Sportmeets Blog

SportMeets Now Blazing Fast

Miro Solanka — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 08:12:36 +0000

You've probably noticed that SportMeets have been quite slow over the past weeks. We are sorry for the bad experience and hope the new server as well as some improvements in page load times will more than make up for it :)

Happy sporting to you all!

Get Sporting in 2011

Miro Solanka — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 15:02:22 +0000

Thanks for being part of the SportMeets community! I hope sporting is one of the few activities we all can keep up with into the new year.

Over at SportMeets we have been working hard to make it even easier for you to play more sports, so I'd like to share some improvements we are really excited about.

Creating new meets - plain & simple

We've been listening to your feedback, so we are constantly making it easier & simpler to create new meets. Most importantly we've consolidated the meet creation process into a single page, so it's never been easier to invite group members or new folks to your meets via SMS, Facebook, Search or just the plain old email. Go on, give it a shot →

Who's the king now?!?

Glad you asked! We've introduced a fun little way to keep you all motivated!

When you win the most sport matches in your city, you become the king of that sport. Pretty cool huh? Take a look at, for example, Prague Kings.

Welcome Slovak & Spanish Languages

You have probably noticed that we've been testing new translations of SportMeets. Slovak is already up (don't know about Slovakia? Read about it here →). As soon as we finish some final touches for Spanish, it'll be available too!

Besides translation, we've also improved the localization with things like AM/PM or 24-hour clock options.

Stickers & T-shirts

Is your group active on SportMeets and has 25 or more members? Let us know and we'll send you a tee :) Want some stickers instead? Write us here, and we'll send you some too!

A few more things to check out

You get rewarded for using SportMeets :) Check out all the badges →
Sports are social! So invite all your friends over →
Are you using Notifo on the iPhone or Android? If you'd like to be one of the first to join our Notifo notifications beta drop as an email at info@sportmeets.com.

Happy sporting in the New Year!

Let Fellow Sporters Know you are Bringing Guests to a Meet

Miro Solanka — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 20:21:25 +0000

Are you bringing a guest to your next meet who does not have an account on SportMeets yet? Now you can indicate that when you RSVP for the meet in the well-known RSVP popup.

The guests functionality is off by default, so the meet organiser has to explicitly enabale it when creating or editing the meet (it's in the advanced options!)

SportMeets at Webexpo 2010

Miro Solanka — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 15:49:49 +0000

We are attending the Webexpo 2010 conference in Prague, Czech Republic from 23rd to 25th of September. I will be sharing our SportMeets experience of applying at the OpenFund alongside George Tziralis (executive member of the OpenFund). We will be taking about Seed Capital in Practice — A Guide for You to Start-up.

Come and say hi if you are around :)

Play Sports with Friends & Receive a Free T-shirt

Miro Solanka — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 16:49:42 +0000

Have you thought about starting a sports group with some friends or even complete strangers? Well, now it's the time to do so! At SportMeets we would like to send you - the group organiser - a free T-shirt. All you have to do is start a news sports group or a sports ladder, invite at least 15 friends to join you & get together offline for a real world meet.

So are you on the SportMeets diet yet?

And for every 5 extra people over the minimum 15, you may be in for an extra treat! So hurry up, we have only a limited number of T-shirts! Don't forget that it won't cost you anything, we'll even cover the shipping of your new tees!

How about some jerseys as well?

In November, we will also take the top 10 most successful groups (in terms of members, number of meets organised, people showing up at those meets, etc.) and draw 5 at random who will receive our very own SportMeets Jersey along with the tees.

Upload and share files in your group

Miro Solanka — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 13:26:55 +0000

Another popular request has been tackled. You are now able to upload and share (privately among group members or publicly) various types of files.

The group organiser has to enable the "Files" section in the group setup first though. Find the setting in Group setup → Other options

If you would like to be able to upload other types of files, let us know.

"Remember me" fixed

Miro Solanka — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 14:36:14 +0000

We've had an issue with some of you being logged off intermittently even if you checked the "remember me" option at login. Happy to announce that this has now been fixed!

