I had the pleasure of speaking with and interviewing Fantasy Book Inc’s CEO, Jon Brelig.  Fantasy Book is a startup focused on bringing the fantasy sports league experience to Facebook users.  Their first application is focused on Fantasy Baseball and offers an interface similar to that of Yahoo’s fantasy league offering - which is a good thing.  As far as we are concerned, Yahoo offers the best fantasy league experience to sports fans.  Using their model for a Facebook application is definitely a smart thing to do.  I installed the application and played around with it a bit.  I must say that I’m rather impressed with the experience and am excited to see how it progresses.  Despite the thousands of sports apps on Facebook, none of them have really come close to cornering the fantasy leagues market.  Here’s a snippet from their press release:

The application is the first to offer the full spectrum of fantasy sport features including live drafts, live scoring, trading, player stats, and advanced commissioner controls. While a number of sport applications currently reside on Facebook, none have offered a fully fledged Fantasy Sports experience.

As the platform continues to evolve and richer applications become available, it’s going to be very interesting to see what type of experience sports applications can offer fans.  Check out my interview with Fantasy Book’s CEO below:

1.  What is Fantasy Book and who are the people behind it?
FantasyBook was founded with the aim to fill the gap in social network applications and provide a fully fledged fantasy sports application. Jon Brelig founded the company along with co-founders Ben Standefer and Andy Lammers, all three good friends and former colleagues at IBM in Texas. Jon is also the founder and owner of SkiReport.com, a top 10 online ski portal. FantasyBook received seed funding by Bay Partners as part of their AppFactory Program (http://www.baypartners.com/appfactory/) in December 2007.

2.  When and how did things start?
Last September, I browsed the applications on Facebook expecting to find a fantasy football app to setup my league for the season. Surprisingly no application existed and the goal to fill that gap started. By December 2007, we were seed funded, incorporated, and started coding every day.

3.  What is the current status of Fantasy Book?
We released the first fully featured Facebook Fantasy Sports application with the launch of Fantasy Baseball 2008 in March. We’ve also released an easy and fun Salary Cap Baseball game catered to the casual fan. Currently we have ~10k users between the applications and plan to launch two other baseball related sports application within two weeks. Soon the focus will shift solely to the Fantasy Football application to be released in early August.

4.  What are your future plans for Fantasy Book?
As of now, our focus is really just looking towards the release of our Facebook Fantasy Football. Pending the outcome of Fantasy Football, we will re-evaluate our and plan our future direction.

5.  What is your products competitive advantage?  How will you compete with Yahoo, ESPN, and CBS Sportsline?
Providing the Fantasy Sports experience within Facebook amplifies the social aspect as well as simply being convenient for users. One issue with Fantasy Sport applications today is all users are masked behind obscure screen names, while the Facebook platform provides real names and photos. Price is another factor as current fantasy sport providers charge premium rates for advanced services such as live scoring, which we plan to offer free of charge for Fantasy Football 2008. While it may be difficult to compete on the multitude of features competitors offer, we aim to cater to casual fans who want a convenient and social atmosphere to play fantasy sports.

6.  What is your vision for the future of fantasy sports?
On one extreme, advanced sport games will continue to elevate fantasy sports to new heights catering to the growing population of Fantasy Sport addicts. While on the other end of the spectrum, the social network platform has the ability to provide a very social and convenient environment for casual Fantasy Sport users.