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.”

Website: KCChiefsFootball

Interview With: Josh Knox

When did you start your blog?

I started www.kcchiefsfootball.com on June 12, 2008

What made you start it?

I have been a fan of the Chiefs my entire life and a friend got me more into blogging, so it just seemed like a natural fit.

What is your background?

I am 24 years old and one year out of college with a degree in Computer Information Science. I have a wife and two dogs. I have been a Kansas City Chiefs fan since I was little and used to watch the games with my Dad.

Do you blog for fun or are you trying to make it a career?

Right now is for fun but if kcchiefsfootball.com takes off then I wouldn’t have a problem doing something I love as a career.

What is your goal with this blog?

My goal with this blog is to have a place for fans of the Kansas City Chiefs to come and learn and share about their team. I would like it to be a somewhat open forum for discussion and a place where there is no hidden agenda. I will express my opinions but I will not push them as fact., that way readers can form their own opinions without being told what to think, as many other news sources do.
A separate goal would also be to eventually make a little money on the side to help support me and my family.

What type of blogging software do you use?

I am currently using the WordPress blogging platform (version 2.5.1 I believe) and I have found WordPress to be awesome so far, you can tell they put a lot of work into the product and with so many plug-ins you can do almost anything you desire.

What ad network(s) do you use?

The only thing I am currently using is Google Adsense. I am still trying to build and focus more on the content at this point.. I will worry about more ads and as networks when the time comes.

How much money do you make off your site monthly?

So far I have not made much at all but that should pick up when I try to monetize the site more.

If you could get something for free to help you out with your blog, what would it be? (Ex: design, marketing, ad optimization, etc)

I would probably say marketing/promotion and it would be really cool to get an interview of my own with a big name Chief.

What are some of your favorite blogs?

ArrowheadPride.com and ArrowheadAddict.com are two blogs that I really look up to. And Chris from ArrowheadPride has been a great help to me so far. Thanks Chris.

Any bold predictions for the future of sports on the internet?

Sports on the internet are HUGE and I don’t see that slowing down anytime soon. Sports tend to stay on the leading edge of technology and I for one love it. So I guess my only real prediction is that sports on the internet will continue to grow at an unbelievable rate.

We have decided to ad a tab at the top of the page for Sports Websites, Blogs, and Domains for sale.  For fun the other day we were looking for sports sites that might be interesting purchases.  We know there are people out there that all they do is buy and sell websites so we are sure there is some money to be made in the niche of sports.   Here are some of the interesting sports websites/blogs/domains we saw for sale and some sites some of our contacts have for sale:

MMAninja.com: Info

Fantasy Football Goat:  Info

Roto Network:  Info

Goal Tube:  Info

NBA Draft Press:  Info

NYYnews:  Info

NFL Draft Blitz: Info

Packers Forum: Info

Athlete Nightly:  Private: contact info{a}sportstechnow.com for more info

Synergy of Sports: Private: contact info{a}sportstechnow.com for more info

NewEnglandpatriotsplayofftickets.com (just domain): private: contact info{a}sportstechnow.com

NewEnglandpatriotssuperbowltickets.com(just domain): private: contact info{a}sportstechnow.com

Dallascowboyssuperbowltickets.com(just domain):private: contact info{a}sportstechnow.com

Dallascowboysplayofftickets.com(just domain): private: contact info{a}sportstechnow.com

If you have something you would like to post for sale and provide your contact inforamtion, send it over to info{a}sportstechnow.com and we will post it for free.  If you want to post it privately and use us as the go between it will cost you $20 a month.

Good luck purchasing.

*With Leather is now hosted at withleather.uproxx.com but the Alexa numbers are not accurate yet so we are still using their .com unique numbers.  Kissing Suzy Kolber is hosted at kissmesuzy.blogspot.com, Kissingsuzykolber.net, and now kissingsuzykolber.uproxx.com. Most of their traffic goes to the blogspot address so we used that address for stats. The same is true for Awful Announcing.  Mgoblog is only at Mgoblog.blogspot.com

For those of you who have visited our rankings before you will notice we are no longer using Compete.com.  Thanks to the newly released Google Ad Planner, we bring you new and improved rankings here at SportsTechNow.  Google Ad Planner is actually built for Media Planners but they also rank sites and give unique visitors for the previous month.  Our numbers will be based off of US numbers.  Their system should outperform Compete as Google can lean on their Toolbar and Google Analytics stats for site usage numbers.  We still need to use Alexa for sites that are tracked at a blogspot domain or now in the case of With Leather and Kissing Suzy Kolber at the uproxx.com domain.

