Website:  www.crowdpicks.com

Interview with: Jeff Murnane

How many founders does Crowdpicks have and what are there names?

Two founders, myself, Jeff Murnane, & my business partner Cassius Almeida

What are the founders’ backgrounds and qualifications?

We both worked at TD Ameritrade for over 10 years.  I was director of Competitive Intelligence inside the business strategy area and Cassius was a director in Product Development.  Many of the current trading tools at TD Ameritrade, Cassius invented.  Many also were eventually patented by TD Ameritrade.

What does your website do? 

It’s a sports social network where members build their sports credibility through picking games.  Our picking engine goes a little further than most sites however as you make an exact score prediction, not just a winner.  We then aggregate the score predictions to come up with a consensus score.  We also allow members access to this pick data where they can filter out different levels of member accuracy to get a smarter aggregate prediction.

When did you launch? 

August 2007

Has it been easy or hard building your community?

Both.  We knew going in that we could build the technology.  We also knew that the hardest part would be building the community.  However, we are seeing faster growth than we initially predicted.

What types of marketing do you do? 

Not much.  We have some banner ads floating around out there and we’ve had a few press releases, but nothing major as of yet.  We plan on changing this and marketing more extensively in 2008

Do you have any revenue streams besides advertisement? Who is your ad provider?

Just ad revenue at this point and only using Google adsense currently

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

100% self funded

Are you looking for more funding? 

Yes, currently we are pitching several firms in an attempt to acquire outside capital.

What is your favorite feature on your site? 

The trophies! They were put in almost as an afterthought, but they quickly became very addictive for our members.  Members can earn unique trophies for reaching certain achievements.  the size of ones trophy case quickly became a bragging point.  After that I will say that our revenue sharing program which hasn’t been implemented yet, will probably become the most unique and exciting feature on the site.  this should be out early 2008.

Any bold predictions for sports and technology in the future?

I see the convergence of different medias as a greatly unexplored opportunity.  As TV and the web continue to grow together, along with mobile devices, I think that you will start to see the fan’s role become even more interactive with their favorite teams and players.

STN’s Take:

We have actually already featured 2 pick/social network sites called The Fan Yard and Picktastic and we feel that Crowd Picks has similar options but does a better job of providing more action on their site.  They have a solid profile page and places to submit news, submit videos, and write a blog.  We also like the Crowd Filter option which allows you to find the consensus predictions and there are also ways to filter out certain things as well. Unfortunately Crowd Picks user interface and design is not nearly as good as the other two sites.  Although the trophies look good, the rest of the site has an old school feel to it.  Check it out and let us know what you think.

Website: www.thefanyard.com

Interview With: Rick Perreault

How many founders does The Fan Yard have have and what are their names?

TheFanYard.com was founded by Rick Perreault, Justin Stacey, and Blake Butterfield.

What are the founders background and qualifications?

Blake Butterfield, FanYard Community Manager, is an avid sports writer and blogger, with several years in customer support with Bodog Entertainment. His customer support experience coupled with his thorough knowledge of football makes him ideal for day-to-day communication with the FanYard user base. In addition to maintaining the FanYard blog, Blake writes daily at the Fannation.com where he maintains a very popular blog.

Justin Stacey, Director Product Development, has 15 years experience in interactive media. He has developed a thorough expertise in user interface design and usability issues for a variety of interactive digital media, as well as a solid understanding of software development technologies with a focus on AJAX and Ruby on Rails. Justin has created innovative web-based solutions for such high profile clients as Bodog Entertainment, BC Lotteries Corporation, CTV News, Ipsos Reid, and Nortel.

Rick Perreault, Company President, Rick began his career in interactive media in the 90s as a Web Designer/Developer. This led him to Bluezone as a Sr. Interaction Designer where he lead a variety of news and sports related projects for web, Interactive TV and mobile. He then lead the sports initiative at Rainmaker Interactive as a User Experience Strategist. This landed him at Riptown Media/Bodog Entertainment as a Creative Director where he grew and lead a team of product designers, developers and creative marketers and spearheaded the development of a variety of successful online gaming and entertainment properties.

What does your website do?

TheFanYard.com is a sports social network with a purpose. All our activity is centered around having members make predictions on who they think will win a matchup and by how many points. FanYard then aggregates all the predictions for each game and publishes the Yardstick - the community consensus of who will win and by how many points. This is significant because outside of the individual expert opinions, there is no tool that sports media can use to quote the favorite as predicted by Fans. While some media use the point-spread as an indication of the favorite, this is both inaccurate, as the spread is set to split the betting public in half and not an indication of the favorite, and controversial in the US, because of its relationship to sports gambling. FanYard hopes to become the definitive barometer of public opinion on predicting the outcome of games.

When did you launch?

TheFanYard.com launched as a public beta on August 28th of 2007 with Pro and College Football and have since added NBA and Collage Basketball.

Has it been easy or difficult to build your community?

It’s been mixed. Those who are using FanYard use it a lot and have developed an active community, but we’ve yet to get the traffic needed to build critical mass. Additionally, because of the unique nature of what we are doing, many people have commented that they think FanYard is somehow related to sports gambling or fantasy football, a perception that we need to address. Truthfully, we are still very early in the game so ask me this question again in a year.

What types of marketing have you done?

Very little paid marketing to date as we have focused on PR, blog and forum posting, and some PPC on sports sites like ESPN. Our resources have been focused on user experience. It is our thinking that once we have our users on mass inviting their friends, we’ll know that we’ve achieved a point in which our product is ready for mass market and we will then look at investing resources into marketing initiatives.

Do you have any revenue streams besides advertisement? Who is your ad provider?

Our ad provider is RallyAd. We have additional revenue streams planned for the future.

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

We are currently founder funded.

Are you currently looking for funding?

Yes

What is your favorite feature on your site?

The Yardstick. I like to check the site before the start of each NFL game and see what the Yardstick is. Provides some extra excitement for me while I’m watching NFL, especially on the occasions where the Yardstick turns out to be dead on.

What type(s) of technology do you use?

We’ve developed the site using Ruby on Rails and AJAX.

Any bold predictions for sports and technology in the future?

I think technology is moving us closer to “my interest on demand” and sports will no doubt benefit. We are already seeing more and more niche sites like the FanYard that are highly focused on one topic or purpose. I think this has been made possible by the likes of MySpace and Facebook having successfully gotten millions of average people involved in some sort of online activity. Now those people are going to seek out communities focused on very specific topics of interest.

STN’s Take:

This site has an amazing look and feel. If we are looking to create a new site, we know we are coming to Justin and Rick first. The User-Interface makes the website very easy to navigate through making your picks and updating your profile. We like that they take a consensus of everyones picks and give what the site thinks each team will win by. At first we thought these numbers would be close to the point spread but they really aren’t.

There are some things we would do different with the site. First, we believe the point system favors luck way too much. If one picks the points exactly right you get 100 pts and if you pick one point off, you only get 10.  We know a decent amount about picking games and people who in general can pick pretty close to the points should be rewarded more then someone who picks right on every once in a while. Second, we believe the Yard Stick is biased because of all the people that are predicting the points on their favorite teams.  We have friends that always pick their team no matter what. The best way to take care of this would be to require each person that signs up to choose their favorite team in each sport. Then when figuring out the Yard Stick just throw out each person’s favorite team prediction.

All in all we believe The Yard Stick has solid potential and for anyone who likes to pick games but doesn’t like the gambling aspect, this is a great site to use.