As usual, we’ve been busy doing what many of you – Sportmeets users – asked us to add or improve and we’ve also implemented another few items from the long-list of features that we want Sportmeets to have when it grows up!

So, let’s look at the new features and improvements:

Static Pages

You can now create your own static pages in the About us section of your group or ladder. Whatever it is that you want the visitors and group members to find out about – the brief history of your club, rules of conduct on the team’s night out (handy for mixed teams), or a few links to interesting websites -  you can now put it on a dedicated page.

‘Mark Yourself OFF’ Option

If you’ve ever been using mailing lists to sign up for a game of football you might find this situation familiar: you’re heading somewhere away for a couple weeks and cannot play in the meantime. So you just keep receiving all these emails about “the game next week” and you have to, for the 11th time, politely excuse yourself that you are away. So we’ve added this nice button on your dashboard which marks you OFF if you cannot play. Use it if you get sick, injured, go on holiday or just need to get away from it all for a while.

Cancelling & Deleting Meets

All types of meets can now be cancelled on the meet homepage (big red X) and everyone that RSVPd ‘yes’ will be notified.

Calendar feeds

We like to see you sporting and we’re making sure you won’t miss out on the action by…forgeting about it. If you use an iCal, Google, Outlook or Yahoo! calendar, you can now have all  your group’s events synced with it. This not only saves you time of adding them manually but also saves you all the beers that you would otherwise had to pay as a penalty for not turning up.

…and finally:

Badges

Some of you might have noticed them already, but for the rest let me explain: Badges are our way of saying “Hey, playing sport is cool. Play more often, improve your game and win matches! Get other people playing too! And be proud about it!” We give badges to motivate people to try new sports. We reward those that do something extra, contribute to the community and help spread the word about Sportmeets because they like the idea.  But to make it a bit more fun, we’ve added some hidden ones, so just keep playing the sports you like and you might come across one!

Well, that’s it for now. We really enjoy reading your feedback so please keep it coming. And keep tuned for some more updates soon!

You’ll probably know that organising sports groups has always been at the heart of Sportmeets. What you might not know yet is that there are Sportmeets groups on every single continent by now (although I’m not sure whether Antarctica counts in or not).  And seeing ‘crowds’ as diverse as university volleyball clubs, workplace ping-pong ladders or Sunday-football-in-the-park groups joining in, we decided that we’ll ditch the crowd terminology and put the right name on each of them instead. So you can now choose the type of group that you’re creating on Sportmeets – we are starting off with clubs, teams, ladders and, well, groups.

This is an important step in shaping Sportmeets to best fulfil the needs of each particular type of sports group. Here, let me give you an example. You don’t really have (or need) a secretary or a treasurer in your Thursday night football kickabout group, right? Likewise, the Chairman of a long-established squash club might frown upon being publicly called a mere Crowd organiser. So, that’s the big news. Keep the feedback coming! Chances are high that  your suggestion might make it to the next post!

Happy sporting!

It’s been a busy and exciting fortnight at the Sportmeets office in Prague for our international team. We’d love to share some cool thing we have been up to recently.

Following our promotion at the two events in Perth and Prague, we’ve been receiving a lot of helpful comments & tips on what you like and what we could improve about Sportmeets. We’ve heard from players, captains, coaches, universities and even national sports associations. Thanks for this, everyone! We love reading your feedback and we are happy to transform it into an even better experience of organising games and sports events for everyone.

Introducing: One-on-one game challenges

This is something we have really tackled and are proud to bring to all players! If you play tennis, squash, badminton or any other sport where it is only about you and your opponent (boxing counts too!), you can now challenge another player  directly and set up the game in no time. Sportmeets will let you know as soon as your would-be opponent has accepted your challenge. So, give challenges a try →

Or, if you are not so much bothered as to who are you going to play against, simply create an open match within your crowd and you’ll be notified when  someone takes up your challenge. In any case, if you want to play, we will make sure there’s nothing to hold you back from getting a game set up! Play with the same people often? — then why not organise a formal sport ladder to find out who is really the best in your club, at work or among friends!

