In the arms race for fantasy football supremacy, every small advantage can make the difference between winning and losing. It can also make the difference between making a living in today's world of fantasy football or throwing away money for league fees.
Big Data and statistics is the newest arsenal for fantasy owners looking to secure a competitive advantage over their rivals. I have discussed the importance of Big Data to provide vital trends for fantasy owners before. To add to that set of tools, SkyPhrase Sports has released a new tool that takes advantage of natural language search for fantasy football statistics. The release also includes a separate feature set for Google Analytics.
Natural Language
To provide an easy to use interface to access a plethora of data, the tool utilizes natural language search. "SkyPhrase for Sports shows that natural language understanding technology can make pro-level statistics easy for any user", said Nick Cassimatis, SkyPhrase founder.The tool features several methods to ask SkyPhrase questions about the data you are looking for. One can use their interface on their website or they can use Twitter to pose a question to @skyphrase. The service provides data on individual players as well as injury information. In addition, it provides the ability to compare one player against another when fantasy owners are deciding which one to start. The company says they are still working on an event alert system that could email you, for example, when one of the players on your team has scored a touchdown. The tool also points out that it does not provide statistics on lineman or defensive backs.
Search Results
The SkyPhrase tool is easy enough to use. I entered a query: "Tell me which players has the most yards this season against the Dallas Cowboys" and the tool returned an impressive result with a list of players with their yard totals. It also included running and receiving yardage in the total for players to represent that correct yard from scrimmage number. I also tried other various queries and each time the results provided very readable and understandable results.
The interface to ask question is not as simple as it could be. There are different areas in the UI that guides you to the most appropriate search box to enter a query. In subsequent releases, a single search box such as the method that Google and Bing uses would be more intuitive. In addition, the response time could be improved. This could be accomplished with improved indexing as well as getting a better sample of the type of queries users are entering.Finally, the site is a pull model for user for data. They ask the system for information and the system returns it. One can imagine a system where SkyPhrase uses a push model and already knows which question users are about to ask by gathering information from the players in your league and cross referencing that information with injury status and upcoming match up information.
Summary
Data is becoming more plentiful in the world of fantasy football to the point that the data itself is becoming commoditized. There is an assortment of free data for fantasy football available. The successful companies are the ones that are able to absorb the data and provide meaningful and relevant information to fantasy owners. That is why there are still a number of websites that charge for their content.
The website itself does not display an ads or does the website charge for a service. Moving forward, it would be interesting to see what business model SkyPhrase adopts. There could be an opportunity in ad placement or in the information on the type of search queries players are entering into the system.
In this first release of SkyPhrase, the results and interface provide fantasy football owners a tool that is helpful and can be used today. This is one website that we are going to add to our fantasy football toolbox set.
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Video explanation of SkyPhrase:
