After many weeks of testing (thank you beta testers) we're proud to announce the full release of Benchcoach's League Lab.

You can now drag and drop players to and from multiple rosters in your leagues, as well as search from our new custom built Util widget and drag and drop from there as well.  As you begin to drag, you'll notice that we've highlighted in light green the position where you're able to drop the player.

The front end is clean, clear and crisp.  However, from the back end, our League Lab has many highly sophisticated and technical moving parts.  We've built the League Lab with speed in mind.  As you drag and drop, you'll notice that we're calculating the changes in realtime and there's essentially no lag.  That's the same for the custom Util search.  As you input a players name, we'll search for it in realtime, you don't have to click any buttons.

We'll be pushing updates to the League Lab on a daily basis so stay tuned.  As always, if you have any suggestions or feedback, please email us at, support@benchcoach.com.  One of our team members will get back to you quickly.

We hope you enjoy.

Thanks,

The Benchcoach Team!

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The much anticipated league lab will be going live in a few short days.

From the league lab you'll be able to drag / drop all of your players to different rosters while Fangelica calculates the changes in real time.  Be warned, you can easily spend hours creating different scenarios, it's fun and really easy!

We also have a search box that will enable you to quickly search players from the Util list.  By default we'll show you hot players, but you can easily search for whichever player you'd like and drag them to your desired roster.  As always, Fangelica will calculate the changes in realtime so you can see exactly if the additional player makes sense.

We'll be sending out a system wide email when the feature goeslive, please staytuned.

Thanks to everyone who's helped us during the league lab testing phase.  Your hard work has not gone unnoticed.  Your contributions have enabled us to build a truly stellar feature.

Lastly, we've got a lot more in the hopper, more to come!

Thanks,

The Benchcoach Team!

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Our initial milestone of 35,000 recommendations by 5.15.10 was smashed.

Fangelica is running better than ever and continues to get stronger with every additional Baseball game.

We'll be pushing out some new features in the coming weeks that many of our users have asked for.  In the next few days, we'll be updating the blog with some screen shots of the new features.

As always, if you have any suggestions or comments, feel free to leave a message here or send to us at, support@benchcoach.com.

Thanks!

The Benchcoach Team

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Our users agree, with the last update to Fangelica, 'humanizing recommendations,' the alignment between user fulfillment and our individualized recommendations is almost complete.  The team is going to be pushing out another Fangelica update which will further explain and give a deeper understanding to the user why certain recommendation are coming their way.  Likewise, there will be an update for our custom trade analyzer.

Similarly, in the near future, we'll be pushing out the popular and much asked for scratch pad.  We're making some huge improvements from what we had last season and we know our users will appreciate the updates.  The scratch pad will enable users to drag and drop players on the fly and behind the scenes, Fangelica will be computing the expected outcome of each player change.  It's a very useful feature for players who like to experiment with lineups and dream of amazing teams.

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The Benchcoach team is proud to announce the much anticipated update to Fangelica.  The team dug very deep over the past few weeks to make Fangelica more humanized.

"Humanized, what does that mean?"  Well, that's a great question. Honestly, the best way to experience this humanized algorithm is to log in to Benchcoach and see for yourself.

The bottom line is this: we now succinctly explain why a trade, bench, pickup, or start makes sense.  Of course we still provide the numbers, but we've found with some recent testing that using words enables people to understand more easily why we're suggesting certain recommendations.

The best way for you to experience this is to try it yourself; you won't be disappointed.  

Like always, a tweet on twitter or a post on Facebook is always highly appreciated.

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About two days ago Benchcoach began sending out emails to a lucky few hundred users.  Within a matter of 48 hours, Fangelica had crunched over 300 users league data and had prodcued hundreds of recommendations that our users loved.

We've also recieved high remarks regarding our heat map and breaking news.  We'll be sending out another wave of emails starting tomorrow morning and will begin unvailing some of our new power features in the coming weeks.  More on those features soon.

The Benchcoach team wants to thank everyone who took the time to help test through our alpha and beta.

Thanks again,

The Benchcoach Team

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Through our private friends and family release, Fangelica, has already served up over 6,000 recommendations.  We've received so much fantastic feedback and praise that we've decided to open up Benchcoach to the public for the next

few days.