Also stay tuned for our still-secret extension code-name “Project Challenger” as well as recommendations on who to play as we are revamping our sport interest matching algorithm!

Yeah, by the way, sporting is social so don’t keep your games for yourself ! Just imagine the upcoming  FIFA 2010 Football Championships being played behind a closed door! So share your matches on Facebook and Twitter and have your friends show their support by voting on who they think will win! They can do so directly at the meet page or via our Facebook app. You can also gently remind everyone which of the two players they should give their vote for (Hint: tell them to vote for you!). That’s what friends are there for, right?

Well then, there’s a lot going on right now,  so watch this space for further updates on what’s cooking in the Sportmeets kitchen!

We are thrilled that after 4 months of intensive development and caffeinated nights, we can begin our public beta service. We have opened up the registration to everyone and anyone, so that it is even easier to find the right people to play sports with.

We have built what we expect to be some really useful tools for running successful sporting groups since both Peter and Miro – the two co-founders – have been in the shoes of the event organizers, players, referees and coaches! Some of the cool things we are most excited about are:

• Notify people of new meets and let them confirm attendance via SMS, Facebook, Twitter or Email
• Track how much people owe you for attending meets you organize; then get paid via PayPal right on Sportmeets
• Challenge others for matches, then record and share the scores

So go ahead and get playing with Sportmeets →

We are fresh on the pitch – improving the product continuously, so your feedback and impressions, whether good or bad is always welcome at hello@sportmeets.com.

Happy sporting from the crowd here at Sportmeets.

Sports Leaders with Sportmeets: Promote sport, get a great work experience and earn extra cash!

Enjoy playing sports? Then we want to hear from you!

If playing sports and socializing is a regular part of your free time, why not turn it into a valuable work experience as well? Become a Sports Leader with Sportmeets and work in a unique position in a grassroots marketing campaign that will boost your CV, develop your employability skills, and may earn you quite a bit of cash, too.

A great opportunity with Sportmeets.

Sportmeets is a young growing company providing an innovative web application for an easy management of recreational sporting groups and events, ideal for students and young people. We offer to several UK university students the opportunity to represent Sportmeets in their city and to spread the word among fellow students and friends, sporting groups and teams, or student clubs and societies.

Your contribution makes a difference.

As a successful candidate you will communicate with sporting venue administrators, bloggers, or media to promote Sportmeets to the local sporting community. You will be in touch with other Sports Leaders to share support, ideas and advice. We will guide you when you need it, and let you a free hand when you know your way. In the end, it is your city and you will know best how to achieve the results.

A real business experience.

Your role will help Sportmeets succeed in creating an engaging sporting community that allows players of any ability to meet and play sports easier and more often. In return, as a Sports leader you will gain great business-sector work experience that involves enthusiasm, planning, creativity and communication skills, together with a commission-based reward scheme and an official recognition of your performance that will increase your graduate employment prospects.

Interested?

Then you should

• be familiar with the social life on campus
• have a passion for sports and be involved in the local sporting community
• be a self-starter, good communicator, motivated, creative and well-organized
• enjoy using social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter
• be knowledgeable of social media and able to spread message
• be able to commit for 10-15 hours per week for approx. 10 weeks (April – May/June)

We offer:

• a unique opportunity to be in charge of promoting an innovative service on your campus and within your city
• a revenue-sharing payment scheme: the more people you engage, the greater your reward can be
• a certificate of achievement stating your tasks and how well you performed
• professional references upon request
• possible on-going cooperation if we like what you do
• a prize of £200 for the best performing ambassador across the UK

Still interested? Great!

Then let us know a bit about yourself and your ‘qualifications’ for the role of a Sports Leader at peter@sportmeets.com and we will be in touch with more details on the next steps to take.