New to the list this month are MixMakers.net, TheAngryT.com, and SportsCracklePop.com.  The amazing thing about SportsCracklePop is that they have only been around since April.

You can view why we pick these sites and not others at the bottom of April’s Top 25 Sports Blogs.

Soon the new Oklahoma City NBA team will be releasing their new name.  We decided here at SportsTechNow to do a little research on the most obvious domain names if the Oklahoma City team would be called the Outlaws.

Here are the names we came up with:

OKCOutlaws.com (Domain Squatter)
OKOutlaws.com (Forwards to Yahoo.com but flashes Yahoo Sports first)(Update 7/8/2008: Now Forwards to an Ebay Auction.  Our advice is don’t bid on it. Update 7/9/2008: Ebay auction has been taken down and now forwards to a Godaddy premium domain for $5000.  Our advice obviously is don’t buy it.)
OCOutlaws.com (Domain Squatter)
Oklahomacityoutlaws.com (Domain Squatter)
Oklahomaoutlaws.com (Domain Squatter)

OKCoutlaws.com and OklahomaCityOutlaws.com is owned by someone named Brian Campbell, OKOutlaws.com is owned by someone named Brandon Cecil but the domain now refers to Yahoo so one can only think that Yahoo Sports just purchased the name.  Besides that, the real interesting part is that OCOutlaws.com and OklahomaOutlaws.com is owned privately in Bellevue, WA.

Now this could all mean nothing but what are the odds that 2 of these domains would be owned privately in a city right next to Seattle.  We have emails out to Brian Campbell and Brandon Cecil to see if they have been contacted about their domain names.  If they have already been contacted, they probably won’t reply as  we are sure the NBA will make them sign something that says not to discuss anything.

We also know that the NBA now hosts all the team websites but team domain names can be very valuable.

Update: Twins Territory has done some additional research and found out that Brian Campbell owns many of the other rumored names.  Some of them are oklahomacitybarons.com, oklahomacitycyclones.com, Oklahomacitydrillers.com, Oklahomacityoutlaws.com, oklahomacitythunder.com, oklahomacitythunderbirds.com, and Oklahomacitytwisters.com.  Obvioulsy Brian is some sort of domain investor and is banking on getting the name correct.  The Whois report says he owns over 800 other names.

Update 7/7/2008: We received email back from Brandon Cecil that says “sorry, but i cannot comment on that at this time.”   We believe this pretty much verifies the NBA or Yahoo is working with Brandon about his domain name, OKOutlaws.com.  If not, he would of just said no one has contacted him instead of saying I can’t comment at this time.

Update 7/8/2008: As one of the commenter has pointed out Brandon Cecil’s domain has now forwarded to an Ebay auction.  We think this pretty much confirms this won’t be the NBA name.

Check out the first Oklahoma City Basketball Sports Blog at Oklahomacitybball.com vote on your choices.

Website: LocalReplay

Interview With: Galeal (Gil) Zino

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

Jordan Hunter - founder responsible for hardware and database architecture.

Mike Jaffe - founder responsible for software development.

What is your background and qualifications?

50% sports fanatic, 50% technology geek, 100% entrepreneur. I’ve led software and technology teams for most of the last ten years, building solutions that range from patented VoIP software to LocalReplay.com. I was a year-round athlete at the high school and college levels, coach, athletic director and now parent to young athletes.

What does your website do?

LocalReplay enables everyone involved in local sports - from nationwide sports organizations to individual videographers - to build interactive, multimedia sports websites to meet their web needs. Teams use the LocalReplay platform to host their team site with schedules, statistics, rosters, etc. Organizations and events build sites to promote and market their organization or event, usually including videos, photos and social networking for their members. Individuals start sites that range from sharing highlights with grandma to online resumes for recruiters. The LocalReplay platform is the first to serve entire local sports communities, not just for example high profile athletes or pro sports fans.

