SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The NFL, TechCrunch, and Stanford Graduate School of Business today announced the finalists for 1st and Future, a startup competition focused on the future of sport for fans and athletes.
The “pitch-off” style event hosted by TechCrunch will take place at Stanford Graduate School of Business in Stanford, CA on Saturday, February 6 from 8:30 - 12:00pm pacific time. Finalists competing in the three separate categories include:
The Future Stadium:
- HYP3R: HYP3R is a location-based engagement platform. We make it easy for businesses to engage influential customers at specific locations on a personal level, in real-time. Leveraging the social media breadcrumbs that people leave at locations, HYP3R mines them in real-time, enabling engagements that can surprise and delight consumers.
- ReplyBuy: ReplyBuy turns simple conversations into seamless transactions. Their solution enables professional teams, universities and venues across the country to connect in real-time with their fans via mobile and execute a purchase with a quick “reply" text message.
- Paranoid Fan: Paranoid Fan is a social mapping app where fans can pin, share, and discover the best kept secrets on GameDay – like where to park, find tickets, food, beer, or even your friends in a crowd of people.
- Sidestep: Sidestep is a mobile platform that allows fans to browse and buy live event merchandise before, during, and after a show for both pickup and delivery. Through the fan app and third party integrations, Sidestep has unlocked incremental revenue, captured critical fan data, all while enhancing the fan experience.
Bringing Home The Game:
- LiveLike: LiveLike uses Virtual Reality to bring you and your friends together in a sports viewing experience that's as easy as turning on your TV and as thrilling as going to the stadium.
- Fanmode: Fanmode is making the world a stadium for fans. While a team can see and feel the support of the fans at the game, the millions outside are not represented. With its proprietary communications platform and smart device applications, Fanmode solves this problem and makes global real-time fan participation possible.
- FirstV1sion: First person live broadcasting for sports like American football, basketball, ice hockey, soccer and many more. FirstV1sion's JerseyCam enables broadcasters to offer the best action from the player's angle in real-time, making them feel the action closer than ever.
- Maestro: Maestro provides engaging video experiences that drive user action, sponsor & transactional revenue, and robust data collection for business-minded broadcasters. Customers layer Maestro over platforms like YouTube/Twitch to amplify viewership while maximizing return on investment within their own properties.
Tomorrow's Athlete:
- Heddoko: Heddoko™ provides a solution made of smart compression shirts and pants that track the movement of the body joints using textile embedded sensors. The e-garment transmits live data to its users by capturing the full body movements and modeling it in 3D, allowing to improve their performance and alleviate the risk of injury.
- DimeTime (developed by RADD3): DimeTime is an advanced, virtual reality-based football training system featuring real NFL formations, route concepts, and real NFL player speeds and movements. A player can walk around a football formation as if the player is on an actual field, and use voice commands to call and audible plays just like in reality.
- Telemetry Sports: Telemetry Sports builds technology solutions that improve team performance and decision-making across the sports industry. Using machine learning and other analytical methods, the Telemetry Sports platform will change the way organizations develop their game day strategy, scout every team, and evaluate every player in the NFL.
- Kenzen: Kenzen delivers real-time health insights using patented biosensors, sweat analysis and predictive analytics. Our mission is to predict and preempt injury and health complications.
In The Future Stadium category judges will select as the winner the startup with the product most likely to be implemented and have the biggest impact on the experience of attendees at live, stadium sports events. Judges include: Kevin Compton (Co-Founder of Radar Partners), Mary Meeker (Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield Byers), Mike Rothenberg (Founder and CEO, Rothenberg Ventures), Geoff Yang (Co-Founder, Redpoint).
In the Bringing Home The Game category judges will select as the winner the startup with the product most likely to see wide consumer adoption and alter in some fundamental way the enjoyment of live sports broadcasts in the home. Judges include: Beth Comstock (Vice Chair, GE), Bill Gurley (General Partner, Benchmark Capital), Lowell McAdam (Chairman and CEO, Verizon Communications), Jed York (CEO of 49ers).
In the Tomorrow's Athlete category judges will select as the winner the startup with the product that would have biggest impact on athletes’ training, performance, and safety during practice and games. Judges include: Mitchel Berger, MD (Professor and Chairman, Department of Neurological Surgery, UCSF; member of NFL’s Head, Neck and Spine Committee), Jim Breyer (Founder and CEO, Breyer Capital), Dhani Jones (Former NFL Linebacker, Chairman, Qey Capital Partners, & Co-Founder of Action Streamer), Mark Parker (CEO, Nike), Condoleezza Rice (American political scientist and diplomat).
Winning startups from each category will receive $50,000 from the NFL's Strategic Investment Fund, tickets to Super Bowl 50 and an invitation to visit league headquarters where they will have the opportunity to meet with top NFL executives.
While judges deliberate on winners of all three categories, youth entrepreneurs from BUILD.org will present their insights into the importance of developing an entrepreneurial mindset for success in the 21st Century. BUILD is a national nonprofit that uses entrepreneurship-based, experiential learning to ignite the potential of youth in under-resourced communities and equip them for high school, college and career success.
1st and Future will be streaming live on TechCrunch.com and on the TechCrunch App for Apple TV. For more information about 1st and Future please see here.
Media interested in attending and covering 1st and Future should contact one of the media representatives listed below.
Social:
@TechCrunch
#TechCrunch
About TechCrunch
TechCrunch is a leading technology media property, dedicated to obsessively profiling startups, reviewing new Internet products and breaking tech news. The TechCrunch community includes nearly 20 million friends and followers on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google and other social media. TechCrunch is subsidiary of AOL.