Every day we’re a bit closer to the long-expected ‘D’ day when Sportmeets will finally go live. We have come a long way over the last year trying shape the initial idea to its current form – from a student hobby project to a full-time dedicated work. We have engaged many people to help make Sportmeets reality, in places as far apart as Glasgow, Prague and Athens, and we have already known it under 3 different names, too! Whether Usporter, Crawdout or Sportmeets, we’ve got to like them all a lot.

There’s one thing, though, that has been pretty much the same ever since we started working on this – and that’s the concept behind Sportmeets.  Well, I guess it is about time to tell the story that lies behind Sportmeets to make it clearer why we are here, and why we ever thought of creating an application that will make life easier for anyone involved in recreational sports. I will divide it in several parts, each describing one interesting experience of Sportmeets’ founders. The first one is about how Miro met Joe.

The story starts in the lovely city of Glasgow, Scotland. Having just moved here from Los Angeles, CA, to continue his studies, Miro (the then Sportmeets-chief-to-be) discovered an unpleasant fact. Are you not sure what can be unpleasant about a West-coast Scottish city at a latitude equivalent to that of Moscow? Well, put simply, if one of your interests back in California was to play beach volleyball every now and then, you might as well forget it here in Glasgow. The weather is for the most of the year generally unsupportive of any outdoor activities that involve even partial nudity. For Miro there was not much choice but to find some other sport that would more reflect the reality of his new surroundings, i.e. it had to be played indoors! Football was one option.

There used to be these weekly football games organized by Joe, a Glasgow Uni student, in which a bunch of guys from all over the university would participate. Joe has always been a nice guy – he had to be, in order to keep this football thing running. He would wake up early on a Wednesday morning to get down to the sports centre to book the activity hall for next Wednesday as this had to be done in person and if you came a bit late, the slot would already have been taken. After paying for the booking, Joe would send out an email with the time of the game, asking people to sign up to which they would respond if they wanted to play. Joe would then send another email to confirm who was coming to the game and they would all have a nice game of football the next week. So far so good. But sometimes the things turned out to be more complicated than this. If you ever tried to get a bunch of people to one place to do an activity, you will know what is involved. In addition to the weekly morning trip to the sports hall, Joe would have to go through all the RSVPs and write down who’s coming. After the game he would collect the money: with 60p per person it would usually amount to a pile of change or worse, nobody would have anything smaller than a tenner. Due to some strange Murphy Law, there would therefore usually be either too much change or not enough. Now, that already was quite some work to do just to have a game of football. Imagine then that somebody would sent an email that they cannot make it just a day before the game – another email had to be sent out again. Sometimes people did not turn up at all and there would not be enough players. Another time somebody would forget to pay their 60p before going home. It was Joe that had to deal with all these inconveniences and carry around all the loose change and he did so bravely.

Well, Miro was a part of this football group, too. And he thought that there must be many ‘Joes’ around, organizing all kinds of activities and sports, but perhaps some of them are not willing to spend so much time to do it. Can something be done about this to help the guy in charge enjoy the game as much as the others do?  That’s where the idea to make sports organization as smooth as possible came from and it now lies at the core of Sportmeets. And now we also know that the answer is yes – it can!

Is this all about making the life of  the organizer easier then? Nope. We know well enough that there’s more to doing sport than that.  But I’ll tell you more in the next part of the Sportmeets story.

Yup, exactly as the title says: Crawdout is now Sportmeets. But hey, let’s be clear about this. We haven’t been taken over by a huge corporation with a name you’ve never heard of! We’ve  just changed the name and added a shiny, brand new logo on the top!  While Sportmeets will be about crowds and people around you as much as Crawdout was, we just like the sporting side of it too much to keep it out of  the name. And of course, meeting for a sport is as much fun as getting your crowd out, right?

So, let’s hear it for Crawdout then as it leaves the pitch, and welcome Sportmeets instead – young, strong, and ready for the ‘big game’ that starts very soon!