PicksPal, a fantasy sports betting site, is launching a March Madness game this morning.
Picks are made via an Ajax interface by clicking on the winners through to the Final Four. Once you’ve selected winners for all of the games, you can invite friends to participate as well, and create a widget showing your picks to put on a blog or social networking site. Users can also set up private leagues to compete directly with friends and office workers.
There are a number of prizes that the company is giving away each round (iPods, Nintendo DSs, Slingboxes, PS3s 37″ TVs and two Mini Coopers) . If anyone you’ve invited wins any prize, you get that same prize as well.
“If anyone you’ve invited wins any prize, you get that same prize as well.”
If everyone invite on or two persons, then the contest go “viral”.
And then you have a lot less chance to win…
The idea of setting up private leagues sounds very good. In that case you can set your own private league and compete with people you know.
Actually, I saw Blingo do this idea. Of giving prizes to all the people you invite. Pretty neat thing and really gets the viral going. Does increase your chances if you’re a popular guy.
Why crazy people got addicted to scoreboards?
They never seen numbers since they graduate right off college.
What do you get when you win and lose after watching scoreboards?
Nothing…
Well predicting who will win is just like timing capital markets, only conjectures can be made.
http://www.tekn...ld.blogspot.com
Oh… I guess this is a sports thing…
This is the first year I’ll be playing Facebook’s March Madness Pool. It got me thinking about the intersection of social media and fantasy sports in general.
Why isn’t there more going on in this space? Or maybe you’ve covered this, Michael, and I just haven’t seen it. Some of the most profitable businesses on the Web are those that can attract premium fantasy sports users. Fantasy Sports, such as baseball / football / basketball seem like a natural way for Facebook to expand and perhaps solve some of the monetization problems.
On a different tangent, Yahoo and CBS Sportsline could be doing quite a bit more with their existing fantasy properties. Both sites have hundreds of thousands of fantasy users that aren’t being properly leveraged into other properties. Niether, the last time I checked, was offering even a sliver of the networking interaction you’d expect in a time when social networks are becoming a commodity feature. I don’t know. Just seems weird to me.
Please tell me those are not your real picks! That might have been a good bracket 10 years ago, but this time around we can safely say you won’t need to clear room in the garage for that Mini.
Arrington is going to win the Cooper!
Did you fill out the bracket based on how many players will eventually be i-bankers? If you did you left off Penn
facebook did this last year and is doing it again w/ better prizes this year.
here is a cool one in the NY Times
http://q8.nytim...t/index.html?hp
These guys were handing out flyers at the United Center this weekend during the Big Ten tournament.
Lamely, their bracket wouldn’t submit for me in firefox.
Love that you have Stanford going all the way!!!!!
HA!
TC – you should have posted this yesterday. Already using the Yahoo tool for my pool. The scenario feature that Yahoo provides is great once the tourney starts – let’s you see how you will do if your picks win, highest seeds win and how you place in your private league.
mrshl is right – lots of room for improvement. Millions gather online for the next three weeks because of this tournament.
What’s this? TC readers can’t handle march madness? Can’t all you web2.0 uber-geeks step out of your 2.0 bubble for a minute and enjoy the great improvements in NCAA bracket mgmt interfaces that are being rolled out?
I just completed 4 brackets on CBS Sportsline, ESPN.com, Yahoo Sports, and the one Mike mentioned above. I’ve noticed a significant number enhancements in each of the bracket mgmt interfaces and functionality over previous years.
@4 – wtf are you trying to say?
@6 – Is it really that hard to imagine that a TC reader might also be a college hoops fan?
@13 – worked fine for me in FF.
@ all – Syracuse got screwed!