Daily Fantasy Sports Blogging

It seems like the daily fantasy sports industry has finally hit the inflection point where it's popularity is starting to explode. Fantasy Sports Live has been growing steadily since our launch in June 2007, but without much help from a strong daily fantasy sports industry. We now have some well funded competitors who are driving awareness of the concept, and annual prizes paid out are starting to approach the 10 million dollar amount. Daily Fantasy Sports is now just as legitimate as online poker was in its beginning and new cottage industries are developing to support this expanded popularity. Rotogrinders is a perfect example of a site that could not have existed two years ago, but can exist now with a critical mass of daily fantasy sport players.

When I started my poker blog, I was a bit late to the game. Poker blogs had existed for a few years, and I was just offering my unique perspective to the game. As I got better at blogging, I was able to break some new ground in some of my poker strategy posts but this was tough, because most of the concepts had already been beaten to death by other bloggers. With daily fantasy sports, it feels like being the first one to have a poker blog. There just are not a lot of people blogging daily fantasy sports, and new ground can be broken all the time. Since this site is not where people would come to look for daily fantasy sports strategy posts, I have been writing for Rotogrinders. It is like I am writing the first posts on continuation bets, or check raises, or floating for value which is a pretty awesome feeling. I am in the unique position of having created the industry (I have been thinking about daily longer than anyone else) and I am also a serious fantasy grinder on some of FSL's competitive sites. This dual owner/player perspective may end up placing me as the grandfather of daily fantasy blogs when all is said and done, similar to what Iggy did for poker blogs.

Posting over here is just not happening much lately, but if you would like to see what I have been doing with daily fantasy sports, check out these links below.

Table Selection and Hourly Rates in Daily Fantasy Sports

Third Level Thinking in Fantasy Football

NFL Advanced Metrics

Why Andriod Will Not Be a Long-Term Success

The unending hype from the tech industry about how Android is crushing the iPhone is pretty laughable. Sure the tech industry hates Apple, and Android is the next best thing to iOS, but they are missing the big picture. To win long-term requires good customer service practices, and these simply do not exist at Google. Apple has been around since before the internet, and has never adopted the internets lack of customer service business model. When you are Google or FaceBook, and have millions and millions of customers, and a limited budget for customer services you need to make some choices. For example if you have one customer service agent per 5 million customers, you have issues if you publish a support email address or support phone number. The support load would be overwhelming if you allowed your customers to actually contact you, so they simply avoid this at all costs. They use Forums, and FAQ pages, and their contact pages do not provide actual contact information, just more hoops to jump through and links back to the FAQ pages. I know this from personal experience. Google is probably a top ten worst company in terms of customer service. You simply can’t contact them, even if your problem or issue can’t be solved by a FAQ page. If you are a customer of Google and have an issue you are simply fucked. Fucking your customers over is not a solid long-term strategy for growth.

So how does customer service for the Andriod OS work?

I will tell you right now, that you will not be getting any from Google. Google gave away the OS for free, and as a result does not have to support it. So the device manufacturer will have to support the software that they did not provide. Good luck with that one! So if your android device is having an issue you can go the manufacturer, and they will claim it is an OS issue. You can’t go to Google so you will need to just take their word for it.

How does customer service work for the iPhone work?

Apple not only makes the phone, but they also provide the OS and software. They are completely responsible for the device, and can’t point fingers elsewhere. They also have a brick and mortar retail presence that allows you to speak directly with Apple customer service agents. They also have actual contact info on their website. So at apple they can take ownership and resolve the issue, while with android there is no single owner, and OS support will be non-existent.

Which OS requires more support?

The Andriod OS clearly will require much more support than an iPhone. There are simply more versions of both the OS and hardware out there, and Android phones are much more customizable from their base configuration. The iPhone is also much easier for non-techies to use and understand than an Android phone. So the support levels will need to be higher for Andriod, but the support is crippled by Google’s lack of participation.

Ultimately, consumers are free to choose the Smartphone operating system that they want, and many are currently choosing Android. Consumers are a fickle bunch, and once they catch wind of major customer service issues with Android, they will not be sticking with the OS long-term.