Tag Archives: SportsTech

Startupbootcamp Demo Day – Sports & EventTech

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The latest Startupbootcamp Virtual Demo Day covered startups in Sports and EventTech. Given the current pandemic lockdown and the lack of sporting events and public festivities in Melbourne (“Australia’s sporting and events capital”), the pitch night was sub-titled “The Comeback…”

As with similar startup programs running during the pandemic, it was remarkable how much the teams had achieved in the circumstances. The 10 startups that presented were as follows (website links in the names):

FlipTix

According to the founders, 30% of all fans leave events early – so they have identified an opportunity to re-purpose those empty seats. Rather than re-selling existing tickets, this platform is issuing new tickets for seats that are no longer being used. Already working with key festival promoters, the team say they are not encouraging flipping or scalping, nor are they competing with existing event ticketing outlets engaged by organisers. As well as issuing new tickets, FlipTix offers event upgrades. However, they also mentioned “pre-event” flipping services – which I assume is different to scalping? Finally, it wasn’t clear how FlipTix verifies that seats have been fully vacated – what about all-day tickets for the cricket, for example, where spectators are free to come and go (with pass-outs).

Benchvote

As sports clubs struggle to maintain connection with their fans under the limitations of lockdown, Benchvote drives engagement with team sponsors and brands to bring them closer to their fans. Essentially an SaaS campaign creation platform, Benchvote offers annual licenses and individual campaigns, and is seeking to engage with other consumer brands, not just sports and events.

Globatalent

Described as “The Sports Neobank”, Globatalent helps aspiring athletes to “sell” shares in themselves to fans and investors (in return for a proportion of their future income). The founders claim that 48% of young athletes lack sufficient funds to continue their sporting careers. With a background as talent scouts in professional tennis, the founders are familiar with the challenges faced by struggling players. While the model seems simple (essentially securitizing future winnings and sponsorship money), it raises a number of questions: do these investments represent financial securities (and all the regulation which that entails)? is it a form of modern slavery (however willing the participants)? does it lay the athletes open to risks associated with gambling such as manipulation and collusion? why wouldn’t fans invest in the clubs instead, with their talent development structures? how does it apply to professional sports such as AFL that have strict salary caps and player drafts? and is it more suited to individual rather than team sports?

Floteq

The team presented data that suggests pubs and clubs waste 9-12% of their draught beer, because of their current systems. Not only does this mean lost sales and revenue, the lack of product consistency impacts brand Integrity. The founders believe that post-COVID there will be an even greater focus on cost controls within hospitality, with the added need to reduce waste and maintain consistency. Floteq comprises an IoT device at the point of delivery and service, to track volumes, sales, quality and consistency.

Friends of Mr Ed

This is an app called “Fred” for race horse owners, to facilitate communications between stables and syndicates. Fred offers a subscription-based B2C model, with the opportunity for additional revenue streams (from sponsors and other industry participants). I’m not familiar with the racing industry, but I don’t see why owners can’t simply use existing social media (and crowdfunding platforms)?

BindiMaps

This system helps blind and vision-impaired people to navigate indoor locations, even if they have never been there before. Designed for office buildings, shopping centres, university buildings and visitor destinations, it uses Bluetooth beacons operating on a standalone system, and can be up and running within 24 hours, complete with an analytics dashboard. Although originally intended for the vision-impaired, it can of course be used by anyone.

TRENDii

In recent years, fashion has “moved from the catwalk to social media”. TRENDii is an AI-powered fashion app and browser extension that allows users to “shop at the point of inspiration”. Aimed at fashion brands, publishers and consumers, TRENDii will rely on ad-based revenue, but with the ability to offer advertisers greater audience reach and context. The founders are also exploring audience partnerships and new verticals such as homewares and furniture.

IntelliCUP

This team is the Australian licensee for the IntelliCUP system for beverage point of delivery and dispensing. Pointing to poor UX at venues and events, the founders are positioning Intellicup as an integrated order, purchase and dispensing system, and are already undertaking client trials. Revenue will come from transaction fees, hardware sales, in-app purchases, and the sale of data and analytics.

Humense

Also referencing the challenges facing professional sport during COVID19, Humense is proposing an immersive on-field viewing experience for TV spectators. It brings on-field vision from a 20 camera system offering infinite angles and volumetric imaging, all viewed via VR headsets. The founders claim that this will be the future of sports broadcasting revenues.

SportsCube

The founders state that community and local sports clubs lack funds; yet sponsors face too much red tape. SportsCube is designed to help businesses to sponsor clubs, and the team is already working with clubs and corporate sponsors. The business takes a 15% commission or success fee (which is half of traditional agencies).

