Product Name:
Autography
Company Name:
Autography LLC
Product Description:
Our technology allows athletes to autograph digital trading cards, pictures of game-winning plays, and meet-n-greet photos with fans. Using a tablet computer, the autographed digital media is delivered to fans by email or text message link for them to download. Our technology has been used by New York Times bestselling authors including Heather Graham and R.L. Stine, as well as multi-platinum musical artists including Luke Bryan and Sarah Evans. In 2015 we were issued a patent for an application of this technology specifically designed for the sports industry. An athlete’s signature can be biometrically authenticated to eliminate counterfeiting. This ensures each signature is mathematically scored every time our media is autographed. The system will immediately flag any inconsistencies, requiring verification through additional biometric data points before authentication is approved. Athletes could also attach an audio or video greeting to the autographed media. Imagine an athlete providing a personalized narrative as a voiceover on video of their game winning hit, touchdown, or goal. Instead of physical souvenirs that can be lost, stolen, or accidentally destroyed, all of our media is permanently archived on our servers. Autographed digital media is delivered to fans with embedded social media links for ease-of-brag in posting to the big four sites in the U.S., (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and MySpace). There are over 60 major social media sites worldwide and even more mobile messaging platforms that we plan to expand to.
What Makes This Product Worthy of Winning This Category?
The closing half of the year was ugly. The bad PR was not limited to the big two Daily Fantasy Sports operators – the problem jeopardizes our entire industry. What had been accepted as an innocuous, perhaps even geeky past time must now be defended to spouses, bosses, children, and colleagues. Their disapproval will not end until there is a better narrative. We need to change the story. Operators need a unique offering to keep contestants engaged. Fans who may not win cash rewards can remain immersed in the experience through personalized media – photos, audio messages, and/or video clips – from their favorite athletes. We took our recently patented technology and redesigned it to create an exclusive new Fantasy Sports service, filing a whole new patent late in 2015. With our new concept, fans will design their own Fantasy uniforms, complete with their own team colors and logos. The athlete autographs an image in their real-world uniform, but Fantasy players can opt to receive the autographed image with the athlete wearing their fan-designed uniform! This is what digital technology can bring to Fantasy Sports. The athlete’s face, autograph, and personalization remain the same, but the fan-designed uniform replaces the real-world regalia. Imagine Malcolm Butler or Stephen Curry sending out an autographed digital trading card featuring a fan-designed uniform! It is the personal aspect that makes Fantasy Sports so popular – now the memorabilia is catching up. Using their own proprietary customer metrics, Fantasy Sports operators will soon be able to select the fans to reward. These can be incentivizing the fans most likely to succumb to negative churn or rewarding the most vocal and public supporters. This is the strategy a Seattle-based startup called Amazon used to overcome early stage negative press and become the global success it is today. We believe this coalition program between Autography and Fantasy Sports operators can benefit the entire industry. Together we can underscore the message that success comes from individual study and analysis, not blind luck. Until we can change the media’s story, we stand to lose the court of public opinion to the insidious cancer of doubt.
Product URL:
www.autography.com
Special Instructions:
Product Name:
SportsManias app
Company Name:
SportsManias
Product Description:
SportsManias uses human selection and innovative Artificial Intelligence technology that allows users to customize their mobile sports news experience to their interests, automatically curating the most reputable social news in real-time. Season fantasy football players can import their rosters from ESPN, CBS and/or Yahoo for a winning edge: a real-time news feed on their roster to make smarter lineup decisions. SportsManias organizes, by topic and relevance, all of the sports content from Twitter and other social platforms. You get what you want, when you want it, from the best sources with no search or noise. During and after the games, fans can talk digital smack with the world’s first animated sports emoji keyboard. After launching with season fantasy football in 2015, SportsManias will add pro basketball, baseball and daily fantasy football in 2016.
What Makes This Product Worthy of Winning This Category?SportsManias’ real time fantasy football feeds arm season fantasy players with the most up-to-date information to make smarter lineup decisions. Curating real-time news and analysis from the team beat writers and fantasy experts, SportsManias gives the fantasy player a distinct edge for last-minute lineup decisions. No search, no bouncing from site to site, no more missing that late position swap that makes the difference between winning and losing.
Product URL:
https://app.sportsmanias.com/media
Special Instructions:
Import your fantasy football team from ESPN, Yahoo or CBS, and you’ll receive a real-time news feed on every player on your roster from all the best, most-professional sources. You also can customize SportsManias for your favorite teams in the NFL, NCAA, MLB, NHL, NBA, MLS and international soccer.
Product Name:
Draft
Company Name:
Draft
Product Description:
Draft is the easiest way to play daily fantasy sports. Play versus friends or random opponents in head-to-head snake drafts. Build from the ground up for mobile, draft is much like words with friends, except instead of making a word you’re picking a player. Play for fun or for real money.
What Makes This Product Worthy of Winning This Category?
In it’s first year Draft has grown from 0 to hundreds of thousands of players playing on iOS and Android. The Draft app has over 1000 five stars reviews on each platform and is constantly one of the top rankings sports apps in each app store.
