Website: UFN

Name: Jonathan Joseph

When did you launch Ultimate Fotball Network?

The Ultimate Football Network is still pre-launch.

Is their more then one founder? If so, who are they?

I’m the only founder.

What is your background and qualifications?

I’m a former venture capital investor and social media consultant. 

What does your website do?

The Ultimate Football Network (UFN) is a free social media resource for the Fantasy Football market or for casual fans looking for the hottest news about their favorite teams. UFN aggregates, organizes and ranks football content making it easily accessible and customizable for football fans. Fans can add, rate and comment on the content in the UFN news stream. The Ultimate Football Network automatically tags content with the teams and players mentioned, giving users the option of filtering the content to find the hottest news about any team or player with one click. So when users are trying to figure out whether to start or bench a particular player on their fantasy roster, they can quickly find the hottest news about that player whether it comes from ESPN or a fan’s personal blog or a fan discussion thread on a message board.

The Ultimate Football Network also organizes the social media landscape by tracking data about social media content. Based on fan feedback and participation, we track which authors and sources produce good content, which fans add valuable content and commentary and which fans know about certain teams and players. We’re working on building out additional features that make this content and data more useful to fans looking to use UFN to manage their fantasy rosters.

How do you generate revenue? If through ads, what ad network do you use?

For now, UFN generates revenue through advertising and we use Adbrite. Going forward, we will have a different strategy with respect to advertising and other non-advertising revenue streams coming from features under development.

How have your marketed your site?

We haven’t done any marketing yet as we are pre-launch.

Funding: Self funded, Angel Investment, or Venture Capital?

Self funded to date

Are You currently looking for funding?

We’re talking to some angels at the moment.

What type(s) of technology do you use?

Ruby on Rails and Postgres

What is your favorite feature on your website?

My favorite feature is definitely the ability to rank fans and authors. When there are enough users voting on content, I’m really excited to see which authors fans will think are the best. For example, I’m looking forward to seeing whether fans think the guys at ESPN (John Clayton, Len Pasqaurelli, etc) do better work than the guys at CNNSI (Peter King, Don Banks, etc) and I’m wondering who will be the first “fan” to break through to stardom using UFN. It would be a great story if an independent blogger ended up getting hired somewhere like ESPN because his blog consistently got more votes than say, John Clayton.

If you ran a large sports network like ESPN or CBS, besides your website what indpendent website would you acquire first and why?

Not an easy question to answer. Even though ESPN and Yahoo, in particular, have done a pretty good job with their online sports properties to date, the world of media (and not just sports media) is going to undergo such a dramatic shift that they will all have to make major moves. There are a handful of “startups” in the sports 2.0 space but I don’t know that I think any of them have gotten it right so far. In fact, a few that have emerged so far as early “leaders” have, in my mind, huge, fatal flaws in their business models so I think everything is wide open for start-ups at this point.

Any Bold Predictions for Sports and Technology in the future?

I have bold predictions for what technology is going to do to almost every business in existence, so yes I think the sports world will also get turned upside down over the next 10 years. All sorts of industries are trying to figure out how to incorporate the “social” trend but no industry has a more natural affinity for social trends and user engagement than sports, so yes there will be big changes on the horizon. I was amused recently at the brouhaha over the Bob Costas Live panel on the future of Sports media (see the UFN blog for my complete thoughts). For what was supposed to be a panel of experts, it was abundantly clear that none of them had even a basic understanding of the changing landscape, so it’s clear we’ re still in the first inning of the game here.