App for all that … sports, that is

In one of two offices overlooking North Main Street in Providence, a team of five software developers, each glued to his open Macbook Pro, is working toward the release of the Fanium’s first mobile app, which aggregates Twitter feeds to provide real-time commentary during live sports games.
The company behind the highly anticipated app is more than a little unusual. Fanium’s core staff is comprised of one freshly minted Brown University graduate, five Brown undergraduates and one 2012 Rhode Island School of Design graduate. Despite their limited business experience, the team has garnered $450,000 in investment capital in the year-and-a-half of the company’s existence.
The seed for Fanium was planted during Brown professor Danny Warshay’s Entrepreneurship and New Ventures course in the fall semester of the 2010-2011 school year, when Fanium founder and CEO Grant Gurtin, a sophomore at the time who is scheduled to graduate in the fall of 2013, developed an idea for a virtual sports memorabilia and betting site for a class project.
Gurtin assembled a team the following spring to build the site that included Seth Nolan, now vice president of operations and human resources; Brown graduate Marcus Gartner, chief technology officer; Eli Bosworth, lead software engineer; and RISD grad Sam Andrus, now creative director. Andrus and Nolan had collaborated with Gurtin in the past on an event-planning website, and together with Gartner and Bosworth they became Gurtin’s co-founders.
Soon after developing the memorabilia- and betting-site idea, however, the team abandoned it when Gurtin was inspired by research presented by ESPN that claimed 55 percent of all Twitter users say they use the micro-blogging site for sports-related purposes.
He decided to embark on a new project, one that leveraged Twitter to provide real-time sports updates. He sent cold emails to some 50 investors that he identified mainly through an Internet search by their “experience investing or advising other companies that leveraged Twitter’s API,” he said.
When Howard Lindzon, co-founder and CEO of StockTwits, a curator of financial Tweets and other information for investors, responded, Gartner put together a trial website and Gurtin jumped on a plane to San Diego (his hometown) to demo the product, a site that would collect Twitter feeds into a customizable collection through which a sports fan could follow his team in more detail than ever before possible. Within a month Gurtin was able to attract $150,000 in funding, enough to keep his graduating co-founders, Gartner, who was being courted by Amazon, and Andrus, on staff.
Fanium was officially incorporated in April 2011 as GoLudo LLC, but the development team already had started testing a beta version of their program during the previous season’s NFL playoffs. “Fanium was giving me injury updates before anyone else in the room knew,” Gartner said. “That’s just an example of what our technology can do, which is what we’re excited about.”
Justin Paterno, product director at StockTwits as well as an adviser to Fanium, met with Gartner and Andrus in San Diego early in the year to share how his development team collects and curates financial information.
“I’ve given them a lot of advice of what not to do,” Paterno said. “Losing focus is something that can happen easily.”
Gurtin and his team must have been listening, because their products already in the market are highly regarded. Fanium has built applications for CBSSports.com, including one the team hopes will earn $60,000 in prize money in the CBS Developer Challenge (the winner will be announced Sept. 29).
The CBS App, “Team Tweets,” leverages Twitter to give fantasy players live, expert commentary during fantasy games. Team Tweets is the second-most popular free app in CBS’ app store for fantasy baseball and the most highly rated app for fantasy football, among both free and paid apps.
Fanium also developed a CBS Web app called Scoreboard Plus. The screen is divided in half, with the fantasy scores of two rosters facing off as though playing against each other, with relevant live Twitter feeds beneath the score on each side. “I don’t think fantasy sports have been innovated very much in the past 15 years,” Gurtin said. “Maybe ‘drag and drop’ your line-ups in Yahoo. … This is definitely going to be the coolest way I’ve experienced fantasy sports yet.”
As much fun – and success – as Fanium has had developing the CBSSports apps, the team believes the mobile-computing market has greater potential. And they are not alone.
According to a report by ComScore, an Internet analytics company, more than 20 percent of mobile-computing-device users in the United States access sports information, while 15.1 percent accessed financial news or stock quotes. “There’s more money in finance, but there are more people in sports,” Paterno said.
David Putnam, an informal adviser to Fanium and vice president of product at StockTwits, said more than 35 million people played fantasy sports this year, and the number is growing. He talks to Gurtin every other week about prioritizing the different products Fanium provides.
“Right now our huge focus is getting our mobile apps out,” Gartner said. “We’re really anxious to get that out, because it’ll be easier to get customer feedback [than from the mobile website].”
The program aggregates Twitter content and filters tweets from local sports writers, analysts and official team Twitter accounts into separate feeds. A stream of real-time sports information accompanies live scores on the Fanium mobile website, supplementing the experience of watching the game.
Fanium is banking on the growing segment of the population that uses social media to follow sports. Many sports networks already integrate live stats into their broadcasts, engaging sports fans in this type of data monitoring. Fanium is looking to complement consumers’ experiences in the physical world, not compete with them, accessing what is known as the “second screen,” as sports viewers watch the live broadcast and use a mobile device to delve deeper into the experience.
“I think he is doing the right thing, the business is about usage and recurrence,” said Ed Ross, former vice president and director of business development at ShapeUp, who hired Gurtin as an intern back in 2010. “It’s a very powerful thing, especially in sports. There’s a lot of competition for those users.” Gurtin believes financial benefits will come with scale. “Our focus right now is on acquiring users. When we find enough eyeballs, we’ll focus on how to monetize them,” Gurtin said. “Whenever you’re able to disrupt a big market in the way that we’re going to, in sports and fantasy sports, you’re going to add value to this company. We’re adding value to the money that our investors put in.”
According to Forrester, more than half of business decision-makers will increase their mobile apps budget in 2012, possibly to contend with the projected 257 million smartphones and 126 million tablets in use with U.S. consumers by 2016.
“I do want to make something that millions of people use,” Gurtin said. “I think we can get there in a few years.”
His investors share his optimism. Fanium has added another $300,000 to the initial $150,000 investment, with the biggest contributors being Social Leverage, Lindzon’s angel-investment company; Venture 51, another early-stage venture fund; and Gurtin Fixed Income Management LLC (Gurtin’s father, William Gurtin, is CEO of the investment firm). Besides rent and snacks, most of the funding goes toward human capital. And Gurtin doesn’t draw a salary yet.
Bosworth’s favorite feature on the Fanium website is the ability to follow the global play-by-play of his team: Arsenal. If you like a team on Facebook, then the team will appear as a button in the app (so long as you’ve agreed to sign into Fanium using your Facebook account). “Although we don’t ask for the right to post on your wall, which I’m proud about,” Bosworth said.
Ross is a believer. “Grant is sitting on huge development horsepower, which is really uncommon for an early-stage company,” Ross said. “They’re young, they’re hungry and they’re on the cutting edge.”
And what about that name, Fanium? Gurtin has a witty response: “It’s a combination of fan and stadium, not some kind of element.” •