So you've figured out how to "export your data" in the LAST TUTORIAL, now you're going to grant StatFame access to pull that newly exported data! Again open up your iScore and leave it on the homepage - you'll notice a new icon in the bottom right corner near your version number of the homepage, you'll want to click there. Notice the fancy arrows below... 

Here is how it'd look on an iOS (iPad/iPhone/iPod) device:

Here is how it'd look on an Android:

After you click that icon you'll notice 2 tabs called "News" and "Release Notes" in the top left corner. While on the "News" tab, you'll see in the first paragraph that we're requesting the data be shared with us. On the top right of the screen you'll see an "Allow Access" hyperlink. You'll want to click and hold on that link and "open"; all this is doing is allowing us to pull your data from your device:

Here is how it looks after you've clicked and held it. A popup will ask you if you want to "Open" the link. You most certainly do!

When you open that link, it'll tell you that access has been granted for us to pull your data. Congratulations! We can now pull your data into our system and begin analyzing your game!

This is one of the quintessential questions we asked ourselves when starting down this path.  There are some great apps out there, and sure, their end-goal is to be the end-all be-all of stat entry, but we live in a world that has loads of choices and opportunity.  People like one app better than the other; the idiosyncracies, the feel of the app, we think more people will still use a scorecard for the foreseeable future.  

So with all these options to enter the data, how do you know who is telling the truth?  What if you're playing a game where one team is using ScorePAD, one team is using a paper scorecard, and a fan in the stands is using GameChanger?  Clearly they aren't going to all have the exact same thing at the end.  Sure, in a perfect world and professional level they may, but we're talking amateur sports.  They'd need to compare and contrast afterwards to be certain - but that's not likely to happen.  

However, with StatFame, the folks using the real-time data would upload to their servers of choice, and we'd then be able to use our XML API to transfer the data from there to our servers for the card validation, and deeper sabermetric analysis.  Furthermore on the validation, we'd compare how each scorekeeper of record scored the game, and if both sides check out, it's validated, but if we see discrepancies on how one person saw it, we flag and send email alerts to both scorekeepers plotting out what's different between the games to get a final answer to "Who's on First", so to speak...

Does anyone really care if the stats are valid?  Well, yes, it IS amateur sports, but if you're reading this, you're interested in statistics, and most likely you're NOT a professional sports team, but who says you can't be validated like one?  Especially for free?  "Crappy statistics nicely formatted are still crappy statistics."  The end goal of our platform is to try to give a recruiter a better look at a players abilities.  Anyone can send a one-sided, parent made video of their skillset, but likely it's a bit jaded.  They may have scored every game, every at-bat, and every pitch throughout a career, but a recruiter has few resources to prove or disprove that stat, until now.

Alright - maybe they don't, but we think that pen/paper is going to be the way a majority of amateur athletes and coaches are going to continue scoring games for quite some time.  We love all the apps out there that have stellar products like iScore, Gamechanger, and soon HomeField Scorebook, but there's a huge market gap there for the people out there that aren't going to switch up the tried and true way of scoring.

A few things people think about when scoring a game with their phone:

• What if my phone/ipad dies?
• What if it rains/snows?
• I don't want to learn a new technology, it's too hard.
• We aren't by our stuff when we're in the field, I'd rather have someone steal a pen and paper, than my iPad.

The gap of people that are left behind that DON'T want an app to score their game is huge, and will continue to be huge.  The problem there is that sitting down and scoring a game that already happened from your scorecard is a pain in the butt, right?  But if you *did*, you're sure your fans/team mates would be happy to gander at those stats, cause all rec leaguers are somewhat interested in stats.  That's where we come in.  

Why should we use your service?  What sets StatFame apart from everyone else?  Well, aside from being free, and the fact that nobody else is offering this service, we're not sure we understand the question.  ;)  We started this business as we saw a gap in the current market.  We've been building out an interface and team of data entry folks for several months now, we've got a good jump on the competition.  If you ARE considering being competition in the near future, we're against partnering with you, ping us as we might be able to help each other out.

Take a photo, a scan, a fax of your scorecard and send it to us, we'll do the dirty work.  Yea, we may slip up or not recognize your penmanship, or how you scored it - so feel free to tell us we did it wrong, we'll fix it.  We've got years and years of knowledge on how to score the book and can likely get pretty close to what you're looking for.

How much does it cost, you ask?  ZERO!  We'll do it for free.  Why?  Partly because we're just that nice, and partly to see if there is a market for it.  If there is, we'll find a way to make it work financially for us.  Our model is to NOT charge you guys.  You pay enough to play in the amateur sports leagues.  If we can find a market for it, we'll find a way to make it profitable, not by you paying us though.

Don't want us to mess up your hard work or only you can read your penmanship?  You can do it yourself, why not.  We've got the data entry form in BETA release right now.  Ping us if you want to take a stab at entering your own data.

Why not just craft up an OCR scorecard?  Well, that's the thing - everyone does it their own way.  We've started on the technology to do so, but have it "mothballed" for now as we want to make it as far from intrusive as we can.  You have your way of doing it, and so does your neighbor - they may not be the same way.

