SportsbarNY.com

Nothing brings strangers together like sports. A big game, a few beers, a good atmosphere and strangers can quickly transform into blood brothers. This idea is to create a location-based online sports viewer community based upon sports bars. Every sports bar within a city will be profiled, featured, and indexed by location, menu, programming and promotions, and if it has allegiances to fans of certain teams (a Red Sox bar in NY). Community features will help facilitate fan interaction, allow users to meet at bars and also comment on their sports bar experiences. Think menupages.com meets myspace. The next step of social networking is to create relationships and value once a user turns off their computer. This concept will turn online social networking sites from a fad into a practical service that enhances people’s social life. Sports is a natural space for this trend to grow. Tons of sports bars have been featured (online and in print) in the last month as soccer fans (many with national loyalties) have searched out where to watch the World Cup. Fans that have moved away from their hometown, alumni looking to reunite, and fans of smaller sports such as boxing, lacrosse, and hockey will all be able to benefit. This idea can be monetized on different levels. A database of sports fans will be valuable to local sports bars looking to market and advertise in their area. This could include email blasts, setting up viewing parties, and special events at bars. A bar should be able to send a text message during the night announcing on-the-fly drink special to attract people in the area. Once a critical mass of users has registered, beer and alcohol companies are natural, high-budget sponsors that will be attracted to the audience.

Paid Search Futures Market

Many companies, both large and small, rely on paid search as a critical component of their marketing and advertising strategy. The key to paid search is bidding the optimal price for the right keywords. Companies must actively manage their campaign as keyword prices fluctuate to receive the optimal amount of exposure and manage costs. There seems to be an opportunity to create a market that allows “investors” to buy search words in advance at set prices and then actively trade these keyword derivatives. This futures market would work as a hedge for companies that want to create stability for their paid search campaigns, and would also create a speculative market in which traders could invest in search terms which they believe will rise in popularity and price in the future. Not sure if these derivatives would actually need to directly interface through API with Adwords, Yahoo! etc, or could work off of already available data from Google Zeitgeist type search data. Either way, seems like there is a market here just waiting for a marketplace.