Gignal

The sport industry is still reluctant to utilize social media to amplify their events and to share the social experience at stadiums with the rest of the world. The potential is notable, and aligned to the core purpose of sport - engaging communities of passion.

Imagine sitting at a stadium experiencing the atmosphere that has drawn people to arenas since the time of the gladiators. What we experience is a collective relation with the people we share that moment and passion with offline and online. And collective relations are as powerful for people as intimate relations with our spouses and relational relationships with friends. It is that collective experience we want to support with Gignal, engaging audiences at physical locations and around the world.

So with 2012 in front of us, what can sport teams and venues do to amplify the collective experience and engage their audience? From Gignal’s perspective a lot can be done, with or without our stream - here is five low hanging fruits just waiting to be picked.

1. Micro-reporting
It is no longer only the television- and radio stations that report live from a game, the most active reporters are the audience, with thousands of mobile phones they are standing in the front line eager to report the atmosphere, emotions and defining moments to their network. They share their experience trough pictures, videos and status updates, viewed by friends and fans outside the venue that did not have a ticket. To engage the audience as pitchside reporters, interaction with the team, the players, the coach and the venue is key. We already see sport stars on Twitter and Facebook, but much more can be done to make the audience share their experience.

Through the social media stream on physical screens at the stadium, the audience can monitor the collective participation, which makes them aware of their role as a micro-reporter. And the audience watching from home, can follow the social media buzz online, as if they were standing in the front line them selves.

2. Cross media experience
The audience are multitasking even when they are at the stadium watching the game. They follow the action on the ground, on the billboard, on their phones and on screens at the tribune. At home the TV or radio is on, and so is the laptop where the fans can search for further information and interact on social networks.

The social media stream is not competing with TV or radio, on the contrary it presents the audience experience rather than a reporters, making it an ideal supplement for a cross media experience.

3. Engage communities of passion
Football teams describe the 12th. player as the audience. If the audience is engaged and cheering for their team, they empower the players. Through the stream on stadium screens, the coach can send a message to the audience - to make them roar their support to the players in crucial moments. The team players can send messages before and after the game, to create buzz and to thank the audience directly.

There lies an incredible power in audience engagement, because in the end it is all about stimulating communities of passion, to create a memorable social experience.

4. Social media stream - before, during and after the game.
During games we are often able to watch a live video stream, but sport teams tend to forget that fans talk constantly about their team, upcoming games and their expectations. It would be easy and obvious for sport teams to have a “Live” area on their website, so fans can click and see the real-time buzz, produced by fans and the team across social networks.

Gignal provides a widget, making it easy for clubs to host and present all the social media buzz from a geo tag and hashtags on their own website. Not only will it be easier for people to find the buzz, it also brings the traffic back to the clubs, instead of keeping it on the social networks.

5. Real-time marketing
When a fan checks-in to a stadium, writes a tweet or takes a picture, we know where they are based on the geo tag. This is also the ideal time to market and sell merchandise, tickets and other location based goods, to a passionate and captive audience. During the heat of the moment it us much easier to sell tickets for the game next week, merchandise and beer at the pub after the game. Some clubs are seeing this potential, one of them are Real Madrid, that has been working with mobile marketing for a while.

With Gignal, sport clubs can present these time limited offers on the stadium screens, reaching a captive audience, that are much more willing to press buy while they experience the atmosphere in that given moment.

Every brand is media company
Every organization and brand is a media company. But since this is not their core business or skill, utilizing the new media opportunities can be difficult for the people involved. We want to make it easy for sport teams to gather, host and present all the buzz that surrounds their brand, so they can be in charge of audience involvement.

YouTube has increasingly become the preferred media channel for upcoming stars, waiting to be discovered. Established artists have reached out to their community of fans, by feeding them on YouTube. Lady Gaga’s producer revealed that their strategy is to produce videos on YouTube to sell concert tickets. Our Founder and CEO, Natasha was interviewed by the national Danish television station DR Mama Popular about this YouTube phenomena.

The interview is in Danish, but the talk is about three Danish talents that have become famous in Denmark at least, and with a dedicated fan community supporting them through their YouTube production. Two of them have even signed record contracts after their YouTube defining moments.

