LocalReplay.com

(video clip above of AAU basketball - North Carolina Gaters vs Georgia Inner-Strength)

I always used to be surprised when I'd see a startup be announced on a site other than their own.  Then it happened to us late last night.  We posted a job opening on LinkedIn and within 24 hours the first blogs picked it up, did some research, and posted.  True to their name, alarm:clock appeared to be first, although they got one fact wrong (it was VSNL that bought Teleglobe, not vice-versa).  Mashable was up early on the story as well, and now Digg and company are starting to pepper it all over the web.

LocalReplay.com has not been in complete "stealth mode" - we started a limited but public beta a couple months ago, but we have not done any PR or marketing, and were waiting to formally "announce" until we came out of beta.  That's what we get for waiting, and now I know how and why this happens to so many startups.  Lesson #10,000 or so that we've learned in the past couple months (will blog some of them one day if things calm down).

So, what is LocalReplay?  Well, go to the site to really find out.  A picture is worth 1000 words, and worth at least 2000 of mine (and we have thousands of photos and tons of video clips like the one above as well).  In a nutshell however, LocalReplay enables all members of local sports communities to easily create personal, multi-media (photos and videos), interactive sports web pages.  Players create StarCards, teams create TeamCards, coaches start CoachCards, photographers and videographers build channels, fans compile FanCards, writers contribute to our blogs or start their own, etc. 

The "Local" part of our name is because we built LocalReplay for local sports - not national professional sports.  Local sports glues communities together - from Little League to the high school tennis team - the games are played, coached, watched, supported, and discussed by the people in the community.  More people nationally care about MNF, and that's why it belong on national web sites and media, but the Friday night high school football game is just as important within the thousands of local communities that they are played in each week. 

LocalReplay belongs to you as a local sports community.  Use our technology to represent your community's local sports - the people, teams, and games that matter to you.  As we add communities, we'll actually make the site smaller from your perspective, meaning hyper-focused on your community.  We'll continue to stitch together communities across the country, but your LocalReplay experience will be much different than mine if we live in different areas.  LocalReplay will be a part of the new media paradigm that we've discussed some on NextBlitz, and the great communities at blogs like MediaShift, Buzz Machine, and A VC discuss with much more frequency, insight, and detail.  In the new media paradigm, you own your web experience, you own your content, and LocalReplay will be a part of it for you.

What isn't LocalReplay?  We are not another site that you need to buy a subscription for to hear about who someone else thinks is the best of the best. The site is completely free for you (sponsorship supported) - charging you would mean that only certain teams and athletes would be able to use the site, and we are about entire local sports communities - all sports, all the time.  We are also not intent on keeping you within LocalReplay walls.  Want to hop over to a message board for soccer, and a different one for football, and neither is on LocalReplay?  Fine with us - we try to gather the links for you and work with other sites to let you navigate back and forth between the sites in the manner that is most ideal for you, and we enable other sites to use our data, photos, and videos as well. 

Two MVP-caliber software developers, Jordan Hunter and Mike Jaffe, did almost all the heavy lifting on the site in only a couple of months.  They did a tremendous job, but our goal was to build a beta that had some functionality, and then learn from you what we really need to focus on, rather then spending six months or a year building what we think you want.  Your response has been great - we get over 100,000 hits per month even though we only launched in one community without any advertising or PR - and we've learned more than we could have hoped for, and are applying it to make LocalReplay better everyday.

So that's the LocalReplay introduction and a quick description of what we are today.  What will we be tomorrow?  I don't know - it is really up to your local sports community - but I know we'll be happy to be where sports are being played and enjoyed the way that they should be, and hope to add a web dimension to your local sports experience.