What can Fantasy Football Sites teach Content Oriented Businesses and Intelligence Professionals?

by Jeff Hoffman

The participation in and popularity of fantasy football has exploded over the last decade. By some estimates the industry grosses more than $1 billion a year.

In early September I began gearing up for a twelve team fantasy football league that uses an auction style draft. With little spare time, I wasn’t looking forward to the annual task of manually collecting and aggregating predicted stats, point totals and other data on the top 200 players/defenses from disparate sources and monitoring news sites for player news and updates that might make them more or less valuable.

ESPN.com came to the rescue eliminating the tedious tasks that drain 40% or more of my time preparing for the fantasy football auction. ESPN provided not only player’s aggregated point totals for the season based on my league’s scoring but also links to really useful, up-to-date player information and alerts about breaking news.

This illustrates two important lessons for content oriented businesses and intelligence professionals:

Content oriented businesses can differentiate themselves by offering a one-stop solution that is comprehensive (yet actionable), timely and relevant to their consumers needs.
Being able to focus your time strategizing versus collecting and aggregating data from the web can be the difference between being in the game versus prospering.

In all the economic gloom many people have forgotten that we live in the most extraordinary technological age in history. While my fantasy competitors had access to the same ESPN data as I did, in the real world, your competition is (or may soon be) using intelligent Agent technology to monitor, extract, aggregate and normalize data, text and graphics from tens of thousands of Web Sites or internal sources– effortlessly, for competitive advantage.

To learn more about how intelligent Agent technology can help you gain a competitive advantage in the real world visit Connotate.com.

Interested to see an example of how I used intelligent Agents to help me with fantasy football last year? If so, please view the chart below (in Internet Explorer 7). In summary Agents collected and graphed data on the number of touches (defined as the number of handoffs and receptions combined) by player helping me figure out who to start and/or pick-up. My take away from the example below was to sit both Hightower and James towards the end of the season because the Cardinals were increasingly passing the ball.

Unfortunately the data source I used to collect this data last year isn’t available….so if anyone knows where I can find data on the number of handoffs and receptions combined by player for this season please send me a comment and let me know.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 1:47 pm and is filed under General, Intelligent Agent Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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What can Fantasy Football Sites teach Content Oriented Businesses and Intelligence Professionals?

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