What is interesting about this is that it is a very non-traditional marketing move by a small fantasy company. Fantasy Knuckleheads realizes that getting people to read its content is its biggest struggle, so it has created a tool that will bring additional people to its site. By making inclusion within the widget available to any fantasy site, asKurt Turner of Fantasy Knuckleheads put it, “This is a win-win situation for everyone involved and will help promote each others’ content and help us all achieve our goals, more readers and page views.” Well said.

Daily and simple fantasy sports are one of the larger growth markets in the fantasy industry right now(Fanball and NBC Sports‘ SnapDraft has already paid out over $2M in prizes). 140Bets’ approach is the most interesting, because it is building on top of an established platform like Twitter makes the game easily accessible to millions, easy to play, and could potentially benefit from the viral growth that social networks can have. While TweetBracket is just a technology demonstration, but I like to think that it gives us an idea that there just might be a number of different ways to play fantasy sports in the future.

Other sites, such as FanDuel, are already exploring fantasy games played on Twitter, so TweetBracket is not unique. However, the fact that everything is heavily integrated with Twitter is truly remarkable. TweetBracket players just have to log into their Twitter accounts and they are good to go. That’s a really nice feature. Something more sites need to do (or use Facebook Connect). 140Bets’ games are much more like an extension of Twitter than its own site.

What are your thoughts on the direction that 140Bets is taking?

Fantasy Football Is Adult Christmas and the Draft Is Like New Year’s Eve Michael Deszo breaks down why this time of the year is his favorite season, and what steps you need to take to get ready for the fantasy season. There are a few good tips in there (do a mock draft), and a few non-traditional ones (be the Alpha Dog, whatever that means).

Fantasy Football: My Most Fulfilling and Consistent Relationship For some, fantasy football is that one constant in their lives that never changes. Year, after year, fantasy football is there providing thrills and disappointments, but mostly, moments of Joy. Michael McDonald contemplates the actuality in his and provides the steps that you need to develop this kind of healthy relationship in your life.

Verizon Adding Widgets, Web Video To Fios TV If you are one the people lucky enough to have Verizon FiOS and happen to play fantasy sports on ESPN, you will now be able to check out how your fantasy team is doing without living your couch or opening up your laptop. Verizon FiOS is adding the capability to view numerous widgets, such as the ESPN Fantasy Widgets, or probably more popular ones like Facebook.

That is all for now, but please check back often for more news.

It looks like after losing its court case to have boxscores and player statistics to be taken out of the public domain (see: Fantasy Sports Win Right to Player Names, Statistics), MLB Advanced Media has found a way to create new statistics that it will own and will license as it sees fit. MLBAM will now have some statistics it can call its very own. MLBAM has not announced how it plans to distribute the data, and how much of the data will be made available to the public, and how much will stay private for use by the teams.

Currently in testing in San Francisco, four high-resolution cameras capture everything on the field in three dimensions. Then, the information is transmitted to a control room where very sophisticated software is able to differentiate a baseball from a runner. Each game produces over two million meaningful location points. These points are then used to determine how much ground an outfield covered, how long it took for a ball to land, how efficiently someone runs the bases, or numerous yet-to-be-thought of statistics. At a cost of $5M, MLBAM plans to have the system rolled out to every major league park by 2010.

From a fantasy perspective, this is just more information to determine if a player is good, or just lucky. More importantly, it might create stats that can be used in fantasy leagues. For the stat heads in the world of fantasy baseball, it may just be information overload.

Now, if we can just use that technology to see if a ball was actually fair or foul…

After watching the companies take turns making the same mistakes year-after-year, I think this something that is long over due in the industry, and eventually lead to better products and innovations.

Below is the introductory email and invitation from the Fantasy Tech Group. If you are interested, head over to Fantasy Tech, and join.

At the recent FSTA Chicago Conference, a small group of “fantasy sports tech” folk had lunch and discussed forming a user group related to the “techies” of the industry. Thus, a few of us have started the Fantasy Tech Group to bring together the segment of developers that work in the industry on the tech side of things.

We don’t want to make this a complicated social network that tries to rival your Facebook friends list or flood your Twitter stream with statements like “I just ate a sandwich and fixed the waiver system code.” We do want to make this a site that allows for some talk across the wire regarding fantasy sports technology and the folks that work on it.

Here is what you DON’T need to do:

* Pay any fees
* Be a member of any association
* Consider yourself to be a tech guru

Here is what we HOPE you will do:

* Create a profile at http://www.fantasytech.org
* Introduce yourself on the forum
* Send us suggestions to make the group better or get involved
* Pass this email along to other fantasy tech developers you know

If there’s one thing we noticed at the conference, the fantasy sports business folks know each other pretty well, but the fantasy sports tech folks are a disconnected bunch. Hopefully, this group can create some better dialogue.

Randy Burgess, Don Van Demark, Kevin Goodfellow
info@fantasytech.org

http://www.fantasytech.org