Product URL:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/draft-head-to-head-daily-fantasy/id929695550?mt=8, play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.playdraft.playdraft
Special Instructions:
Product Name:
SidePrize
Company Name:
SidePrize
Product Description:
SidePrize raises the stakes in season-long fantasy leagues by bringing additional competitions to the traditional format beyond the season-long buy-in.
What Makes This Product Worthy of Winning This Category?SidePrize is pioneering a brand new category in the fantasy industry, evidenced by winning the FSTA Elevator Pitch and Shark Tank awards at this summer’s conference. Outside of innovations like real-time scoring, the season-long format has remained largely the same over the last decade. SidePrize allows season-long providers to maintain levels of engagement over the course of the sport season, and SidePrize allows consumers to get better ROI from the amount of time they spend towards their fantasy leagues.
Product URL:
www.sideprize.com
Special Instructions:
It takes three simple steps to become a winner on SidePrize: Connect, Select & Collect. Create an account on sideprize.com, connect your fantasy league, choose any opponent(s) from your league, place a challenge ahead of the week’s matchup and collect your prize after you beat your friends.
Product Name:
Fantasy 6 Labs (F6L)
Company Name:
Fantasy 6 Labs (F6L)
Product Description:
What Makes This Product Worthy of Winning This Category?Fantasy 6 Labs (F6L), is a venture builder that builds Fantasy Sports start-ups in the web, mobile, gaming and film spaces. With a special focus on funding socially responsible companies, international start-ups and female founders. In 2015, F6L launched over 5 start-ups, in 14 different countries, employed over 35 people, and generated over $25M in sales. F6L start-ups and team members have received numerous awards, with the most recent acknowledgements being: Prime Minister’s Volunteer Award 2015, National EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Special Citation recipient for Advancing Entrepreneurship 2015, Ernst & Young Technology Entrepreneur of the Year 2015, Startup Canada Award for Entrepreneur Support, BIV’s Top Forty Under 40, Top 30 Under 20, INC 500 fastest growing companies in the US and SBBC Best Company in BC. Founded in 2015, F6L was one of the pioneers of the ‘Venture Builder’ model, which was a new and innovative approach to building start-ups in the Fantasy Sports space. A Venture Builder is essentially a start-up that builds start-ups. They raise capital, pull business ideas from within their own network of resources, assign internal teams to build MVPs (programmers, business developers, sales team, etc.) and run very effective marketing campaigns during their ventures’ pre- and post-launch phases. The product is the venture, the prototype is the business model, and ‘shipping code’ means perfect and timely execution. F6L has an uncanny ability to execute in unknown markets in the most perfect way. Every good entrepreneur will tell you that ideas are worthless and execution is everything. It certainly holds true for venture builders, and F6L is one of the best in that category at the global level. Outside of this entrepreneurial work, the F6L team has contributed significant time to charity and community work. They believe that companies have a responsibility to “give back” to society. This focus includes contributions of time, knowledge and money, a duty to provide environmentally friendly products and services, and a desire to improve the lives of individuals here in North America and around the globe. This socially responsible “consciousness” permeates everything F6L does. Through this model of venture philanthropy, F6L contributes 12.5 percent of company proceeds and encourages employees to invest 40 hours per month of their time and professional expertise in local non-profits to strengthen these organizations and scale their impact. The F6L team has actively recruited a network of entrepreneurs, professionals, volunteers and community leaders to create a local network of partners uniting passion and purpose. At home (in British Columbia, Canada), their mission is focused on strengthening the organizational capacity of non-profits serving children in need and youth at risk. Their vision is to ensure more children and youth reach their full potential. In the past year alone, they have provided over 200,000 nutritious meals for families in Vancouver and Dallas through their Fight Hunger and Thanks4giving Fantasy Hockey and Football Challenges. In addition, they have given 800 disadvantaged youth access to organized amateur sports, and taught children, parents and community members about healthy foods and healthy food systems in over 340 different schools across North America.
Product URL:
Special Instructions:
Product Name:
Fantasy Life
Company Name:
Fantasy Life the App, LLC.
Product Description:
The first mobile only fantasy football community, the Fantasy Life app has public forums on a variety of topics (waiver wire, start sit; trade advice; etc) ; private messaging for leagues ; real time public posting that allows users to trash talk, post player polls, and get advice questions. You can follow fellow users; comment on posts and “prop” (like) them. Inspired by Matthew Berry’s best selling book Fantasy Life.
What Makes This Product Worthy of Winning This Category?Fantasy Life is now the largest social fantasy football community for mobile. The goal was to unite fantasy football players beyond just their leagues, providing a place to get advice, have fun, meet others and celebrate everything we all love about fantasy sports. During the 2015 season the app has had over 295,000 posts, 450,000 messages sent, and over 1.2MM comments on public posts. The app has cracked the Top 25 free sports apps on the Apple App Store multiple times and has been a cult phenomenon.
Product URL:
fantasylifeapp.com
Special Instructions: