The Oleboo blog

Huge performance in sports this week-end

It's been a huge sports week-end with the 10-0 win from PSV Eindhoven against Feyenoord in the Dutch soccer league, and the 59-14 victory of the Raiders over the Broncos at Denver. 

I actually don't remember the last time a team won with more than 10 goals difference in a major soccer (football) league, but my friends at footbalistic can surely confirm that. 

Regarding the NFL game, I don't have the stats either, but what a performance from Oakland, at a time where confidence wasn't necessarily there (after all, they lost against the 49ers last week!). 

Looking forward to seeing the stats if you have them!

 

Oleboo is hiring a developer

You love sports? You love social media? You love hacking stuff late at night? Then this job is for you! 

Oleboo, a social application that connects sports fans during a live event, is looking for a developer to accelerate its growth. 

What you need to know about Oleboo: 

We’re a very young start-up, team is extremely small. 
We’re based in San Francisco, but don’t work out of an office. 
We like shipping. You have an idea, build it, ship it, learn, iterate. 
We hate power point, it’s actually forbidden (it’s just bad). 
We launched our iPhone app 6 weeks ago. 
We got featured on the app store under the “what’s hot” section. 
We have a lot of cool stuff coming up. 

Responsibilities: 
Hands-on on all the development aspects. 
Come up with ideas all the time. 
Make oleboo the best product for sports fans. 

Requirements: 
Must have: 
* HTML/CSS 
* Javascript 
* Python experience 
* Web services 

Nice to have 
* JQuery (what we use) 
* YUI, Dojo, other good javascript libraries 
* PHP, django templates, mako templates, some sort of templating experience 
* Pylons/WSGI 
* SQL 
* SQLAlchemy 

The ideal candidate is a sport fan, who loves building great products. They don’t mind working in a very fast environment, where things change all the time, for the good of the product. We haven’t raised money, therefore we can’t afford to pay cash. We give great equity in exchange. We’re totally cool if you want to do that job on top of a regular job. Huge growth opportunity! 

Contact us if you're interested! 

The NHL is starting. Cheer on Oleboo!

Today is the opening of the new NHL season. Some of you asked us to cover the hockey season. We've done it. You can now cheer for your teams, or boo your opponents for all the NHL games. 

While we were at it, we also added all the pre-season NBA games.

Remember, watching the games while playing Oleboo is fun. It's like watching the game together with all your friends, no matter where they are! 

Opening games much earlier

We've got a lot of feedback from all of you asking to open games earlier.

Unfortunately, the app doesn't let you start playing until the game you want to talk about is actually active. So you can't engage in any pre-game smacktalk. This probably has to do with the medal system that rewards you for multiple comments during a game, but it would be nice to incorporate pre-gaming in some respect.

This was from a review in appolicious. While we understand that some pre-game trash talk is always good, we also want Oleboo to reward the folks who are watching the game. So we decided to come up with a new point system and a new way to open games.

Starting today, most of the games will be opened hours before they actually start. Those of you who want to ole or boo the teams, you will still earn 1 point per shout. You'll also enjoy the usual 4 shouts to start with, each of them regenerating after 5 minutes. 

Now, if you shout while the game is actually happening, you'll score 3 points per shout, and 2 points everytime someone else does the same thing, within a minute. 

Basically, you have much more chances to be the MVP of the game if you participate during the game, than if you just do the pre-game trash talk! 

Let's see how this goes, and don't hesitate to send us your feedback. 

 

Amazing goal from a Japanese player

via www.youtube.com

New interface on the web

We've just released an improved web interface. We'll bring even more improvements in the days to come, but you'll notice that you can now see the total number of boos and oles each team has. You also have a better access to your stats. 

We've also introduced an invite module, so you can invite your friends as you play. Oleboo is much more fun when your friends are on it at the same time, so don't hesitate to tell them to join you! 

You can check it out by going to oleboo, and playing a game on the web or on your iPad. 

Amazing penalty kick and what a mistake from the keeper!

via www.youtube.com

Amazing penalty kick!

Best day ever on Oleboo!

Yesterday, with the opening of the NFL season, we've had our best day ever on Oleboo. More than 45 people played simultaneously during Vikings vs Saints. Those are not people saying they're watching the game. Those are people who are sharing their emotions as the game is happening. It was a lot fun. 

It was great to talk about the game as it was happening with fans from all over the place. Interestingly enough, each team had almost the same number of oles (86 and 87), but the Vikings  received more boos. 

At the same time, the Giants beat the Padres for a huge win in the race to the Playoffs. I feel bad for earning the most points during that game, but I was just so happy for the Giants! 

Earlier in the day, Apple removed us from the new and noteworthy section on the homepage on the Itunes store (which makes total sense since we're not new anymore! ). We're now showcased in the what's hot section (see image), still on the homepage. Thank you Apple! We're hard at work on the next version, which will be out very soon. 

New shouts limit on Oleboo

In the past few days, we've seen an increase of individuals using all their shouts at once. While this was their choice, it impacted the user experience for everybody else, since we would just show a long string of oles and boos. We had to find a way to fix this. 

We've decided to move to a different model. From now on, you can shout a total of 4 times every 5 minutes. 

The advantage of that is that it gives you more shouts for the overall games, since there isn't the 30 shouts limit anymore. Hopefully, this will provide a better experience for everybody. 

New football season #NFL 2010

This is the time of the year when I get really excited. The new NFL season is about to start! Brett Favre is back, as usual, and Sunday nights are not going to be the same for the next 5 months (maybe I should also say Monday nights...). 

Oleboo is ready for the new football season. That was one of our key goal when we started this adventure. We're available on multiple platforms (web, Iphone), we have a solid user base, and the product has gone a long way from the prototype we had back in May thanks to all of you, who used Oleboo and shared your feedback. 

Of course, things are not perfect, and we're going to release improvements and new features in the days to come (stay tuned, a lot is actually happening!), but we're very happy of where we're at right now. And we hope you'll enjoy playing Oleboo during football games as much as we're enjoying building the best companion for sports fans while watching a sporting event.