TechCrunch
Fantasy Buzzer Launches As A One-Stop Shop For Fantasy Football Research
With the start of fantasy football draft season nearly upon us, New York-based startup Fantasy Buzzer has launched a new website that aims to give fantasy buffs an edge with real-time news, injury alerts, and recommendations tailored to their teams. Because nothing is serious like fantasy football is serious.
Fantasy Buzzer, which won the $5K ATT prize at the TechCrunch Disrupt NY Hackathon in May 2012, is meant to be a one-stop shop for fantasy research. It aggregates news and tweets concerning users’ teams, hosts Quora-like forums for users to poll each other for advice, and provides detailed profiles of all league players.
“Typically a person will spend 10 hours a week doing research, going to different sites, and figuring out what is the next best thing for them to do,” Fantasy Buzzer co-founder and CEO Pritesh Damani said. “They go to ESPN and NFL and read news. If, hypothetically, a player got injured, they’d look for advice on who to pick up next.”
Fantasy Buzzer also sends texts and push notifications backed by decision-making algorithms before game time to alert users if they’re making a mistake. This is particularly applicable on Sunday mornings, Damani said, when fans may be sleeping in after a party the night before.
Recommendations for users go beyond subbing in another player for someone with an injury, which Damani said is an easy suggestion to make. The site also tells users when they should coach a particular player who’s not on their team in order to use him for trades later and creates rankings for a poach list.
The market for fantasy football apps is big. In 2011, fantasy football represented at least 27 million people spending a total of 800 million in digital goods each year, and those numbers are growing. Fantasy football represents 75 percent of NFL.com’s total traffic. And people invest heavily in their teams because every fantasy league includes money bets, he said.
Fantasy Buzzer is capitalizing on fantasy footballers’ desire to get even the slightest edge over each other. The site offers premium upgrades for $30 per season, which gives those users priority on all the site’s features. They get alerts before everyone else and their questions are pushed to the top of the line.
Fantasy Buzzer raised $385,000 in a two-part seed round led by Payfone’s Mike Brody and will most likely raise again, Damani said.
It isn’t the first startup to enter this space, though. NumberFire launched in 2010 with a similar goal of being the last word in projections and news aggregation. They, too, built a question forum similar to Quora’s model.
With the many forums, blogs and news sites out there dedicated to Fantasy Football, Fantasy Buzzer will have to prove itself to users on the utility of its pushed recommendations and advice, which currently stand out as its primary differentiating factor.
Google Launches Real-Time API For Analytics In Invite-Only Beta
Google today launched the beta of its real-time API for Analytics that will finally allow developers to programmatically take action based on the real-time data they get from Google’s service.
Google Analytics launched its real-time reporting two years ago, but until now, it was very hard to take action based on this data. Even Google acknowledges that “it’s not realistic to sit at your computer 24/7 and take advantage of these insights.”
For now, developers need to request access to the API and it will remain invite-only and outside of Google’s usual SLA for a while.
Once you have access to the API, Google notes, you’ll be able “make queries about your real-time data and use that information in whatever way you please.” At its most basic, that means you can put a live visitor counter on your site, which seems to have worked well for vacation rental service Twiddy, for example. Or you could build an app that displays the number of active visitors on a Pebble watch.
Once you have this data, though, you can obviously also make changes to your site based on this information. If you are seeing a large number of readers from Reddit, for example, you could easily add a Reddit button to your site (or just a specific story) now.
The Google Analytics real-time feature provides users with data about active visitors and the pages they are looking at, the geographic location of these visitors and traffic sources. While Google doesn’t specifically note which features it’ll make available through the API, it’s a safe bet that all of these core data points will also be available to developers.
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