Monday, April 21, 2008

Red Herring

I am on my way back from the Red Herring Europe conference in Malta. Sportingo was short listed as a finalist at the event which was a nice honor and I got a chance to present the company. Overall the conference did not seem to attract as much as an audience as it did last year. I am not sure if it was due to the location or a change, marketing of the event or a change in the industry. Bret Hoffman the founder of MyDeco gave a very interesting presentation about his new venture and some key learning from his past at Lastminute.com . If he succeeds in his goal MyDeco will become a very important company and the site is worth while visiting although I feel that it still lucks focus and seems to just have to many different features in it.

There seemed to be a lot of companies in the mobile space all talking about better browser experience the shift introduced by the iPhone and social networking. I still find my Blackberry very limiting in surfing the web and that most of my surfing is to find sport scores, weather and check that the Sportingo site has not crushed. There are clear advances in mobile technology which will offer a lot more to users from location based services to better data transfer using Wifi etc I am just still not convinced how quickly they will be adopted by the majority of the market place.

On a separate note we launched a beta of our new site redesign this week. Please visit the site and send us your feedback. We still have a lot of fixing to do but wanted to share it with our audience sooner then later and get feedback on the layout and functionality. More about the beta and site redesign in my next post.

Friday, April 11, 2008

New Partnerships

In the past few weeks we launched a couple of interesting new partnerships. The first with the BBC which now includes links to What’s Online from its sport pages. The second new partnership is with Virgin Media which now encourages its users to sign up and write about sports through Sportingo. Virgin has been at the forth front on sport and Internet in the past year. They acquired the rights to broadcast highlights of the Premier League over the Internet then introduced a very bold new design to their website. We are very pleased to be associated with Virgin as they lead the way in getting more fan participation on their website.