN.net – Probably the most serious of fantasy platforms that we’ve yet come across, the NBA GM game at the center of Ngozika Nwaneri’s online community involves year-round attention to your basketball franchise. It allows consumers to play as either general manager or player agent, each side having to deal with the other in various personnel situations.

TodayInFantasy.com – The latest Footballguys online entry wants to be Google for fantasy football (and eventually other sports as well). For more information, reach the recent FSB.com story.

Advanced Sports Logic — Welcome to The Machine. Frankly, I’m not sure I could properly explain this, so here’s what the site says: “Our patent-pending Probulator^TM technology … uses the variance and accuracy of player projections to simulate your entire fantasy football season with powerful probability distributions.” It’s another tool for making stat-based recommendations throughout the year to help your fantasy football team.

Fantasy Judgment – Michael A. Stein is the latest lawyer to launch a site for fantasy dispute resolution. In addition to offering a single-use package and full-season option, Stein is in the market for partnerships with league-hosting sites to provides his services to users.

A roundup of items recently posted on the FSB News page.

– May 10 signals the end of the early-bird sign-up period for next month’s FSTA conference in Chicago. After that, the registration fee jumps $150.

– Just in case you were wondering (and I know you were), Andy Roddick plays fantasy baseball — and apparently isn’t too pleased with the way his season is starting out.

– You might remember us writing about RosterSlots.com a couple of months ago. Even if you don’t, the site opened its inaugural baseball season late last week, which creator Peter Wikander has always planned to be the site’s centerpiece.

– After going twice weekly with its fantasy baseball offering last year, Fantazzle is offering daily and weekly contests in 2010. The site has also launched its FanStock platform, a system for awarding points to frequent users.

– Fantazzle is also looking for a full-time employee to head its sales operation.

Send all of your news, job postings, stories and profile ideas to FantasySportsBusiness@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter (FSBcom).

We’re all familiar with the usual fantasy baseball setup at this point. Whether you’re playing in a draft-style or salary-cap format, you try to collect the best group of players possible and beat whoever else is playing.

RosterSlots.com still asks you to build the best team, but rather than having you draft one at a time against competitors or fill each position without exceeding a “salary” limit, the site presents a slot machine. You click on the virtual lever, and three players come up at random.

The user gets a certain number of spins to fill a lineup, forcing you to decide whether to keep each set of results or take a chance that your next spin will be better.

Peter Wikander says he came up with the idea about three years ago, bringing the concept to fruition for a closed beta test during the 2009 Arizona Fall League season and then an open beta for the recently concluded Olympics.

“RosterSlots.com combines the randomness of slot machines with the strategy of fantasy game play to provide a transaction-rich casual fantasy baseball game,” Wikander told FSB.com. “I hope to attract everyone from fantasy baseball veterans to casual baseball fans who feel that a traditional fantasy league is too much for them. RosterSlots.com is simple and quick enough that you can play on the side, without making a full-time commitment.”

Although baseball is the game Wikander started with and will fully roll out first this year, his Winter Olympics offering garnered some positive attention — including some space in Nando Di Fino’s online Wall Street Journal column. In that version, users spun to acquire a trio of countries for each medal event, with the same spin rules as baseball.

“People really seemed to like doing this with the Olympics, so I think I’ll do that again in 2012,” Wikander said. “RosterSlots is a nice fit for non-standard, special event-type sports that typically have a concentrated event schedule and a good many unknown ‘players,’ so I think there’s an ongoing opportunity for RosterSlots to provide fantasy games for casual and niche sports fans who are drawn to these types of events.”

Key to his concept is the daily schedule of games — such as in special-event setups like the Olympics and the 162-game Major League Baseball season.

Of course, in an industry constantly having to differentiate itself from gambling, the obvious initial red flag with RosterSlots.com is that it sure looks like gambling. Wikander contends that his model doesn’t fit the existing parameters of gambling and that there is plenty of strategy involved to keep the “fantasy” flag flying.

“In no way does the site operate like a traditional slot machine: There are no odds, no payout, no predetermined winning combinations,” he said. “The slot machine is just a simple, interactive and intuitive platform on which to play out the economies inherent in building a roster. How much of your ‘budget’ do you spend trying to land a superstar? Do you stick with a known entity, or push your luck and risk creating a gap in your lineup? How do you get the most value out of your current assets?”

Increasing the strategy component is the fact that users can trade spin results to others to acquire their unused spins. That’s not exactly the traditional model of fantasy trading, but you’re also not sitting there mindlessly hoping for cherries to show up.

Assuming that Wikander can avoid any gambling-perception issues, the only remaining concern would be building an audience — i.e. giving users a reason to play and keep playing.

Wikander says he doesn’t plan to ever charge for his game and that prizes aren’t currently on the horizon either. He’s hoping to leverage the fantasy player’s love of transactions and build a community that will keep users on board.

In that case, Wikander will likely have to work hard to convince users to bring their friends and family members along to compete. The game is certainly simple enough for anyone to pick up, regardless of their level of fantasy knowledge. With no money or prizes on the line, however, the only allure will lie in beating others.

For that reason, RosterSlots might be ideally suited for short-term events such as the Olympics, professional tennis and extreme sports. That audience will be easier to hold for the duration of a fantasy season. Despite the obvious draw of baseball’s everyday schedule, six months is a long time to hold a consumer’s attention.

Then again, the rise of daily and weekly fantasy games opens up a variety of possibilities for game play here. As with all new concepts in this industry, we’ll see how the audience reacts.