How do we keep track of who is who when they send in the scorecard?  Every team will have a unique ID that we'll need to have somewhere in the fax/email/scan/phone pic to associate it with your team in our DB to make sure we're entering the stats for the right teams.

What if I've not signed up to your site yet?  Will you still enter my stats?  Sure.  Depending on how you send us the stats, we'll reply back to that form (text, email, phone #) and we'll give you a login to the site to change it.  Additionally, the data is public, so we can just send you the game page ID as well.  You don't have to be part of the party to be "part of the party".  ;)

OK, I'm sold!  How do I go about sending you my stuff?  I've got truckloads of scorecards for you guys to work on.  Welp, if they're actual "truckloads" - let's start with an email first.  Send us your photos/scans/emails of your scorecards here: Scorecard@StatFame.com, or fax them here: (425)-527-6961 and we'll do the rest!

Are you sure it's free?  Everyone "says" free, and then charges us later.  If it is indeed, why do this?  We're of the mindset that amateur athletic statistics are largely neglected, and recruiters aren't getting the best bang for their collective buck by using sites that force people to use fancy gadgets and gizmos to enter data.  Again, we think that method has a place with people, but not ALL people.  We are still of the mindset that grassroots pen and paper scorekeeping is going to be around for a while, so we need to cater to it.  We're not saying we're going to be around forever, we'd like to be, but we'll see how this goes.  We ARE sure that we don't need to tack cost on to you; if we can't give it to you for free, it totally defeats the purpose of targetting the cheap "pen and paper" entry method in the first place.  As long as it's free to enter stats the way you want to do it, we'll keep chugging on freely.

Wanted to give you all a little update on how we're progressing with the scorecard data entry method and solicit your feedback on what you're looking for going forward.

We've got great news folks - We've partnered with ESPN iScore to give the ability to score your games with their product and transfer them to StatFame quick and easy!

First thing you need to do is to "export data" from your device to the ESPN iScore server so we can grab the data from there. Exporting is a good idea anyway if you ever lose a device, want to transfer your data from one device to another, or upgrade your device. Here's how you do that:

Step 1: Be sure you have an internet connection and open iScore and click the "options" button:

Step 2: Click the "Export" button:


Step 3: Click on "Confirm Export when prompted:

Step 4: Watch the wheel spin while it exports, and confirms export:

Once the data is exported to the ESPN iScore servers, you'll want to give StatFame access to grab your data, so we need your customerID located on the bottom of the "options" page here:

Take note of this Customer ID and send it to us in an email HERE.  Once we've validated you on our side, you're ready GRANT ACCESS.

We've gotten this question a LOT so far, and it's 100% valid.  How do we authoritatively validate all the games and info that's being entered?  What stops a person from just entering they hit 400 homers in baseball, swam a 3 minute mile, and scored 239 soccer goals last week?  Well the short answer is: We can't.  BUT, we CAN mark and validate who is ENTERING the data. 

The most authoritative source to validate the info is going to be cross-team checking.  What's that mean?  That means that if 2 people on opposite teams are scoring a game, and ultimately come up with the same statistics at the end, you can likely bet your bottom dollar that the stats are true.  Not 100% of the time, but MOST of the time - as sometimes it may be best buddies playing each other and want to pump up their stats.  We're watching that too, which weighs in to our factoring of the validity of the stats.

In the absense of both teams having authentic scoring mechanisms, we're weighting the enterer of the statistic.  So likely, the most authoritative person entering is going to be the league president/admin, then maybe the team manager, then maybe a bystander (parent) the probably the player themselves.  We are currently marking who entered each of the stats with varying degrees of trust.  We then take that trust level and will eventually rank the stats based on that level of detail.  ValidStats is our vision there (in ALPHA testing) where we'd just add another filter to the ALL PLAYERS sorting table to show a valid stat.

Isn't that shorting the player though?  I can vouch for him!  Well, sure, you can vouch for the player, and you may NOT be able to be the league administrator or the coach, so how can you prove your worth?  We'll bump up your percentage of awesomeness and truthfulness if you show us over "x" amount of games that you're not fudging the scoring of the game.

So what apps are you deeming "valid" to enter stats?  That's the $1,000,000 question right now, right? We don't want to be in the "app" business, we just want to be the backend validation of the stats.  There are dozens (if not hundreds) of desktop apps our there right now that each team manager likes to use.  We don't want to stop that - we just think it better to partner with that desktop app builder and get them to pipe the data to our XML API.  You don't change anything on your end, we just work with that vendor and do all the magic from the backend.  If their app is a ValidStat app, we'll note that and their scoring system validity will go up!

We're happy to report that we've partnered with the folks at iScore Sports to bring you the ease of scoring a game on your favorite mobile device with the aggregation/personalization of our StatFame platform!  All your stats from your manually entered games will still be valid, it'll just be merged with the data from iScore if your team does or has used iScore in the past!  