The new kids on the block are:

Lukas Graham
Kidd
Niklas

The Dream Team.

Friday the 18th. November 2011 our team joined Startup Weekend Copenhagen. We wanted to participate to meet and work with new talents, build a new frontend for our stream and get business strategy feedback. Friday evening after our pitch 8 people were gathered ready to execute. After midnight the weekend was planned and smaller teams organized based on peoples skills.

Our desktop stream. “Before Startup Weekend”

Saturday morning our focus was to create the design describing the user scenarios, address use case questions and sketch the first mockups. Ray - our designer worked intensely until the first design was ready at 2 pm Saturday. Now the developers could take over, Mariano, Morten on the backend and Signe on the frontend. With the design in place Jesper and Kevin could also start to work on our video - presenting Gignal in action at a stadium. Niels and I worked on our use cases, market research and business model. Saturday was mentor day, where we met with great mentors, giving us feedback and introducing us to valuable contacts.

Saturday evening the first version of our billboard version was ready - boosting our energy after twelve hours of intense work. A late evening turned into Saturday night fewer and after few hours of sleep, for some on chairs and on the floor, we were ready to work on the final version and our afternoon pitch.

On Sunday all the small pieces were put together, the last touch on the stream and a few more designs for later progress were in place - we were as ready as we could get with the design, the stream, the video and the pitch. And this is the result of a weekend of work.

The new billboard stream.

Kevin and Jesper did an amazing job with the video - presenting Gignal Stadium.

After the pitch we used the rest of our adrenalin to celebrate, relax and look back at an awesome weekend.

We have created a special branch for Startup Weekend on Github, so if anyone wants to hack feel free to be creative and please show us your work.

All this was only made possible by the great team organizing Startup Weekend and our amazing team! Even though we had hours of fatigue and last day stress, the team spirit was high and the collaboration was admirable. Proving ones again that teams drive progress not individuals, it was a true honor to be a captain on this team - thank you Signe, Mariano, Niels, Kevin, Ray, Jesper and Morten!

-Natasha

So said Kevin Kelly, Senior Maverick from Wired in June 2011, and we certainly agree! But what is it about the stream, why do we follow it daily on our devices and where will it take us in the future?

We are constantly exposed to tremendous amounts of data across our social networks, when friends and followers distribute pictures, videos, links and messages. The only way we can qualify the content is by scanning it briefly, deciding what message in the stream will get our attention, while the rest will be lost and forgotten forever.

But that’s how we navigate through the flood of information - the stream is constant but our attention is random. We screen, we pick and we participate when it makes sense, and ignore the rest. True qualification of content still depends on humans cognitive skills, no algorithm can replace that - yet. Until that happens, which might take a while even in Internet years, our remedy is the stream. One of the big challenges in data qualification is that robots cannot anticipate what an individual defines as value, nor which topics will be relevant to us tomorrow, because algorithms are based on our actions in the past, which doesn’t necessary lead to our behavior in the future. This gap in technology leaves the need of a stream for us to follow, engage and interact with others.

That is why we are building Gignal. We want to make a stream that amplifies peoples voices and images from events. We want to give any person online, access to any event they want to witness through the eyes and thoughts of the people physically present. Gignal takes the physical atmosphere online in a shared world based on a shared experience.

We are not inventing a need, we are just supporting what people are already doing when their favorite football team scores a goal and when they win a match - they roar with their mobile phone on social media - and we will echo that on Gignal.

The same reaction happens at basically any event where a crowd are sharing an experience. From festivals to world movements as the Arab Spring, where the world joined and supported the young people in the streets of Cairo. Instead of just following the content on Twitter or Facebook, we want to show all the real-time conversations surrounding an event and across social networks, giving our users a real-time experience.

So there is no past, there is no future and there is no end to where our stream will take us, engage us and entertain us - but we want to define it.

- Natasha

Gignal was presenting Startup Week 2011 in Vienna last week. On physical screens, on the Startup Week 2011 website and of course on Gignal. Here is their testimonial we received yesterday - thanks guys it was a great event and we were proud to participate and present all your buzz on Gignal!