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

We are starting to roll out premium services such as custom media production and virtual training in which LocalReplay shares revenue with our partners. We also generate revenue through ads, using a mix of direct sales/sponsorships, local sales (via LocalReplay teams) and three ad networks, AdSense, Burst and soon SportsGenic.

How have your marketed your site?

We have a tremendous volunteer team that has been doing event-based marketing in a few cities. We’ve done limited online advertising (90% of our traffic is organic). Our best marketing has been the leagues and teams that love their LocalReplay sites - they spread the word for us.

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

We’ve raised $600,000 in Angel and founder capital.

Are You currently looking for funding?

Yes, we are currently looking at potential additional Angel funding and potential VC funding.

What type(s) of technology do you use?

LocalReplay is built on LAMP, using EC2 for computing and S3 for storage.

What is your favorite feature on your website?

The team websites have changed the game from the web 1.0 world. They are self-serve, interactive, support unlimited video and photo, include personal sites for everyone involved with the team, support social networking, and feature integrated communication solutions.

The communications aspect is often cited as a favorite from team admins - for example, a coach sends a text from the field to a LR short-code saying that the field is too wet to play and practice is canceled. LR then multicasts that out via text, email and web to everyone involved with the team. An entire phone tree replaced with one text message.

Any Bold Predictions for Sports and Technology in the future?

We are near inflection points in a few critical areas including mobile broadband and photo/video technology. So services will emerge that we aren’t even thinking about today. From the LocalReplay perspective, we want to be “in the field of play” during their development, so we can provide the relevant ones to our users (directly or via partners). Virtual training is one service in the very near future that we are currently working on with a couple of partners. As an example of one further into the future:

1. You are at a game with 1000s of other fans. We know this via the GPS in your mobile device and/or your LocalReplay settings.

2. You take a photo/video with your digital camera/camcorder that has a WiFi or 3G-data chip. The photo or video is sent to LocalReplay via that data connection.

3. LocalReplay multicasts the photo or video to all the other fans at the game that have subscribed to the service, or help package it up for peer-to-peer delivery via a connection like WiFi or Bluetooth. Maybe with a link to an online poll - vote if it really was a touchdown. Instant replay for everyone at a local sports event without a multi-million dollar jumbotron. Personalized, social instant replay - watch it as often as you want, share it with people there or not there, comment on it, create a poll from it, save it anywhere, mash it up with another application, etc.

Website:  Yardbarker

Interview With:  Pete Vlastelica, CEO

What is the background of the founders of Yardbarker?

There are 4 of us. The three early founders were myself and two brothers, Jack and Jeff, Kloster. Jack and I met while getting our MBAs at UC Berkeley. Before Berkeley I worked at Disney doing large international content deals, and also at a boutique interactive marketing agency in New York. At Berkeley we wanted to develop a business plan that moved the ball forward in a segment of digital media and we thought sports medias a category was ripe for innovation. We hooked up with our fourth co-founder, Mark Johns, who was the first engineer at Ofoto, which became Kodak Gallery.

Are you Venture backed?

Yes. For the first twelve months we operated on a round of funds raised from friends and family. Then about a year ago we took money from a group of angel investors. This March, we raised capital from Draper Fisher Jurvetsen.

Are you looking at expanding your funding?

Not sure

How many unique visitors are you getting a month?

5 million monthly uniques across the Yardbarker Network.

Is Fox Sports your only content deal? How does it work?

FoxSports.com syndicates articles and videos from the Yardbarker Network. Every publisher in our network has the opportunity to opt-in to this program and take advantage of the extra distribution. The articles that Fox publishes include links back to both Yardbarker and the original article on the publisher’s blog.

How does the Yardbarker Ad Network work?

The publishers in our network assign us the responsibility of representing their sites to brand advertisers. We offer advertisers a very efficient way to reach the large collective audience that hangs out on all the sites in our network. We split the revenue with our publishers and everybody wins.

Was the Yardbaker Ad Network apart of your original business plan?

No, actually it wasn’t. As with most startups, our business model was part of an evolution. . Our site actually started out as something like a “Digg for Sports.” We found that most of the people using it were sports bloggers who were promoting their sites, and it turned out some of the bloggers in this group were looking for a better way to make money from their sites. That was the beginning of the Yardbarker Network.

What is your favorite part about running Yardbarker?

