The only fantasy sports site you will ever need. Millions of relevant posts aggregated into your own personalized FantasyFeed gives you an unfair advantage in your fantasy sports game.
It was a true pleasure working with the PerfectLine team. They were extremely professional, thorough, and attentive to our needs. They were not just outsourced developers, they acted as partners with us on throughout the project and we would not be where we are today without them.
What is The War Room?
Most fantasy sports fans follow more than ten different sports news sources to get the latest information and achieve a competitive edge over other players in their fantasy league.
Keeping an eye on all the relevant players in their fantasy sports team is essential to enable picking the best players in the draft rounds. The War Room provides fantasy sports fans with all the necessary information to stay ahead of the game with a responsive web application.
Desktop experience is extended even further with and a custom made fantasy sports iPhone application. The proprietary FantasyFeed algorithm analyzes the players, teams and other relevant details that matter and will learn from choices the user makes throughout the process.
Once the personalized FantasyFeed has been created and applied to the user’s profile they will soon see the upper hand they get thanks to The War Room, compared to their friends in the local fantasy league.
Founder’s vision to develop gaming software
It was by the end of 2011 when Blake Hall (founder of TroopSwap and ID.me) introduced us to Terrence McMullen, his classmate from Harvard Business School.
After few emails and follow up calls we came to understanding that we would be a good fit to bring his dream into reality.
His vision for The War Room, and how it could change the fantasy sports industry, was something that really appealed to us from the very beginning and just like that we dedicated ourselves to develop the game.
Starting with small developments
Around the beginning of 2012 we took over the project from the previous developers (originally developed in PHP) and started with a quick updates and fixes to an early version of the application.
Back then The War Room was a simple fantasy sport news site that took a lot of manual labor to add posts and manage them. Unfortunately the user experience for editors and readers was far from being pleasant and we were on a mission to fix that.
Rather soon it became obvious that we should build a more solid foundation from scratch for all the future functionality. We decided that while we give the site a complete design overhaul, we could as well re-build the site with Ruby on Rails.
In about a month later we delivered a gorgeous, yet easy to manage, news website dedicated completely for fantasy sports fans. We still kept the blog format that The War Room visitors were used to.
We introduced few social sharing features to help the visitors share the best sports stories and at the same time power the organic growth for the site. Still, we weren’t in the position to relax since there was too much manual labor needed for all the editorial work and that was about to change soon.
It’s all about the FantasyFeed, baby
Next five months we were busy-busy-busy for our team! Within that time we designed and developed most of the current core functionality that you can see below and optimized the user experience to meet the expectations of very demanding fantasy sports fans.
With these expectations in mind we created the FantasyFeed. The algorithm powering FantasyFeed analyzes all the information that our system gathers in real time, automatically understands on what the content is about and indexes it for fast querying.
The cross-referencing capabilities within the FantasyFeed algorithm makes it so much easier for us to later on query content for any professional sports leagues (we currently follow only NBA, NFL, MLB and NHL) teams or players. On top of the technical challenges we also needed to make sure that the site is easy to use and would engage users for extended periods of time.
Personalization and social networking features benefit from the easy to use user interface a lot and perform well at this stage. Currently The War Room analyzes over 3,500,000 feeds, articles or other sources on monthly basis. This makes The War Room an excellent site to keep an eye on a aggregated fantasy sports information.
Server infrastructure to host the web and iPhone applications
If after reading this you have any questions about The War Room project then just get in touch with us by email, Facebook or Twitter and we’ll get back to you shortly.