Gignal + Startup Week was a perfect fit. Tons of pictures were uploaded during these 5 days, the audience tweeted like hell and thanks to Gignal, it was all collected and amplified from one place. It was a win for our participants, who saw at a glance what was going on, whether they were engaging from our main venue, at one of our side events or at home. And it was of course, also a win for us as organisers. We were always up to date with what was going on, saw potential problems mentioned by our audience in minutes, and stayed in contact with our participants. #sw11

- Moritz Plassnig, Co-founder STARTeurope & Organiser Startup Week 2011

This week the European startup scene will be taking on Vienna. From several locations the program is stuffed with startup fueled activities, from speaks, startup challenges, pitches and panel discussions. Lots of entrepreneurial mind juice and motivation will be produced in this cultural epicenter - but this week the orchestra will be playing the tunes of building businesses in the world of web.

Gignal is proudly presenting the social media buzz from Twitter, Facebook, Check-ins and photos to everyone watching the event as an audience or at home. We present the thoughts and knowledge people are sharing online through messages and pictures. So if you can’t be in Vienna - Gignal will still take you very close.

You can dip into the atmosphere here:
Startup Week 2011 website
On Gignal’s site

And if you are present at the two venues, you can watch the Gignal on physical screens.

If you want to take part of the conversation - use the event tag #SW11.

Event though we are people of the stream we are also in Vienna live - so if you want to meet us, our founder and CEO, Natasha Friis Saxberg is a part of the Business Model Panel on Wednesday - and would love to meet real-time.

Enjoy your Gignal @ Startup Week 2011!

Photo credit: Startup Week

From June 11-25 2011 Gignal will present the social media buzz created by the audience in- and outside the U21 tournament venues.

The games are played at different locations in Denmark, and the matches will be watched not only at stadiums but also in city squares and other outdoor meetup points.

Gignal will capture the atmosphere and emotions when the audience posts updates on Twitter or Facebook, takes photos or video and check-in at the venues.

Follow the Gignal from U21 on physical screens at the event or online.

Photo credit: u21denmark2011

Facebook experiences a loss of users in primarily the US, Canada and Russia, this news has hit the headlines of international media including the Danish.

Tuesday our CEO, Natasha Friis Saxberg gave her take to DR News - the Danish television station, on why Facebook experiences a decrease of users in specific countries. The pattern shows that once they reach half the population, their market limit is reached. It is also the countries Facebook first penetrated that are now experiencing a loss of users, a fact Facebook denies. Countries that were entered later as Mexico and Brazil is still in high growth.

What Facebook experiences now, is the case for many successful companies, they have travelled the J curve journey, and now they are meeting their market limit, which for Facebook is an impressive 50 percent of a country population. Reaching 700 m. users, we are now spending more than 700 billion minutes on Facebook per month. With a reign of 10 percent of the world population, they are indeed conquering the world, in a way Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan would never have dreamt of.

With 2.5 m. websites connected to Facebook, there is still a great commercial opportunity. Very few companies knows as much about their users as Facebook, so we should expect further commercial cultivation, or to use a buzz word - f-commerce.

We look forward to the day where we have to explain why Gignal has experienced a slight decrease in our 700 million users - a problem to love indeed!

We presented the World Cup 2010 Gignal from the Copenhagen soccer festival at Ofelia Beach to more than +165.000 visitors. Gignal was presented in the breaks entertaining the captive audience with the social media buzz from in- and outside the event. The aim was also to attract more participant by spreading the good vibes from the venue.

We presented tweets, photos, video, check-ins and SMS. It was a 3 week event produced by the Danish Television station TV2.

Testimonial by Therkel Sand.
Gignal presented activity buzz from our +165.000 participants at the World Cup event, hosted by TV2 in Copenhagen. Thanks to Gignal we engaged the audience offline as well as online. The content from the event motivated more people to join the football festivity, and gave TV2 useful Real-time location buzz before, during and after the event. The people and content that Gignal collected gave us an ideal opportunity to reach our community.

photo credit: TV2