The origin of Next Impulse Sports is based around sports fandom. My co-founder, Kiley Kmiec and I were working at EA SPORTS sending around links and emails about sports. All day long. This constant feed of sports content back and forth made us marginal EA employees but it was the catalyst for our first website, Cosby Sweaters which is now Next Impulse Sports.
Due to our origins we’re always interested in cool things that companies are doing to combine sports fandom and technology. There’s a lot of really interesting stuff going on in the space and we want to help our readers by curating some of the sports based tech and companies that are worth checking out. One of those is a very cool iOS app built by a team up in Seattle called Fanzo.
What is it?
The Fanzo team uses tech and human curation to serve fans news, blog and social content for their teams. If you are a Broncos fan, you fire up the app, tell it your favorite team and you’ll get content from a national and local perspective as well as the latest social conversations from other fans of your team. So rather than getting a single high level story from ESPN or having to struggle hunt around twitter and the blogosphere, you get it all in a single fan driven view.
Most importantly – the Fanzo tech is giving all content and content contributors a score, pulling in a variety of engagement based data to make sure that truly compelling content is hitting the app.
A feature that is core to the company’s “Where Fans Rule” tagline is their “cheer”/”boo” post functionality. Think of this as an up-vote, down-vote in Reddit. This simple feature gives users perspective on what other content like-minded fans in the app find compelling.
Fanzo, of course is not the only company curating and serving sports content, but they stand out to because of their authentic focus on the fan. The team is constantly talking to their users and they do a great job of highlighting their fans at any opportunity.
It’s really that perfect app to have on your phone to stay up to speed on your teams. It presents team content in great chunkable format so that you can drop in at anytime during the course of your day.
Cool Data From the App
One of the cool things about these apps is all of the data that they’re collecting around sports and their fans. We had the pleasure of chatting with Dana Dyksterhuis, the Co-Founder and Chief Community Officer of Fanzo and she shared some cool data on who the biggest fans are when it comes to consuming and sharing data.
Below is the list as of last week:
1. Manchester United (viewing 400% more content than the #2 set of fans)
2. Arsenal
3. 49ers
4. Seahawks
5. Alabama
6. Chelsea
7. Texas
8. Broncos
9. Auburn
You can learn more about Fanzo on their website and be sure to give it a try, you can download it on iOS here. (Android is coming soon).
