We are number One!!! A milestone for CrowdZone – becoming the #1 iPhone Sports app.  Sports fans are loyal and fiercely tribal in their allegiance to their favorite teams. We have been exploring the various ways to channel this expression in the CrowdZone Social Network. This summer we brainstormed over a 100 ideas, whittled down to a dozen great ideas, and then focused on a couple of ideas for implementation and testing. One of them was a fun way to collect virtual mascots and numbered jerseys. Fans need to spend points for a chance at winning a virtual good. Fans gain points by their regular CrowdZone activities such as checking into games, rooting for their favorite teams, predicting winning teams, stadium presence during the game, posting pictures and shouts, inviting and interacting with friends, etc. This new scratch-off game feature was released last week as version 1.62. This is the most popular release of CrowdZone, yet. We made it to #1 in Sports. Below is a iTunes snapshot of what consumers are saying and doing:

Number One Sports App

Consumers review CrowdZone version 1.62

CrowdZone version 1.62 has been launched with the addition of virtual goods. Fans can now collect team mascots and jerseys – and what we see so far they are loving it, with a lot of new activity. We are at #6 for Sports in the iTunes app store today. Hopefully we will see this rise to #1. That would be a nice milestone.

The new features sets us up to enable our partners, the teams/leagues/etc. to generate transaction oriented revenues with their fans.

Baseball is by far the most prolific sport in the USA. As America’s pastime, organized Baseball extends from Major League Games to a host of Minor League Games.

30 teams play Major League Baseball with an average attendance of 30,000 per game. Given that there are 2,430 games each season, over 73 million game attendances are recorded each year. This is certainly a very big sport.

The popularity of Minor League Baseball games may come as surprising to some. There are 136 full-season clubs including the 16-team Mexican League. Approximately 4,000 fans attended each of the 1,500 or so games played in March and April, that is ~6 million patrons in the first 2 months. More than 40 million fan attendances will have been recorded by the time this season is over.

Needless to say, there are countless millions of fans who follow these games on television. CrowdZone is a Mobile Crowd Network that connects fans at the game with those watching at home or in sports bars.

Our first app exclusively tailored to Baseball called “Check’n Cheer Baseball” is now available in the iPhone app store. Baseball fans can now check into all the major league and minor league games and connect with other fans and friends.

Description

Check’n Cheer is the best way to follow and cheer for your favorite MLB & Minor League Baseball teams while earning points for tickets and prizes,
including a chance to win ’10 World Series tickets!

You’ll get scores, updates and hear the roar of the crowd from your favorites games while connecting with friends and other fans from inside stadiums or watching at home from all around the world.

KEY FEATURES:

- Scores, Updates & TV listings showing games
- Check-in to your favorite games with other fans
- View & post game photos & chatter
- See who’s at the game & find your friends
- Compete against opposing fans & win trophies
- Win tickets & prizes from your favorite teams!

We made a cut this week, pushed out a bunch of enhancements as version 1.5 into the app store. We made some big strides in enhancing the user experience, as well as the ability to post to Facebook and Twitter. The team of course is already on to bigger things in the next release….

Some of the improvements detailed below:

* Faster launch and overall performance improvements
* Join the Crowd anonymously, interact with other fans without having to sign up
* See how many points you’ve earned, trophies you’ve won, and games you’re checked into in a global ticker
* Get the game score, status, and number of checked in fans directly from the main screen
* Post quick chatter
* Post chatter to your Facebook and Twitter accounts
* Sound effects help you root for your team
* Consolidated multiple trophies to single trophies with a badge indicating the number of times you’ve won the trophy
* Description pages for the trophies that you’ve won
* See people’s profile photos in the leaderboard
* See who’s rooting for which team in the chatter and leaderboard
* Add and manage your favorite teams
* Get alerts when you win a trophy, your buddies check in, and games start / end
* Add buddies directly from the leaderboard and game score screen

Should we file a patent now? One of the first items we tend to take care off when starting a technology business is to protect our intellectual property by filing patent applications. Patents can take years to issue. Hopefully the unique and useful ideas we seek to protect will have come into commonplace usage by the time the patent issues. So it is make sense for a technology start-up to file early, but this process can be a strain on scarce time and economic resources.

The cost of developing products has been dropping dramatically with the leverage of new technologies and a global talent pool over the past 2-3 years. These gains in productivity make it possible for entrepreneurs to turn ideas into useful product without large investment needs. Unfortunately, there has been no real corresponding productivity improvements in other adjacent services that are needed to build a business. It costs more to file a patent or structure a round of financing today than it did 3 years ago. One needs to keep a very tight rein on these overhead expenses and ensure that a huge huge share of resources go toward developing a truly great product. In the end it is all about coming up with that truly distinguished product that our customers seek. Everything else matters less.

Nice surprise!  It has only been a few days since our launch at CTIA 2010 in Las Vegas. Thousands of iPhone users have started to download the app and check into the daily games – baseball, hockey, basketball and soccer. We are a top 10 Sports app in the iTunes store – at #8 just behind Fox Sports but ahead of CBS Sports.  These ratings are dynamic and change daily.  I captured the iTunes screen shot below in order to memorialize our achievement.

It has been great fun working with a stunningly talented and passionate team. The enthusiastic reception by consumers has been very gratifying. The results often speak for themselves, as it does in this case. We see crowds of enthusiastic fans gathering daily around many of the games on CrowdZone. Who are these CrowdZoners?  Well, some of them can be seen on our home page at: www.crowdzone.com.

Building a great first product is a small part of the larger story. We need to make the product even better, add more conveniences and functionality.  That in essence is our mission, to enhance and simplify consumers’ daily lives using mobile.  We are now onto this next phase of improving upon the 1.0 product. The list of features we had to shelve to make the 1.0 release timeline is very long.  We are all now back on the treadmill to release 1.2. More caffeine please..

Below are a couple of press stories around our launch:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/25/tc50-demopit-winner-crowdzone-launches-mobile-social-network-for-sports-fans/

http://www.iphonelife.com/blog/2458/crowdzone-crowds-thing

Some team pictures from CTIA….