Building the team. We have grown from 5 employees to 20 employees over the past year, and every individual at the company is outstanding. We have been able to build our team while not losing the passion that was there when we started. We’re proud of that.

How have you had so much success with Athlete Bloggers?

We learned that athletes were looking for something like this. There is a new generation of athletes that don’t want to just be quoted in a newspaper article – they want to be able to tell their story on their own terms and connect with fans in an authentic way. We always stress the importance of staying dedicated to their blogs. We tell them that it’s worse to start a blog and then quit than to never blog at all.

Was Greg Oden your first big athlete blogger?

You could say that. John Lackey was our first professional athlete blogger and Chris Henry (the running back for the Titans) was our very first athlete blogger leading up to last year’s NFL Draft.

How are the athletes paid?

We share advertising revenue with our athlete bloggers.

Have advertisers sponsored individual athlete blogs?

Yes, quite a few. Playstation sponsored Carmello Anthony’s blog; 2k Sports sponsored Greg Oden’s Blog, and Modells, a sporting goods company in Boston, sponsored Rajon Rondo’s blog, among others.

What type of technology do you use?

Yardbarker is custom built using Ruby on Rails

Any Bold Predictions for the future of sports and technology?

The definition of a Social Network is going to change – it’s no longer about being on one site where everyone else has to come visit you to hang out. Social functionality will start to spread across the web via a patchwork of sites with like-minded audiences. Widgets will get better. No matter where you are on the web you will feel like you’re in the social environment that you choose to be in. If I want to talk sports, I should be able to do that with my friends whether I’m on ESPN, Facebook, Yardbarker, or some small blog. The web itself is the ultimate social network.

(We had the pleasure of doing this interview over the phone with Pete and we thoroughly enjoyed it.  He seemed to understand his market extremely well and as long as Yardbarker can keep bringing in the advertisers we see them being dominant force in the sports space online)

Website: SportsZu.tv

SportZu.tv was founded by two Colorado companies, Interactive Marketing and Innovation (IMI), a strategic marketing company and SportsHD Productions, a high definition video production company (SHD).

IMI, SHD and the SportZu.tv initial investors own 100% of SportZu.tv.IMI and SHD have decades of experience in television and interactive content production and editing, video channel development, venue management, media operations, sponsorship sales, marketing and sports team operations. Both companies have significant local and North American contacts in the sports, corporate and media world including executive relationships with the National Basketball Association, National Hockey League, National Lacrosse League, Canadian Football League, Major League Lacrosse, Central Hockey League, Arena Football League, Fox Sports, CBS Sports, ESPN and others.

David Ehrlich, CEO. President and founder of IMI, Ehrlich is a former “40 under 40″ Sports Business Journal award winner while Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Kroenke Sports Enterprises (KSE) – owner of the Denver Nuggets, the Colorado Avalanche, the Pepsi Center and a variety of other sports franchises and entertainment properties. Ehrlich has over 10 years of executive experience in the sports and entertainment industries.

Matt Bortz, President. Founder and President/COO of SHD, Bortz was the former President of BORTZ Sports, a sports marketing and consulting firm. In the course of his 15+ year career, Bortz assisted a variety of major professional and collegiate sports leagues and affiliated teams, including the NBA, MLB, NHL, MLS and the PGA Tour. Bortz has significant interactive platform experience, having consulted with NBA.com, PGATour.com and others in the interactive space.

Craig Jonas, Chief Business Development Officer. Founder, Principal and Chief Business Development Officer for SHD, Jonas has consulted for several sports entities (Basketball Travelers, PE4Life, and Inside Edge) and was Vice President for Business Development for the broadcast and interactive media technology firm, Sportvision. Prior to joining Sportvision, Jonas served as Executive Vice President for Coach’s Edge and initiated the $100M+ merger with Sportvision. Jonas is a former successful head college basketball coach and a current member of the National Sports Marketing Network Denver Board.

What does SportZu.tv do?

SportZu.tv is the bridge between the passion of professional sports and the audience and community of youth sports. SportZu.tv is an interactive sports community for professional sports organizations and youth sports organizations focused on kids ages 8 to 18, and their parents and coaches.

