June we reported that a new app called Beyond the Box was becoming a fan favorite for its ability to consistently provide relevant sports news tailored to specific teams by searching over 1,000 news sites, blogs, and social media sources. At the time, Beyond the Box was a new product born from the Stanford StartX Accelerator program.
Shail0 Rao, the Beyond the Box Founder, explained to us that his app is not a typical sports news aggregator. Its ranking and analysis system carefully identifies the best sources about each team and league. This allows Beyond the Box to collect and deliver the right quantity of high quality updates, while sports fans are watching a game or when they’re browsing for the best content from local, national, blog, and player news sources. For Rao, the ‘right quantity’ means filtering out news sources that simply add noise and detract from the ideal second-screen user experience.
Today, months after its conception, Beyond the Box remains a fan favorite and is continuing to grow its user base. It recently launched version 2.0 for iPad and iPad Mini. With this new version Beyond the Box now pulls real-time Instagram photos about your favorite teams and players from a diverse array of high quality sources. It also now covers NCAA and soccer and it refined it’s Twitter backend to create even more efficient and relevant social content.
In the Q&A below we talked with Rao about the the new 2.0 version of Beyond the Box and the thought process behind its additions and enhancements.
SportTechie: What new features were added to Beyond the Box in the 2.0 version and why were they added?
Shailo Rao: Thematically, Beyond the Box 2.0 is about making high quality news about your favorite NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, WNBA, NCAA, and Soccer teams come to life with vibrant multimedia.
At a feature level, the new items are 1) real-time photos from Instagram and coverage of 2) NCAA sports and 3) soccer.
The NCAA coverage spans the ACC, Big 10, Big 12, Big East, Conference USA, IA Independents, Mid-American, Mountain West, Pac 12, SEC, Sun Belt, and WAC. There’s real-time news about college football, basketball, baseball, hockey, soccer, volleyball, tennis, rowing, track and field, lacrosse, gymnastics, and swimming.
There’s coverage of over 150 soccer teams from the Premier League, MLS, Bundesliga, Eredivisie, La Liga, Ligue 1, Scottish Premier, Serie A, and Super Lig.
ST: Why did you feel the need to add real-time photos?
SR: Mobile photo capturing and sharing has become ubiquitous as illustrated by Instagram’s 150 million users. This has created some incredibly fun new content specifically for sports fans including:
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Teams offering new angles of a live game
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Players giving fans a genuine glimpse into their lives
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Fans creating cool art and memes
The sports news experience before, after, and during (second screen) a game is incomplete without easy access to these photos filtered by team and league.
ST: How do you decide what new features to add when rolling out the next version of Beyond the Box?
SR: Hockey legend Wayne Gretzky has a very relevant quote: “’I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”
That characterizes our product philosophy at Beyond the Box. Our continuous market, user, and technological research drives us towards new themes that will resonate with sports fans. These themes in turn get broken down into individual features. Just like Gretzky, Beyond the Box is going where sports fans will want to be, not where they’ve been.
ST: Where is Beyond the Box looking to go from here with the next version? More sports perhaps?
SR: In the short term, Beyond the Box will continue to be focused on re-imagining sports news. We will expand the reach of Beyond the Box by bringing it to more platforms like the iPhone and Android [SIGN UP: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/st-btb-iphone-android]. On the backend we will continue to refine our ranking and analysis of media and player sources.
In the long term, Beyond the Box is focused on re-imagining sports scores and statistics. Together our real-time content aggregation and data visualization will make it infinitely more fun for sports fans to get instant news and insights about their favorite teams and players.
Having covered Beyond the Box since it was initially launched via the Stanford StartX Accelerator program we are looking forward to tracking its continued progress as it further penetrates the second-screen sports news market.
You can download Beyond the Box 2.0 for iPad + iPad Mini on the App Store and sign up for the iPhone + Android launches here.