Over at  Jesse Bearden’s Blog which I found via CrunchGear, Jesse meets Shaq because he was following him on Twitter.  For most people you would just think that Shaq probably used Twitter for self promotion but this pretty much proves otherwise.

Jesse and his buddy Sean had been following Shaq on Twitter and weren’t sure if it was really Shaq.  When he Twittered from a restaurant that was near them, they decided to check it out.  They walked into the restaurant and there he was.  They didn’t necessarily have the balls to talk to him but when Shaq twittered, ” I feel twitterers around me, r there any twitterers in 5 n diner wit me, say somethin.

Sean spoke up and this picture was born

Check out Sean’s Blog for the rest of the story.

Bleacher Report who raised $1.5 million back in Febuary has now raised another $3.5 million according to TechCrunch.  The round of funding included Hillsven Capital, Gordon Crawford, SoftTech VC, and Jacob Lodwick, founder of College Humor and Vimeo.

This is great news for Bleacher Report’s 13 employees as they now have job security.  We hope they didn’t burn through their original $1.5 million in 8 months already.  Hopefully they raised this money knowing that they are going to need it for a while due to no end in site of deteroriating ad sales.

If you would like more information on Bleacher Report, we interviewed Dave Nemetz of Bleacher Report a while back.

Tyler Bleszinski has come a long way since starting Athletics Nation.  He is president of SB Nation which just received 7 figures in funding which Jim Bankoff, former AOL programming chief, was able to pull off.  For those of you who are not familiar with SB Nation, you can read about it here in our SB Nation interview with Tyler Bleszinski.  Not bad for a guy who started with an A’s Blog.

The Round of financing was led by Accel Partners.  Additional funding came from Allen & Co., Ted Leonsis, owner of the Washington Capitols, Brent Jones, former San Francisco 49ers player and now managing director of private equity firm Northgate Capital, Dan Rosensweig and Jeff Weiner.

According to TechCrunch, Sports Genic has added $10 Million in Funding.  Formely Active Athlete Media, Sports Genic is an ad network that focuses on selling ads for medium size sports websites that can not sell ads on their own or are very limited.  When SportsGenic was Active Athlete they focused on selling ads for websites that were for the active athlete like running, biking, and swimming.  They re-launched as SportsGenic because they also wanted to get into the teams sports area as well.  The new $10 million in funding should help them be on their way.

The funding came from Adams Street Partners, Louie Partners, KPG Ventures, and Greycroft Partners.

Open Sports, started by the former founder of Sportsline.com Mike Levy, has launched into Public Beta.  We previously covered Open Sports when they first announced their funding.

At first look it looks to be a standard sports fan site and it looks like they got Sean Salisbury involved.  If we are choosing someone notable to partner with when launching our site we would probably would put Salisbury last on our list. 

This is what there About page says they are going to do:

• Read national and local stories from around the web
• Read and write insightful and entertaining blogs
• Stay up-to-date on teams and players
• Keep your friends and other sports fans informed by uploading videos, photos and stories
• Become friends with other registered members
• Participate in passionate discussions through commenting and forums
• Be entertained through engaging community programming experiences

It will be interesting to see if they can garner the amount of unique visitors a venture backed site needs to be successful.

eFans

The new eFans, a revolutionary social network for sports fans, is positioned to become the website of choice for virtually anyone who has an interest in athletics.  It will combine all the features of sports and education sites for any notable sport, starting with the Olympic sports.

Stephen Maric who we previously interviewed states, “The new version of eFans will include many new exciting features that will change the way sports fans connect on the Internet. The new release will have new modules that unite the fans that have the same favorite athlete or team. We will launch new functionality in phases so users can grow the site to be what they want it to be.”

A Global Sports Social Network is a great idea in mind but it really needs mass adoption to work effectively.  Good luck to Stephen and his time over at eFans.

Related Topics:

eFans Feature
SportsMates Feature

BallHype and ShowHype have been acquired by Future US. Future US is a leading publisher of special-interest magazines and websites and one of the fastest-growing media companies in the US.  With market-leading publications in the Games, Music, Technology, Action Sports and men’s and women’s special-interest markets.  Well, it looks like they are getting into the sports business now.  With their advertising contacts we wouldn’t be suprised if they make back their money on this investment in a few years.

You can read the info about their sale at a post on Ballhype.  The actual amount of money for the purchase was not realeased but TechCrunch’s great sources provided the 3 million dollar price tag.  Congratulations to Erin and Jason.  They deserve it.  Though we think if they waited another year, that price tag may have been 10 million.  We know they have a child to support so I am sure that selling now had something to do with it.  Erin and Jason will both continue to run BallHype and will be apart of Future US.

The hits just keep coming for Bleacher Report.  They sure have some great deal makers over there.  Right now they are finalizing a deal with CBSSports.  Dave Nemetz and his team are doing a great job.  I guess their 1 million unique visitors in June gives them the leverage they need to do deals. 

There isn’t any word yet on how the deal will work but you can see a logo on the bottom right of their web page.  One can only imagine that it will work much like the Fox Sports Deal where Fox Sports editors are allowed to pull content from the Bleacher Report site and post it in full and link back to Bleacher Report.

From the people who brough you baseball-reference.com, they now bring you the most comprehensive Olympics reference site on-line.  The site provides information for every athlete, country, sport, and event in Olympic history, all packaged in Sports Reference’s easy-to-use format.

Olympics at Sports-Reference.com was created out of a partnership with Bill Mallon, Jeroen Heijmans, and Arild Gjerde, all members of the International Society of Olympic Historians (ISOH), who have a combined 120 years of Olympic research experience. They lead a group of Olympic researchers who call themselves the OlyMADMen, reflecting their devotion to the task. Mallon, Past-President and Co-Founder of ISOH, noted, “We are very excited to partner with Sports Reference. Anyone who has seen their other websites on baseball, football, basketball, and hockey, realizes that they have the premier sports statistical sites. When we first started talking, we quickly realized we were kindred spirits, and know that together we can bring the same level of statistical expertise to the Olympics.”

The Wall Street Journal (subscriber access needed) is reporting that the NFL and Espn are in talks about ESPN taking over the NFL Network.  The Journal said one scenario would be combining the NFL Network and ESPN Classic since ESPN Classic has a much wider distribution and would bump its ratings.

More then likely he NFL is giving up on running the Network itself due to the fact Comcast in blocking them from their basic packages.  NFL owners aren’t seeing the returns they projected.  ESPN should do a much better job running the network and it will be interesting to see if they pickup all of NFL Network’s content.