Your friends here at FantasySports20.com weren’t able to make the FSTA Winter Conference that took place in Denver this past week, but thanks to Rotonation.com, we can come to some conclusions from the conference. I’ll list some of the highlights and award winners from this past week. Several things we can take from the conference (from a third person perspective):

1. The conference underscored the need for newer, better data on the fantasy sports industry. According to Rotonation, the data presented was more of the same that FSTA member were presented with last year. Yes, we know 20 million people (or almost that much) play fantasy sports in the USA. I don’t see why the FSTA doesn’t partner with or commission a study from the likes of Nielsen NetRatings to monitor the impact of fantasy sports and online usage. Give us some projections. This is obviously an area where the industry is lacking and people are clamoring for this type of information.

2. There was a content on Fantasy Content, and William Del Pillar (KFFL) said something interesting about getting your content out there and seen. According to Rotonation:

Comment from William Del Pilar about syndication: If you are a start-up, syndicating your content on large sites is a cost-effective way to get your content out there. Also has the advantage of increasing your search engine rankings, since you’ll be linked to larger sites.

That’s a great comment and a source of solace for startups trying to get their name out there.

3. There were also some legal issues panels, some companies got to pitch about their companies (nothing too earth-shattering there), but we really want to know who won the awards, right? So here are several of the big winners at FSTA this year, at least that I found most interesting:

Best Innovation: Screaming Sports

Best New Website or Site Update: Accuscore.com

Best Fantasy Commissioner Product Winner: CBSSports.com
Comment: CBS beat out Yahoo! and ESPN? Wow. I wonder if the glitches last year on both sites affected the voting here.

Best Draft Style Tool or Contest: Mock Draft Central
Comment: what happened to Antsports? Not even a nomination?

Best Salary-Cap Style Contest: Head2Head Sports

To view the rest of the award winners, please check out the rest here. Many props to Rotonation and Derrick Eckhardt, whose many blog reports and fine reporting from the Conference provided a majority of the information in this post.