Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Ahh, don’t you just love it when sports and technology collide and form something new and amazing?  I certainly do.  Whether it be watching the Superbowl in high definition on a big screen TV, or catching the latest baseball news on podcasts; technology always makes sports better.  FanDome, just launched today (October 1, 2008), is a new website that aims to provide sport fans all the news, videos, and opinions they desire.

FanDome is a website created by two sport fanatics, Ricky Joshi and Karim Motani, who first embarked on this idea together at Dartmouth College.  Both of them loved sports, but often found it hard to find the news they wanted unless they were located in that specific area.  They wanted to find a site that covered all things sports, instead of searching many, many websites. They soon decided to make a website themselves, one which contained all sorts of news regarding every team of every sport.

Here, Joshi explains in a nutshell why they created their site:

Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, there was a sense of passion for Ohio State sports that permeated your life - it was unavoidable really - and I used to love hanging out with my childhood friends on the cul-de-sac talking football and basketball. But when I went away to college, I lost that integral connection and I longed for more OSU updates than I could find from afar. The birth of FanDome allowed me to rekindle that passion and meet other fans who fervently love their sports teams too.“

“

Now to the present - about FanDome itself. Joshi and Motani proudly tout the phrase “teams, videos, and fans” as their main headline and focus all around the site.  Let’s talk about the first part of their headline - “teams.“

FanDome has links to over 600 affiliated sports team websites that provide the site with their latest news.  For example, Buckeyedome covers sports in the Ohio State University, and they provide a lot of news for their fans on the website.  In addition, users of the site can view related team videos and vote on the ones they like the best.  They can even join a team specific forum and talk about the team and their accomplishments with other fans.

Moving on to the second part, videos.  Before FanDome officially launched, they spent a lot of time scouring the Internet for video content.  After all, if you’re going to claim your site as a video giant, then you need some good videos to start with. Well, when they launched, FanDome had accumulated over 40,000 sport videos.  Another nice feature for their users is that they allow fans to upload any of their sport videos to be enjoyed by the rest of the community.

The last part of their headline is fans.  FanDome is a site by sport fans for sport fans.  They pride themselves on letting users contribute their video and opinions through blogging and forums.  Like I mentioned in the video part, each fan can upload and vote on their favorite videos.  If you decide to register on the site, you can take part in forums and make a personal profile for yourself.  Already, it seems many people are enjoying FanDome as over a 180,000 fans have added their application to MySpace.

Tony Andrea, President of Kaleidoscope Sports and Entertainment LLC (the company Joshi and Montani beta tested it under), had this to say about the site overall:

“As lifelong sports fans ourselves, we were able to appreciate the value of the site immediately. There clearly was no singular place on the internet to quickly and easily find
all the best sports content, and FanDome brings that to fruition.“

Is the site really as fan friendly and user oriented as they claim?  Only time will tell.  However, before deciding to write this post, I took a look at FanDome for myself to see what it was like.  After a bit of searching around, it did have a lot of videos and displayed a lot of news in an easy to find manner.  Let us know what you think of the site and if it is a must see for all sport fans.

Read [FanDome] Via [PR Newswire]

Keep up with the latest gadget goodness! - Subscribe to our feed