In advance of the DC Sports+Tech Summit hosted by the Georgetown University School of Continuing Studies and the DC Sports Tech Meetup group, Joshua Meredith is providing some insight into the companies taking part in the Showcase, which begins at 4 p.m. on April 4th.
Capturing the millennial mind and dollar is a consistent conversation piece when talking to people around baseball. A baseball game has different rhythm to it that sometimes fails to mesh with the current tech savvy individual. What happens if you were able to fill that time with an app which technically interacts with the game you are watching on your TV or in the ballpark?
Dan Cook, game creator co-founder of Fanamana Baseball (pronounced FAN-NAM-ANA) and his technical co-founders at 3Advance, Paul Murphy and Darren Gibney are seeing if they can bridge the gap between the modern baseball fan, fantasy baseball and your iPhone.
Eighteen months ago, the three were introduced and the partnership began. The first issue, was that while Dan was a veteran fan and avid fantasy baseball player he was no tech expert and both Paul and Darren were from Ireland, not especially a baseball rich land.
“I had to teach them a lot about baseball in the beginning,” Cook said. “But then again I have learned a lot about mobile tech from them.”
“We were both huge sports fans, coming from Ireland, Soccer is number one, and we had played fantasy soccer (involving the premiership) for about five years,” Murphy said speaking for him and Gibney. “When Dan came to us, we got that feeling when something special comes along.”
“It is so simple, being in America is going down to the ballpark and enjoying a game, initially for me it was a social thing, and I would look up at the score intermittently. When we started Fanamana with Dan, I started to appreciate the game and I quickly took up on intricacies and the build-up that occurs during the game, over the course of every pitch and every inning. Getting to build a tech level on top of that was super exciting,” Murphy continued.
While words cannot do the game justice, Fanamana takes live data provided by SportsData to create two kinds of games: LiveAction, which you play during live MLB games and RapidFire, which uses historical data to provide game-data. Players then select batters in order to predict what the outcome of the at-bat is before it occurs all within a 10-second window, the object is as always, to rack up more runs than your opponent. Rapid-Fire games during the off-season used historical data between the MLB hitters and pitchers. I suggest clicking on Mike Trout or Miguel Cabrera if your on-deck screen features either slugger against a left handed pitcher. It can be highly addictive for a baseball junkie who understands the algorithms for selecting hitters against a certain type of pitcher.
The game came out of Cook’s frustration with fantasy baseball and that once a player is in the game, they could not be substituted.
“I was watching a lot of Yahoo’s game tracker, but I couldn’t change my lineup,” Cook exclaimed. “I wanted to substitute, a twist on fantasy…to make the game more like the actual game. The game is based in statistics and it plays just like the real game, nothing I could do fantasy wise.”
One of the reasons that Cook and 3Advance began with baseball was the pace of play. A live-action game like baseball where only the outcome of the at-bat has value allows the developer to stream the data at a reasonable rate. But while the relative pace of the game is beneficial for 3Advance, the sport presents another set of challenges.
“Creating a game, recreating baseball, we need to program the app to go through 9 innings and 27 outs but the most challenging element is integrating every single action into 5-8 seconds…if we are not perfect the integrity of the game is at stake,” Murphy said.
As baseball season starts, the second year of Fanamana will surely bring some new elements and the future of participation lies in monetizing the game.
Daily Fantasy, Labeling Fanamana as a Game of Skill
A game based in statistical analysis and algorithms to select players for at-bats during baseball is where Fanamana believes it intersects with the exploding Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS) world. The game will look to capitalize on adding in a live component to the DFS world, an area which until now has not been explored. Different from in-game betting that occurs globally, a player in Fanamana is asked to use skill in a pressurized window to select a batter who will most likeley reach base against a certain pitcher.
“We are working closely with lawyers but the mobile aspect is a great for us, as it allows tracking users and certifying age consents,” Cook explained. “We are very cautious about it.”
From the developers prospective Murphy said adding in accounts and money, “significantly ups the stakes,” for any app creator. Creation of merchant accounts and building the game in the DFS model are all challenges as they move forward. A number of DFS companies have launched applications, or view platforms for their games (with selections still occurring on a secured website), Fanamana would be one of the first to purely use an app, as the company’s website is a shell to the app store page.
While going to the DFS model is truly an undertaking and could be extremely lucrative it also brings in risk.
“The big thing, the elephant in the room, is that is currently legal but things could change and the whole ship could fall apart,” said Murphy. “All of our work and investment [could be] all for naught and the rug could be pulled out from under us…but we can’t not move forward because of that.”
The next step is for Fanamana to prove that they fit in the DFS field and to prove to consumers that if they hone their skills that it can be used as an alternative to the normal DFS baseball.
Postscript
Picking up your iPhone to play fantasy sports over the course of the last few years has been selecting players and then watching them perform via trackers. What Fanamana really does is bring the action in a matter of moments to these games. It offers players choices and a way to experience being the manager, and as any baseball fan knows, baseball is the ultimate game of skill and decision making.
If you live around Washington, D.C. then come see Fanamana demoed live at the Georgetown University School of Continuing Studies on April 4th at 4 p.m. You can learn more at http://www.meetup.com/DCSportsTech/ or download the app at www.fanamana.com