Fantasy Football Goes Mobile

So as I mentioned I’ve been playing fantasy football since before the Internet. We used to keep score via spreadsheets and each week had to wait or the USA Today to publish their weekly stats. If the commissioner of the league was out of contention, often the stats wouldn’t get done for weeks at a time and the league became a mess.

Enter the Internet and web based commissioner services. And once what was a bunch of nerd huddled around a spreadsheet became an industry that every major media entity is trying to get a piece of. Technology in the late 90′s and early 2000′s totally revolutionized the world of fantasy sports.

Now mobile has the chance to repeat history.

At Citizen Sports, we have always aimed to bring fantasy sports to users where they are already spending time. We were the first company to launch a full fledged fantasy football commissioner product on Facebook last season and this season we’ve extended that functionality to the iPhone.

Our iPhone application now available for free in the iPhone store. For those of you in leagues on our Fantasy app on Facebook, you will be able to manage your roster, view live scoring and track all your player news on your iPhone via our app.




For those of you who aren’t in a league in our Facebook league you can still enter your players from any league you are in, on any service. You can then track the scoring and news of those players real-time.

Probably the coolest feature on the application is the way we have used the iPhone’s push notification system. Once you have set up the application you will receive push notifications on any new news on your players or any scoring updates on your players. Imagine Sunday morning, tied up at church or shopping with the girlfriend. A push notification shows up on your phone with news that Adrian Peterson has been scratched due to an accident slipping on a banana peel in the locker room. You open the app, go into your roster and sub Chester Taylor in for him in your starting lineup. Then go back to saying Our Father or telling your girlfriend how nice her new dress looks on her without missing a beat.

Just download the app, so your reason for losing this year isn’t your commitment to God or your girlfriend.

Sportacular v1.3 brings social sports experience to the iPhone

After a long company-wide vision quest, we here at Citizen Sports are excited to announce that the latest update for our Sportacular app for the iPhone has been approved by Apple. The update is our first step towards a more social sports experience from your phone, something we’re passionate about improving. Sportacular 1.3 allows users to comment on live games, in real time, from anywhere in the world. You can also pick winners and see what the world thinks about an upcoming game.

If the social sports experience isn’t your thing and you just have Sportacular for fast, easy-to-use live scores and stats, you’ll still be stoked about version 1.3. You can now configure your auto-updates (10 to 90 seconds) via the Settings tab. This means that all scores, stats, play details plus the new NBA on-court view will automatically refresh at the interval you set. You’ll notice a nice improvement to general performance as well.

We will roll out improvements regularly over the next few weeks and months, so we would love to hear your feedback on what we should come next.  Right now we’re focusing on adding more teams and leagues (specifically Premier League, Champions League, and a few other European football leagues) plus enhancements to the social side of the experience. What do you want from your mobile sports application?

Onward,
Brian Mead

Brian is a Product Manager for Citizen Sports and enjoys pointing out how lame people can be when they try to get clever while writing these blurbs, including this one.