Charged with teaching a dozen 7-year-old little league players the finer points of baseball, David Jacobs and Steven Lerner decided to start with a simple warm-up. They explained that they would yell out the name of a base, and the kids would run to it. When they started with “second base,” however, children scattered to four different bases.
Several little league practices and bus-stop discussions later, Jacobs and Lerner decided to fill the need they had discovered for a compelling way to teach kids about sports.
What they came up with, FunGoPlay, combines an online sports game world with physical sporting equipment that registers physical play and rewards it with special access codes. The “online sports theme park” will launch this Spring.
The model hits a sweet spot on several levels. Almost 20% of children in the United States are obese, and video games — an increasingly favored activity — have long been blamed for increasing this percentage. Paradoxically, at the same time, childhood participation in sports is at an all-time high.
If FunGoPlay catches on, it will be both a video game that effectively encourages outdoor, active play and a way to teach sports basics that is compelling to young children — both factors that are likely to entice parents to open their wallets.
A World of Sports That Speaks to Kids
When Jacobs and Lerner first had the idea, they took a trip to the sports section of Barnes and Noble to check out their competition for teaching kids between 6 and 11 years old about sports. They didn’t really find any competition.
“It’s a huge business to teach coaches how to coach, but there was nothing that really spoke to kids,” Lerner says.
In order to create that appeal, the team went to work on a “sports theme park.” The park has multiple games involving soccer, basketball, baseball, and extreme sports that are populated by a cast of 15 characters.
One of the co-founders, Fabian Nicieza, has a rich background in comic books that includes writing every major character in the Marvel Universe. Presumably, his storytelling capability will help build a narrative that runs through the games. The games will also be tied together by a unified reward system, and a customizable locker or club house.
Virtual worlds for children have long been identified as a ripe business opportunity. Disney’s Club Penguin (a $700 million purchase), Mattel’s BarbieGirls.com, and SecretBuilders are among the most successful. What distinguishes FunGoPlay’s game from these sites is its physical component.
When parents buy a subscription to the online sports theme park, they’ll be able to pick out the physical sporting equipment to accompany it. When kids play with it, a screen on the ball or Frisbee will give them access codes that they can use to unlock special features in the game.
But what counts as “play” depends on the sports equipment. FunGoPlay has researched the way that kids use different sports equipment and will measure activity according to their findings.
“Frisbee turns into ‘let’s all go and catch the Frisbee – once it drops on the ground’ because nobody can catch the Frisbee,” Chief Technology Officer Chris Romero says. “What we’ve done is build a map of that into to code that basically says, ‘OK if this Frisbee is activated over such and such a time period, kids are playing with it.’”
Co-Founders Fabian Nicieza, Steve Lerner and David Jacobs
If you were to put together a dream team for digital children’s entertainment, it would look a lot like FunGoPlay. Huge players like Nickelodeon, Disney, Sesame Workshop, and Marvel are all well represented in team members’ resumes. But will the dream team make a dream product?
The company isn’t the first to run with the idea of merging online and offline play. Anyone who knows a child under the age of 12 has likely heard of Webkinz — stuffed animals with avatar components that live on the company’s website. Ganz Corporation, which manufactures the stuffed animals, is privately held and doesn’t release sales data. But the site had about six million unique visitors per month at its peak in 2007. Post-craze, however, compete.com now puts Webkinz.com traffic at about 3 million unique visitors every month — still an impressive amount, but a line that goes in the wrong direction.
In order to become an integral component of children’s sports education, FunGoPlay will need to prove that its smart soccer balls and frisbees are more than just gimmicks. The plan is to market the physical components as sporting equipment rather than toys, and this plan is reflected in the company’s choice of manufacturer and distributor, EB Brands, which has a reputation for the former.
But no matter how FunGoPlay is marketed, kids — needless to say an unpredictable group (remember Tickle Me Elmo?) — will eventually decide how seriously to take both FunGoPlay’s physical equipment and online world.
COMMENTARY: I have coached Little League teams kids under 12, and I can't describe just how frustrating it is to teach kids between 6 to 11 years of age, the basics of that sport. I assume that the problem exists for all sports, and the fact that the folks at FunGoPlay found a market need, should help the kids learn the proper way to play each sport.
Don't get me wrong, the parents do the best they can, making it a fun activity for the kids, but only have time to do this on weekends. Sometimes parents can get carried away. I ran into this sort of thing myself, with many parents becoming too emotionally involved with winning, rather than focusing on teaching their kids, proper social development skills, teamwork and respect for others. It's not always about winning.
I cam remember after a big loss, many parents hissed because we lost by huge scores, sometimes the opposing team scored too many runs in one inning. I can understand the disappointment of the parents, yet the kids, in spite of the losses, looked at it as fun, and forgot that loss five minutes after the game ended. It's incredible what a post-game pizza party can do for tween kids.
I have a feeling that FunGoPlay, a catchy name if there ever was, is going to be successful, but the parents need to become involved and supervise their kids, and become involved with them as they play their sport in the real world. I do love FunGoPlay's comic book characters. The managment team has the experience and this is a big plus.
FunGoPlay definitely fills a void in the marketplace, and playing the online games gets the parents involved with their kids, and away from that TV for a change, which is one of the reasons why kids are so overweight. And the overweight problem continues right through high school.
Some of the problems that I see with FunGoPlay is that not all families have the time, and many households do not own a computer or have access to broadband. This is especially true of some minorities like Afro-Americans and Hispanics.
This article was passed on to me by a VC friend of mine. Just as soon as I have the time, I will go online and see how well kids actually learn the sports they play online.
Courtesy of an article dated February 8, 2011 appearing in Mashable
FunGoPlay is an online gaming site for kids with much entertainment and fun for kids.
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Posted by: Melissa11 | 11/01/2011 at 03:42 AM
This is so cool. I hope I could still enjoy playing outdoor games on pc. I look forward to this one.
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Posted by: Best online sports Betting | 07/19/2011 at 07:16 PM
How do you get on fungoplay?
Posted by: Joe | 06/26/2011 at 03:14 PM
I agree that some things probably could be done differently and to greater effect
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