Alloy Media, a company that provides youth-focused online content, announced Wednesday that it has acquired Takkle.com, an online resource and college recruitment site for high school sports. According to the company, Takkle will join the Teen.com Network, which includes a number of youth-focused sites. Takkle provides tools for high school athletes to create player and team profiles, as well as share videos and photos from games. It claims to draw a monthly audience of "1 million athletes, both male and female." The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
iWidgets, a company that allows users to take their content from Hi5, Facebook, and other social networks and syndicate those across the Web, raised $4.1 million in a Series A round of funding led by Opus Capital, the company announced Wednesday. In connection with the funding, the company has also added Geoff Katz, a member of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Board of Governors, as vice president of business development and marketing.
NetworkedBlogs, a Facebook app that allows users to add blogs they love to the popular social network, currently has almost 450,000 active users and over 700,000 installs, ReadWriteWeb is reporting. According to the report, its nearest competitor has yet to reach 100,000 installs. Most importantly, the app's users are adding 500 new blogs per day, bringing the total number of blogs on the site to 125,000. The app is free for all Facebook users.
Kiva, a nonprofit microlending company, has unveiled an open-source API platform for those who want to create applications for the finance community. The company is encouraging developers to create applications for the iPhone or a map that displays real-time global fund transfers. But its executives did say they want developers to use the API to develop apps that go beyond its few suggestions.
Slide and Katalyst Media, companies that provide social apps and original content, respectively, announced a partnership that brings KatalystHQ exclusively to Slide's Facebook app, FunSpace. KatalystHQ is an original series that looks at the "inner workings of a Hollywood-based entertainment company." Katalyst Media and KatalystHQ were co-founded by famed model and actor, Ashton Kutcher. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Here's one that's good for back-to-school season. The Web has made it possible for media niches that normally would get squeezed out of newspaper margins or TV time slots to find a way to be heard, and high school sports are no exception. We've already seen Takkle (earlier coverage here) fall into this sector, and now media giant Hearst-Argyle Television has launched a competitor--High School Playbook, which aims to go for a cross-platform strategy of TV, Internet, and mobile content. Sponsored by Canon, the site has launched in beta for a select number of sports-obsessed metro areas.
It looks like High School Playbook is going to be content-heavy, to say the least, with a laundry list of features: "comprehensive school information, game schedules, statistics, individual athlete profiles, interscholastic comparisons, and "game day" weather reports...personal profile pages, team pages, school pages, cheerleader pages, fitness and nutrition pages, SMS voting and other messaging that enables byplay among rival schools and fans." And then there's the video. High-definition content will be gathered from a variety of sources: professional videographers, trained "student journalists," and ordinary users. Since High School Playbook has the backing of Hearst-Argyle Television, which operates many a local news station, the infrastructure's largely already in place.
As we noted about Takkle, there's cause to be a little bit cautious about a site that's going to be providing so much in-depth information about individual high schoolers. Let's hope they have a good plan for that.
You know, the sports world has made a much smoother transition to the digital age than I'd thought it would. Maybe it was the stereotype lingering in my brain of jocks and wannabe jocks having a disdain for anything nerdy, but I would've thought that sports Web sites and social networks would be slow to get off the ground. Man, was I wrong--just look at fantasy sports, as well as some growing social networks like Takkle. Here's another AlwaysOn attendee, PicksPal, which is a community for people who follow sports so closely that they think they can always predict what'll happen next.
Basically, it's a competitive social networking site. The site is structured like a year-round March Madness, with daily sports prediction contests. Win a lot of them, and you earn points. And PicksPal will track your accuracy--it has prizes and a "Wall of Fame," too. See, predicting the outcome of sports really is a sport itself!
PicksPal even calls itself "an American Idol for sports fans." But then who's the equivalent of William Hung?
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