SportZu.tv was created to serve the youth sports market in three ways:

1.       Provide entertaining and educational high quality video (over 2,400 minutes of professionally produced content) featuring professional sports teams, coupled with amateur video content provided by the SportZu.tv community of users;

2.       Enable sports leagues and teams to reach out through SportZu.tv video channels to their local community while marketing their own games and activities; and

3.       Provide players, coaches and parents with an excellent resource for (a) improving their sport performance and understanding through interaction with high quality videos featuring professional players and teams, and (b) creating their own sports channel to communicate to others on their team and share experiences with others in their local and online community with similar interests. 

How do you generate revenue?

SportZu.tv generates revenue by selling advertising as well as creating sponsorship opportunities for groups that wish to be associated with a given SportZu.tv channel. An example of the former is the sale of an advertising package to Dairy Queen. An example of the latter is the sale of the presenting sponsorship of the SportZu.tv Doctor’s Corner to Peak Orthopedics (launch July 2008).

To motivate its content partners to activate their channels, SportZu.tv also provides a revenue share to such partners from revenue generated on their channel. Partners are then economically motivated to keep their channel active and fresh.

SportZu.tv is also preparing to launch additional ancillary revenue platforms such as pod-casting subscription services and merchandising that will follow a similar revenue sharing model.

Currently SportZu.tv is managing its own advertising and sponsorship inventory.

How have your marketed your site?

SportZu.tv has created proprietary marketing templates for its relationships with professional sports teams and youth sports organizations. SportZu.tv’s professional team marketing is focused on high-impact mass audience promotions while the youth sports organizations’ marketing elements focus more on connecting directly with the youth audience and attracting new SportZu.tv members.

Notwithstanding the different approaches, there is crossover in the marketing efforts. SportZu.tv obtains access to each partner’s member and fan databases for direct marketing and conducts on-site marketing at high attendance events and tournaments.

Sample professional sports team marketing benefits include:

1. Editorial exposure on team websites and through email blasts;
2. Syndicated SportZu.tv video footage on arena jumbotron;
3. Event presence and in-venue giveaways;
4. Video access to players and team management; and
5. Re-purposed game, community and in-venue footage.

 
Sample youth sport organization marketing benefits include:

1. Email introductions about the relationship and benefits;
2. Email newsletter alerts about video and channel updates;
3. Exclusive video promotions;
4. Focus group sessions with players, parents and coaches; and
5. Syndicated video player and footage of special events.

Funding History

SportZu.tv’s initial funding came from a “friends and family” round and we recently closed an additional round of financing with the same investor group.

Are you currently looking for additional funding?

With adequate funding to continue our expansion outside of Colorado, we would take on additional strategic funding partners under the right circumstance, but it is not currently a priority.

What type(s) of technology do you currently use?

SportZu.tv was built on the Drupal platform (ex: MTV.com, Sony Music, Warner Brothers).  A key driver for the choice of the Drupal platform is its open-source nature, which enables us to easily import additional functionality, remain current with new technology and scale quickly.

Under our platform SportZu.tv members can express themselves by creating personal video channels, taking sports communication and interaction to the next level.

Teams and Leagues using SportZu.tv can:

1. Create a video library and syndicate content across assets;
2. Showcase new and repurposed footage on the channel;
3. Extend current sponsor exposure and relationships;
4. Create exclusive video-based contests; and
5. Strengthen connection and communication to key audiences.

Coaches using SportZu.tv can:

1. Host team information on a private channel or group;
2. Upload and share user created videos and/or copy professional “tips and drills” to their team channel; and
3. Communicate important team information and updates to all team members and families.

Youth Athletes and Parents using SportZu.tv can:

1. Communicate with friends and family about their games;
2. Put game video and pictures on their channel or group;
3. Watch other family’s video of games they missed; and
4. View tips and drills, nutrition, sportsmanship and sports psychology from industry professionals.

What is your favorite SportZu.tv feature?

We believe that the SportZu.tv user’s ability to create a personalized video channel either as an individual or a coach creating a team channel or for a web site using the SportZu.tv syndicated video player, is a critical advantage as the web becomes increasingly video-centric.

Any bold predictions for the future of sports and technology?

The 8-18 year old wants to control his or her own content experience. Teams and youth sports organizations will have to cater to that desire and utilize SportZu.tv like platforms to reach youth. If they can do that effectively they will engage the youth audience and the youth audience will shape their product and content in exiting ways that people had not anticipated.

What are the founders’ backgrounds and qualifications?