Social networking site Heckler Sports is launching today, and the company "wants fans to cheer, chat, argue and heckle with one another -- and with pro athletes -- during games," according to Jon Swartz of USA TODAY. The service, available at hecklersports.com and as an iPhone app, "allows users to share their sports interests and athletic achievements." Heckler Sports COO Erin Ngeno, along with CEO and fellow co-Founder Baayan Bakari "raised the majority" of $1.1M in funding "outside the usual Silicon Valley sources." Their advisers include former NFLers Tim Brown and Everson Walls. Bakari said, "This is more of a sports environment, not social. The future of social networks are shared-interest sites. Look at Pinterest, for instance." Ngeno and Bakari said that Heckler's secret ingredient is "its ability to trade opinions and comments on any live sporting event with fans and pros" (USA TODAY, 6/12).
WELCOME TO THE CLUB: MLBAM has formally launched "The 140 Club," a human-curated social media news service developed in partnership with Texas-based Mass Relevance. Within "The 140 Club," members of MLBAM's social media team select major stories of the day and curate a live stream of tweets around those topics. The effort, located at mlb.com/the140club, seeks to provide a level of management beyond a simple collection of hashtags or accounts. While the effort will carry an obvious focus on baseball, it will venture in other areas, such as last weekend's Timothy Bradley-Manny Pacquiao fight, as it garner attention within the game. "We are delighted to leverage the reach of Twitter and the tools of Mass Relevance to discover and share discussions and observations that rise above the noise," said MLBAM Exec VP/Content Dinn Mann. "The 140 Club" soft-launched last month (Eric Fisher, SportsBusiness Journal).