Next week: Blockchain and the Limits of Trust

Startup Vic’s SportsTech Pitch Night

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Last month’s Startup Vic’s Pitch Night featured SportsTech, one of the semi-regular topics in Startup Vic’s themed pitch nights. Hosted by LaunchVic at the Victorian Innovation Hub, supported by the Sports Geek podcast and Track, Victoria University’s sports partnership institute.

In a new partnership between Startup Vic and LaunchVic, upcoming pitch nights will feature EdTech, Diversity and HealthTech. Meanwhile, back to the sport. The competing pitches were (links in the names):

Benchvote

Describing itself as a Sports Fan Engagement Platform, Benchvote has a tag line of “the Canva of creating high performing digital campaigns for sport”. Covering marketing, sponsorship and commercial, the platform claims to achieve 50%+ conversion rates on campaigns, partly achieved through a gamification aspect to appeal to fans.

The platform offers campaign templates, drives social media traffic to users’ own websites,
thereby converting that traffic into firm leads. It also has the potential to support other related verticals – including entertainment, media and betting. The proprietary nature of the solution is the combination of a SaaS model plus insights algorithms.

Asked by the judges about customisation versus scaling, we were told that it is a totally white label solution. Although the platform can support agencies as well as product providers with creative content and digital assets, the preference is to let clients do their own (given the business origins as an agency turned software company).

In terms of the competitor landscape, it’s between agency solutions and software services on one hand, and integrated platforms and single solutions on the other.

Potentially integrating ticketing data, the team are also looking at international expansion, and are in the middle of a raise.

MarineVerse

This is a VR sailing platform, that claims to be “Democratising sailing by enable people to sail in VR”. A big call.

Already running a VR Regatta competition, the team is building a community of clubs, members, and daily races. There’s also a VR sailing classroom, with the MarineVerse Cup – a two-week event – to come. Competition exists in the form of Virtual Regatta, which is actually a non-VR, e-sports platform.

Offering a $10 per month subscription model, MarineVerse is banking on the new
Oculus Crest device to boost adoption. The business has been bootstrapped for three years, and is experiencing 8% monthly growth.

Targeting a demographic of 30-55 year olds who are cashed-up and time rich, the team are also developing multiplayer races. The judges asked if there was potential to support high-performance training and use player data for predictive performance or behaviour.

Unite

A platform for sports club and team administration, Unite developed by Eastwood sports tech offers apps such as training calendars, fixtures management, media engagements, sponsor obligations and travel planning. Designed to help manage “Commitments to the team and individual level”, Unite offers a B2B subscription module (individual team players are the actual users) for professional, semi-professional, e-sport and collegiate teams.

Although TeamWorks is a major competitor, in fact there is much more competition at the grass-roots level, because peak bodies and administrators want to own the data. Currently at the working prototype stage, with an MVP. The service is designed to manage and approve player activities and such as media commitments, sponsorship and endorsements. It is built as a hosted SaaS using AWS security features, sitting behind the  club’s own fire wall.

Wedge Pro

As the name suggests, this device is all about “The Art of Wedge Play”, designed to reduce player handicap, and help with short game training, especially lifted wedge shots. According to the pitch, many amateur players suffer from poor technique, poor distance control, and lack confidence.

Apparently, there is a $2 billion global market for golf accessories, such as this physical attachment which launches a monitor linked to an app.

A 2017 winner at the La Trobe Accelerator Program, the team is looking for an app developer for data capture. While offering post-sales service and device re-calibration (for adjustments according to player height, the cord length matrix and player handicap), judges wondered if there was also the opportunity for VR applications as well as the kinaesthetic experience. Asked about distribution, the team mentioned getting the product into golf shops and pro shops (without providing any specifics), while building a brand for a suite of golf tech products.

After all the cotes were counted, the People’s Choice was Unite while MarineVerse was the Judge’s favourite.

Next week: FinTech Fund Raising

SportsTech and Wearables Pitch Night at Startup Victoria

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Appropriately hosted within Melbourne’s Olympic Park, last week’s Startup Victoria pitch night featured four companies working in SportsTech. It was further evidence of the breadth and variety within the local startup sector even if, on this showing at least, there was a little less innovation than we have seen at other monthly pitch nights.

First, there were a couple of presentations from Catapult and Genius Tech Group, to help provide some context to the topic, especially helpful for people who may not be familiar with this sector. However, I’m not convinced that referencing Australia’s Olympic medal tally as a key rationale for building a sports technology industry necessarily set the right tone. For a start, despite some gold medal success in the 2000, 2004 and 2008 summer games, Australia has seen a rapid decline in medal performance at the past two Olympiads. Then there are the cultural and governance issues at the AOC itself.

Then came the pitches, in order of appearance (website links in the titles):

TidyHQ

With the slogan “tribes are everywhere”, this business is all about getting the off-field performance right. TidyHQ is supporting smarter sporting clubs and organisations by helping them with things like governance and succession planning, and by having all their back office operations in one place. Essentially a white label portal solution that offers branded websites (“SaaS doesn’t work in this market”), the service is designed to support grassroots clubs and associations, across all sports.

