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.

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

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

Checking in from your location has become far more known after Facebook Places has been launched. There are a broad variety of LBS (Location Based Services) providing information based on your current location. Some finds it brilliant, now information can be filtered based on my location - neat! Others find it creepy - does that mean that “friends” like my employer, wife and other subjects can see where I check in - they can if you do!

But what are the potential of geo-location for consumers and corporations?

From a consumer perspective you can get situational information, so when in Rome you will get info on cultural events, hotel offers or the direction to the the best restaurants in town - recommended by your network. And even though social and mobile shopping is still in its rising, there will be a huge potential on how to combine your purchases with your social network patterns and real time location. Facebook Places will unlikely show us a new dimension on how to use peoples personal information, their updates, social curation and purchase patterns together with their location.

Businesses must rethink their marketing, going from mass- to situational marketing, by aiming at consumers in situations where your product actually adds value. So instead of trying to make your customers adopt to your product and campaigns, you support your customers behavior and needs - when and where it is needed.

This is a big-mother scenario, where we accept receiving offers, campaigns or information from a supplier, as long as it matches our need at a given location. And to avoid a big-brother scenario remember - common sense also rules online!

photo credit: flickr - ciccioetneo

Today we have the privilege of presenting the Gignal from TechPitch4.5 at TechHub in London.

TechPitch4.5 is organized by 2Pears, i.e. the two awesome event organizers Petra Johansson and Rassami Hokljungberg, who used to run the TechCrunch Europe Events.

Follow the Gignal from this great event, moderated by Mike Butcher (TechCrunch Europe), and spiced up with great speakers as, Wendy Tan White, Moonfruit (a true rolemodel), Danvers Baillieu, Bootlaw and Katy Turner, Eden Ventures amongst others.

Enjoy your TechPitch4.5 Gignal!

Note: Written by a calm steady breathing founder - the stream i stable again - yeahh!

We had set up an #egypt stream, aggregating tweets and photos. We deliberately excluded check-ins, so we wouldn’t expose anyone at the scene. It went very well for a day, but then the database crashed - we fixed it- and then it crashed again.

So to look at the bright side, It turned out to be a good test case, due to the large amounts of data. We already planned to implement MongoDB, that task just became more urgent.

Lesson learned: You only have a problem if you don’t know the solution!

Back to work….

We have decided to take our own medicine and share what it’s like to build a startup – complete with all the thrills, pain and concept chaos that rule at Gignal.

Since this is our first journal entry, allow me to introduce my life and business partner - Jacob. Gignal is Jacob’s brainchild and he is also the lead developer.

Yours truly, Natasha, takes care of most of the front end business tasks. My greatest challenge right now is to proof the concept by selling it. Learning from that process will help us improve our service and get closer to the right business model. It ain’t easy!

Back at the start of the recession in 2008, we decided to move to the very northernmost tip of Denmark, called Skagen. We isolated ourselves to focus on the two most important things in our lives - our children and our work.

We’re that rare combination, two startup psychos who got married. This means there’s no one to take us out of our entrepreneurial insanity to do stuff like relax on holidays, watch TV, talk about non-business stuff, or whatever it is “normal couples” do – assuming they actually exist.

This journal will take you on board our journey - from bootstrapping a startup to building a global business.

Here we go!

Follow LIFT11 on Gignal - http://bit.ly/LIFT11 Presenting tweets, photos and check-ins. #LIFT11

Geo-location has undoubtedly been the tech darling of 2010, and we have probably only seen the beginning, many more “must have” geo-location services will rise in the years to come. And we intend to provide one of them - with Gignal.

We basically aggregate data from a specific location or tag - to show what people are talking about at events. There is no difference from creating an opinion in a physical environment to an online. You scan what people are talking about, you chose conversations to follow or participate in. And by tapping into to those conversations you get other peoples perspective from an event. You also have the chance to connect with the people you dig and thereby expand your network. In many ways you can get the exact same value from an event online as offline, since we communicate online even if we sit next to each other at a conference. The barrier for talking is some how lower online.

Now that was the simple version from a user perspective. From a conference organizer perspective we want to help reinvent conferences, by extending them with an online platform, that can strengthen, prolong and cultivate the event for participants before, under and after the physical event, making it a whole year experience - a conference 365.

We would love to hear your thoughts, ideas or needs on how a conference can become more valuable with Gignal, whether you are a organizer or conference participant.

Gignal at action.
TEDxCopenhagen
New Media Days
Danish Media Conference