Clearly we need to be able to know where your new information is coming from, so we'll need to get a few small details of your new device; namely your iScore CustomerID which can be found in the "Options" section of your iScore home screen:


If you're still using paper and pencil, no worries, we will accept those until you're sick of sending them to us. :)

We've been putting our main focus on this piece of the pie as it was the biggest hit at the CTIA show last month.  People LOVE the idea, but want to use their own apps - their own mobile apps, their own desktop apps, their own scoring system, but absolutely ate up our sabermetric and sorting capabilities that their current app lacked, and the ability to compare across ALL entry points (apps).  Sure, in a perfect world, one app would rule them all, but that's not the case.  People have their favorites, and we don't want to stop that.

That's the market we envisioned on Day 1.  We knew that there wasn't an app out there that COLLECTIVELY produced the deep data analysis that amateurs enjoy.  You can't find one that fits them all, and that is the problem we're solving with a backend that'll accept and validate the data!

What does a typical Stathead like about stats?  Digging deep in them!  Who is the best hitter in your rec league softball team with 2 outs versus a lefty on Tuesdays?  Genevieve Brown would probably give you a run for your money in 2011, but what about lifetime stats?  What about who was the best hitter in 13 year-old All-Stars from Helena, Montana from 1990-1992?  We'd love to find that out, and people have that data tucked away in a notebook, an old scorebook, or how about in a Wordpefect 5.1 for DOS? Seriously, I remember using this back in the day.  Hokey?  Sure!  Effective? Absolutely!

Who's going to want to use this "XML API" you're chatting about?  Well, the plan is anyone that has desktop or mobile app that wants VALIDITY in their statistics.  If the other team uses product "x" and you're using product "y", how do you prove it in an amateur setting?  Sure professional sports use stats.com or Elias Sports Bureau, but as an amateur, we don't have that luxury, so cook up something special here!  

We don't want to be the frontend interface of data entry, we want to be the backend validator/repository to give more credibility to ALL the apps already out there!  This isn't to say we'd not be in the market to create an app if we need one, but at this time, not on the roadmap.

We've got contacts in the newspaper industry that have MILLIONS of these records from old high school and rec league games with clean data, but no good way to pipe it to us.  We've got people that have the data in old XLS spreadsheets - we've got a large population of people currently using an Android or iPhone app that have the recent data, but no historic data.  We've got recruiters talking to us about finding the next best tool to find new recruits, and a list a mile long of coaches and managers looking to keep what they have, yet organize it better.  Finally, and most importantly, we've got players that are lost in the current market, they've got dozens of options, all valid, but none play well with other apps.

That's what we're shooting for for v1.0 of the XML API.  Give us a jingle if you've got an app vendor that we should chat with, cause worry not, if they're willing to give validity to their app, we're willing to have them!

If you've already read the "Getting Started with StatFame, Part 1, How To Enter Your Team", you're ready for this section. Again, you may be asking yourself, why am I entering my stuff manually? I thought you guys were a fancy app!?!? Well, yes, we're working on either partnering or building an app ourselves, but either way, you need to tell SOMEONE your team lineup. Why not enter it with us? ;)

c.  From the teams menu, be sure you’re on the “select” tab and click on the edit icon next to your first team created:


d. Your team will come up on the “profile” tab.  Then click the “schedule” tab:

 

We've had a lot of new developments (in the past few weeks especially) on where we're heading with great plans on how to attack it!  We're a bootstrap startup right now, so these are fairly flexible, but for now, we wanted to toss it all on the wall and see what sticks!  With that in mind we thought it best to let you all know where we see things shaking out in a quasi-decent chronological order and let you tell US what you think is a best next step(s) if you so desire: 

- Hire an outsourcing company that spins their wheels for 9 months and delivers a poorly built product
- Decide to scratch a PHP/Zend Framework backend and start fresh with .NET and SQL
- Find awesome help from Jeremy, Dan, Torgny, Dave, Kim, Andrew, Harvy, Chelo, Marshall, Josh, Kevin- Start making some REALLY great progress in May 2010
- Lots of good things happen, [insert other sweet progress here].
- Integrate Twitter/Facebook for posting real-time and historical stats
- Add Telerik to the .NET functionality to manage the statistics
- CTIA Show March 22-24, 2011 - Have a GREAT show with LOADS of potentials!
- Finish up the XMLAPI
- Build out the "per-at-bat" MS Silverlight functionality
- Find a great Chief Marketing/Strategy Officer
- Start executing on the 300+ ideas in our Marketing Strategy that's been 2 years in the works [keep hush-hush so as not to alert the competition].
- Push our idea of being *THE* backend for *ALL* mobile/desktop apps to send data through to our XMLAPI
- Create or partner to get an iOS and Android app
- Adding Golf
- Adding Scocer
- Setting up the XMLAPI to take new sports data
- Building out the Per-At-Bat functionality for baseball/softball to give deeper sabermetric data
- Seek out to partner or create iPhone/Android app
- Hire employee #10!
- Redesign profile page (Thanks again Chad @ Cox Printing and Signs)
- Internships anyone?
- Adding Cricket
- Set up validation of statistics system [also hush-hush as this is a big point for our product].
- Adding Swimming
- Adding Video Games
- Adding Board games
- Adding Card Games 
- Merging profile page as a scrapbook for data
- Reach out to recruiters to have them check out how easy it is to find great recruits.
- building out a Board of Directors