Weekly Repeating Meets Now for Everyone

Miro Solanka — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 12:43:24 +0000

You asked for it and we listened. The most popular request on our Feedback Page has been repeating meets. These are now available in the advanced options section when creating a new meet.

We wanted to keep this as simple as possible, so the way "repeats" work is on a weekly basis. That means that if you mark your Thursday 7pm training to repeat, as soon as this week's meet is finished, SportMeets automatically creates the next week's meet and sends an e-mail notification to the organiser. You, as the organiser, then have to invite the individual group members to the event! We are looking into ways of making the invites more automatic, but we want to listen to your feedback first & get it right the first time!

With the upcoming start of the season for most university sports clubs, we hope this will help you all manage the groups even more effectively than before.

Please send any ideas on how to improve the repeating meets or your comments our way.

Inside Sportmeets Over the Past Weeks

Miro Solanka — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

As usual, we've been busy doing what many of you - Sportmeets users - asked us to add or improve and we've also implemented another few items from the long-list of features that we want Sportmeets to have when it grows up!

So, let's look at the new features and improvements:

Static Pages

You can now create your own static pages in the About us section of your group or ladder. Whatever it is that you want the visitors and group members to find out about - the brief history of your club, rules of conduct on the team's night out (handy for mixed teams), or a few links to interesting websites - you can now put it on a dedicated page.

'Mark Yourself OFF' Option

If you've ever been using mailing lists to sign up for a game of football you might find this situation familiar: you're heading somewhere away for a couple weeks and cannot play in the meantime. So you just keep receiving all these emails about "the game next week" and you have to, for the 11th time, politely excuse yourself that you are away. So we've added this nice button on your dashboard which marks you OFF if you cannot play. Use it if you get sick, injured, go on holiday or just need to get away from it all for a while.

Cancelling & Deleting Meets

All types of meets can now be cancelled on the meet homepage (big red X) and everyone that RSVPd 'yes' will be notified.

Calendar feeds

We like to see you sporting and we're making sure you won't miss out on the action by...forgeting about it. If you use an iCal, Google, Outlook or Yahoo! calendar, you can now have all your group's events synced with it. This not only saves you time of adding them manually but also saves you all the beers that you would otherwise had to pay as a penalty for not turning up.

...and finally:

Badges

Some of you might have noticed them already, but for the rest let me explain: Badges are our way of saying "Hey, playing sport is cool. Play more often, improve your game and win matches! Get other people playing too! And be proud about it!" We give badges to motivate people to try new sports. We reward those that do something extra, contribute to the community and help spread the word about Sportmeets because they like the idea. But to make it a bit more fun, we've added some hidden ones, so just keep playing the sports you like and you might come across one!

Well, that's it for now. We really enjoy reading your feedback so please keep it coming. And keep tuned for some more updates soon!

Sportmeets at the 2010 BUCS conference at Keele University

Peter Crkon — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

University sport is where Sportmeets' roots are. Over the last five years at Glasgow Uni we've played actively volleyball, football and squash, tried kayaks and lawn bowls, gone hiking, climbing and running, and even attended exercise and salsa classes (I am not sure about Miro, but I did!), so there's quite a bit of personal experience in what we do now. We know that there's much to improve in how students go about finding others to play a squash game with or participate in a university squash ladder. We also know that the captain of the volleyball club still has to send out at least 5 email reminders till they get everyone to confirm their attendance for the Sunday match and that there are over 50 contacts on the mailing list although there were never more than 15 people at the training session. This and much more is what we set out to improve with the Sportmeets project. And there's no better place to tell the right people about it than the annual conference of the British Universities and Colleges Sport (BUCS).

This year's conference will be held at the Keele University in Staffordshire between 13th and 16th July. The theme of the conference is about finding innovative ways of delivering sports at the universities, to which Sportmeets certainly has a lot to say. With over 100 UK universities represented by their sports union presidents, directors of sport, and sport development officers, it will be an exciting event and we're looking forward to see more and more students and universities discovering the benefits of Sportmeets soon!