Using a freemium subscription model, the main sales channels are local and regional AFL leagues. Sales are helped by a viral effect – given that in small towns and regional areas, there is quite an overlap of club officers.

TidyHQ also takes a clip from sales of multi-stream products and services sold through their customer sites, which includes a diverse range of clients such as yoga studios, play groups, plus a number of US sororities, fraternities and law schools.

Competition comes from different quarters: vendors like TeamSnap and SportsTG; incumbent club officials and their spreadsheets; even social media. One challenge, however is managing and harnessing the “volunteer mindset” associated with community sports clubs, especially when it comes to budgets and adapting to change.

RefLIVE

This company has built an app for soccer referees that works on smart watches. Referees typically use stopwatches to record match time and stoppages which, with constant match use have an average life of 2-3 years. Yet referees also have to keep track of player substitutions, match scores as well as the yellow and red cards they hand out.

At a price point of $60 per annum for referees, and annual fees of between $5k and $50k for soccer leagues and associations, an ideal entry point for RefLIVE would seem to be local, short-form knock-out tournaments, where the full range of features can be deployed in one place.

Currently scaling to take advantage of international market opportunities, RefLIVE is currently receiving enquiries from youth soccer leagues in Japan, as well as Germany and China.

Considered to be (literally) a game changing app for the Apple smart watch, RefLIVE is
also seeing interest from AFL, Rugby Union, Rugby League and field hockey.

At the moment, the platform does not support a live back-end, and there are no real plans to distribute or commercialize the data. While live data could be pushed to a server via WiFi, a bigger obstacle is getting the refs themselves on board – even though it has the potential to enhance their on-field performance and help them with off-field administration.

Spalk

Spalk (“crowd-sourced sports commentary”) enables custom audio streaming for TV sports, via some proprietary technology to synchronise secondary content with traditional broadcasts. Due to the high costs and copyright issues associated with TV broadcast rights for professional sports (only made more complex by “over the top” platforms), Spalk is mainly licensed by broadcasters for coverage of amateur competitions.

The international basketball body, FIBA, sees an opportunity for Spalk to help drive international engagement, through the use of localised and translated commentary. However, in many cases, Spalk will need sports that retain their own D2C content rights. (Anyone familiar with the challenges of listening to overseas test matches will be aware of Guerilla Cricket, and its predecessor, Test Match Sofa.)

Part of Spalk’s “special sauce” is in integrating and synchronizing multiple audio tracks, which can provide better UX compared to social media streams and viewer posts, commentary and Tweets. Another key to success is the ability to integrate with existing broadcasting commentary technology and vendors.

SPT

Finally, SPT (sports performance tracking) is a GPS monitoring system aimed at amateur and grass-roots clubs and leagues. Offering analytics for all teams, SPT is cloud-based, multilingual and claims to be “efficient, simple, affordable”. So simple, that unlike the aforementioned Catapult, clubs don’t even need to hire sports scientists….

Currently supporting 800 clubs, and 65% of revenue coming from overseas (despite claiming to have spent only $300 on marketing), the main appeal is probably the $299 price point per device, and the core user base is amateur leagues.

SPT has so far relied on viral effects and referrals, plus an element of FOMO. While SPT may not be as sophisticated or as detailed as similar platforms used in professional sports, it has managed to demonstrate the data validation when compared to some camera-based apps. In any event, according to the founders, a 2-3% margin for error is OK for this audience. And if users can compare their own performances against those of professionals, that is an added bonus.

However, one issue facing the collection, use and sharing of sports analytics has recently surfaced in a spat between the England team manager, Gareth Southgate, and Manchester United boss, Jose Mourinho. Which may make some clubs reluctant to upload their data.

Following a tally of the judges’ votes, Spalk was declared the winner, but only by a margin of 0.25 points….

POSTCRIPT: While I think the decision to present thematic pitch nights was a good call, there are a few logistical aspects to the current series of events that the organisers need to address:

  1. Choice of venues: the room used for the sports tech pitch night had an unfortunate layout – there was a pillar right in front of the stage, which must have been off-putting for the presenters. (Also, there was only a very small screen to display the pitch deck slides, so most people in the audience wouldn’t have been able to see them.)
  2. AV tech: I’ve said this before, but organisers need to arrange for a second monitor in front of the presenters, so they don’t need to keep looking over their shoulders at their slides. And please, please check that clickers are working (or that presenters know how to use them!)
  3. Audience participation: At previous pitch nights, the MC would field questions from the audience. Now, no more. And the audience voting system (people’s choice) has gone awry. Makes it feel less engaging.

Next week: The network(ing) effect