Summer is almost behind us and fall is starting to turn the leaves brown and the air crisp and if you are anything like me, this means one thing – Fantasy Football time is here!! With the season starting this week, all fantasy players have their rosters set and leagues ready to go. Can you believe that over 33 million people play fantasy football? Glued to the TV, obsessing over rosters, following injury reports and stats, add, drop and trading, etc. for nearly half of the year! As a fanatic, I am always looking for new information and platforms to play in that enable me to find the data I need in order to be more successful in my leagues. I recently came across an interesting new start up platform that integrates with data analytics from IBM Watson Developer Cloud that help completely change the way fans, like me, play the game.
Bringing the analytical number crunch tech to fantasy football, Edge Up Sports is taking data analytics to help take the stress out of managing a team and deliver the ultimate experience built on the most innovative technologies like IBM Watson. Utilizing IBM Watson technologies, they are able to analyze thousands and thousands of blog posts, social media news, articles, etc. about professional football players and teams. This helps streamline the process so that people can cut through all of the information and focus on the information that they need to help them succeed in their league. Their apps streamline all of information out there (and there is a lot!) and chews it up into smaller, easy-to-digest pieces. Utilizing Watson software components in their initial version, people can track their players using dashboards showing weaknesses, strengths, stats, physical status etc. especially when matched with other players and teams. With linguistic analytics, Edge Up Sports is able to size up a players readiness for a game based on social media (tweets, posts) and sentiment analytics to measure sportswriter attitudes regarding particular players.
Edge Up Sports, as a Kickstarter campaign, are in their initial stages of development and are planning to continue to utilize IBM Watson Q&A, as their core technology. This will eventually allow them to automatically read through “the entire universe” of articles that are written about NFL teams and players, pull out the knowledge and answer questions from Fantasy Football players in a casual, dialogue style.
I, for one, am very excited about this new platform to help me weed through all of the information that is out there and hone in on the information I need. These are amazing technologies that allow for Fantasy players to cut through the chaos and white noise to find out what is really going on and manage their team in a more successful manner.
