FanDuel turns fantasy sports betting into a social game

Launched from the hubdub offices next door to Informatics Ventures in Appleton Tower, FanDuel brings the next level of web innovation to fantasy sports.  There are at least 20m of us playing fantasy sports every year and it’s a $2bn industry. And yet, we have seen very little web innovation there recently. One of the problems with fantasy sports is the huge time-commitment involved - when you play fantasy, you have to play for the whole season – no breaks, no holidays, no excuses. In this era of the real-time web, people want instant gratification.  This problem is tackled head on by FanDuel.com, a new fantasy sports game which launches today. FanDuel.com lets us play and win in a day instead of the whole season. Players can draft a new team at any time, and pitch it head-to-head against an opponent – a friend, or another FanDuel player – for real money. The player whose team has the most fantasy points at the end of the day’s games wins the cash prize. It’s purely fantasy baseball right now, but the fantasy football game will launch when the football season starts. Integration with Twitter and Facebook means that picking opponents is slick, as is bragging about your wins. This is a first for the fantasy sports industry which has been dominated by the big players such as Yahoo, CBS and ESPN for too long.  The competitive space for daily fantasy sports is fairly new but there’s a definite opportunity there.  Nigel Eccles, CEO of the company behind FanDuel, admits, “After playing Mafia Wars and other social games on Facebook, going back to playing traditional fantasy sports on CBS felt like going back in time. We felt we could build something better, more social and more exciting.”www.FanDuel.com