We'll be releasing our much anticipated V.1 in about 1 week.  The 1.0 version will include our custom heat map, deeper player and team stats and some amazing design improvements.  Finally, for those that signed up last month and the pervious, we'll be mailing you when the version 1 launched with a custom link.  Because you took the time to sign up, you'll be getting access to a few custom 'sneak peek' features.

Check out these screen shots taken from our development server, pretty soon everyone will have access to these features.

More to come!

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As many of you know, Benchcoach has undergone many new interface / application updates.  Our proprietary algorithm, Fangelica, (More on that soon) has been in development for the past two seasons and is now ready to go live in a few short months.

Benchcoach will change the way people manage and play.  If you're interested in getting early access, please fill out the form which can be found at Benchcoach.  For those who sign up early, we'll give you access asap!

Lastly, over the coming weeks, we'll be leaking screen shots and talking more about our technology.

We're very excited to showcase to the world a new way to play / win.

More soon.

Benchcoach

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Upcoming Benchcoach Signup Form

Starting in a few weeks, we'll begin changing around the Benchcoach webpage.  We're getting ready for the upcoming season with a brand new interface and updated algorithm for recommendations (More on that soon).  The sign up form will be launched in about 1 week for early signups.   Here's a sneak peak.

Much more to come soon!

The Benchcoach Team

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So the last 2 weeks have been incredibly hectic. We've had a second write up, we've seen a steady increase in signups, we've launched Season 2 of Benchcoach and we upgraded our servers and are in the process of updating our tour videos to match the new Benchcoach. Now that we have some breathing room, I'd like to catch up a little and let people know what has been going on with Season 2 and why Benchcoach looks and feels so differently.

So last year, we noticed that there were 2 main issues with our application. First off, we called it "Scratchpad", which was functionally what we were trying to do, but wasn't a very catchy name. So we've renamed the core application to be "League Lab" which is not perfect, but is an incremental improvement over "Scratchpad" (You'll see that incremental improvements is the way we do things).

We also noted that many people were confused about all the functionality we crammed into the original Scratchpad

That's a lot of information and not all consumable. Truly the work of 2 engineers cramming everything onto one page. So one thing we wanted to address right off the bat was breaking out the functionality into more consumable chunks.

The second thing we wanted to address was to improve performance. Dragging and dropping a player would result in a significant lag as the roster change was sent to our server, we recalculated the entire league, and then sent the recalculation back to the browser, and then the browser had to render it all again.

We had tinkered with the idea of moving the app to Adobe Flex last year but we wanted our app to work in any browser with out a Flash Plugin.

We now realize that this was a bitter pill that might better serve our users. While you need to have flash installed, YouTube and most video serving sites have made that a necessity so most people would already have Flash installed. Maybe not at work, but hey, in this economy, we probably shouldn't get caught tinkering with our fantasy baseball lineup at work anyways!

The last major thing was to try to improve our product feature wise, software bug reduction wise, and usability wise. Now follow this convoluted logic and we can all reach a happy conclusion.

To make a better product, we believe that we need more feedback. To get more feedback, we need more users. To get more users, we need to stop offering the trial product and open this thing up wide open. We also need to be as quick as possible in responding to our forums and feedback emails (which we try to do but sometimes, we're not as quick as we'd like so apologies). Ipso Factor, Benchcoach is now free. This is not to say that we won't try and create a premium version of Benchcoach that has advanced features, data, graphs but we're a company that's 18 months old and we've done most of the heavy lifting in terms of data, and number crunching and building out the site, so at this point our costs are manageable (if anyone really wants to know how much this site costs to run and how much time/money we spent building it, I'm free for a beer in NYC).

The end result is Benchcoach Season 2.

We've gotten some nice press written up about us (twice by the same guy at CNet!)

CNet - Get ready for fantasy baseball--18 top sites

CNet - Your 2009 baseball guide: 30 sites

And I'll be recording an interview for Fantasy CPR Radio this afternoon.

All in all, I feel good with what we've accomplished this off season but there's tons more work to do so please feel free to email me with feedback, bugs, comments, feature requests at spark at benchcoach dot com.

Have a great 2009 season, (due to the effort expended on getting season 2 of Benchcoach, my fantasy teams will be undergoing a "rebuilding year")

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