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My new startup Timu officially launches

Yesterday was a big day for me, after 8 months of planning and product development work finally launched my new startup, Timu. Timu gave me a chance to apply many of the lessons learned with designing and building ActiveRain to another market, amateur sports.

It's a social networking platform specifically built to solve the communications problems encountered by athletes, sports teams and their fans. Online social networking is a natural way to solve many of these problems. Yet, existing social networks provide disjointed solutions that do not handle sports specific features, such as player rosters, game results and statistics. At the same time existing sports web site offerings provide little interactivity and user engagement.

Individual athletes can setup an profile on Timu in minutes. Profiles can be customized with information about the sports they participate in, teams they play on, and their competitive highlights. Photos, videos can be uploaded, and various “widgets” can be added or modified. These profiles serve as one center of communication within Timu.

Coaches, players, or parents can create a team center for your team on Timu. Team centers provide many features like team news, schedules, player rosters, photos, game results, statistics, statistics and a wide range of commmunication tools. All of the people associated with the team can be invited to become members of the team center, which can then function as a hub for team communications.

A few examples of team centers: http://bellevueblaze.timu.com http://dreadsox.timu.com http://baseball.timu.com

Currently Timu supports about 30 different sports ranging from baseball and soccer to unicycling. Each of these sports has it’s own section or hub on Timu including photos, videos, game results and discussions. Timu members can participate in the conversation at these hubs about their sport. As Timu grows we will be providing the ability to view these hubs by region, subsection of a sport, or even by sporting venue.

Create a Sports Profile

Setup your Team on Timu

Posted by Matt Heaton on 06/11/2009 03:03 PM

Comments (45)

timu

45 Comments on My new startup Timu officially launches

JUN

Congratulations Matt! Good luck to you and Caleb on this grand adventure!

What a great idea...as usual! Good luck with this, I will check it out....is there a Laker Forum yet?

Congrats, Matt. I wish you good luck!!

Matt, when my boys were playing sports at the jr/sr high level and the more competitive summer baseball leagues this would have been awesome! It was so hard back in the late 90's to even have a website that was easy to maintain so this new endeavor of yours should really take off! Good Luck! I almost want to go back to being the parent booster chair again to try this out - umm well NOT! lol!

Matt,

This looks like a really cool forum, and seeing what you have done with Active Rain, I don't doubt for a second that it will be a success. :)

Matt,

Well done and good luck!

Bill

Congrats! I'll send a note out to all my super sport fan clients!

Great idea....how about triathlon?

Awesome Matt, I am so excited for you. This is great. I am sending out to my sphere who are avid sports fans. This is going to so successful, do you have any idea how many sports nuts there are? Not saying me, LOL just "out there".

OK I lied and you know where Christa got it.

Congratulations, Matt and best of luck, I am not much of a sports fan unless it is horse racing or tennis but it sounds great.

How exciting, Hopefully each and everyone of us on AR will re-blog and help you get this going- Here's to you success, I raise my glass! be good cheryl

Great job and congrats I wish you much success.

Matt:

A while back you wrote a blog talking about TIMU. It is great to hear that you are finally done with it, and it sounds like you have already improved in your initial idea. Tere

Dude---great idea. Oregon has dozens of cheerleading teams and Ive thought for a long time that they need a common method of sharing info. Can it be used for that?

I Re-Blogged you...on my outside blogs gotta be some Central Ohio athletes and teams that ought to be using Timu.

Your vision and creativity seem limitless. Congratulations, I'm sure it will be a great success too!

I'm back- I re-blogged and challenge all the Rainers to do the same. Then step it up a notch. Grassroots and start-ups all have the people connection in common. I am e-mailing an invite to the PBR crowd, a couple of agents getting their riders on board and we should have a front row seat to a great season. I love that this can be so local, so I am also sending a link to my community activities director to see about getting the kid's teams on board too. If we each reach out to a couple of groups that would benefit this will take off quickly!

re-blog, facebook, twitter, whatever you can do- Matt has been there for us getting the RAIN flowing, pay it forward- sign up and spread the word. be good cw

Thanks for the support everyone :)

Marvin: Yes I'll add cheerleading as a sport on the next update.

Oh, and whoever featured this over at AR thanks... Yeah I know it's not a real estate related post, but I've actually got a few half written I've just been too busy to finish up.

The fans are going to send their love your way; the coaches are going to send their thanks to you.

Congratulations on all of your hard work. I am sure all your blood, sweat & tears went into this project.

Good stuff Matt ! Congratulation.

Congratulations! I am thinking sports might be even more fun than real estate .

Don't let Matt fool you I gave him the idea...JUST KIDDING bro! I needed to break up my day as it is getting long. Looks great bro and thanks for adding Skiing :)

All the best for your new undertaking.

Patricia aulson/Portsmouth NH Real Estate

Hey Matt, I just spent some time checking out Timu. Very cool. I found the layout very eye appealing and it was easy to navigate. This going to be a big success. I'd wish you luck but don't think you need it. You're hard work is enough. You're launched. Come out of your room and take a shower will ya!!!

Matt, good luck with your new site. I haven't had time to really check it out but I will.

Hi Matt: Congradulations and good luck with it - I will check it out!

Matt - Best wishes with the new venture.

IMatt, congratulations. My husband, brothers, cousins, friends,etc. all sports fanatics.

Congrats. Does your new site offer an outlet for all sports? Like the Monday Morning Quarterback? I'll have to check it out.

Good luck on your new business. May you have as much success there too

Hi Matt - I just recently became interested in amateur sports in general - our little town just got approval of a huge Desert Falls sports complex mainly for amateur sports, with Adidas committing to build it up. Would that post be a good place to link to your Timu?

Great, now you are going to suck me in and I'll have to "help" my 5 year old post about his ice hockey...

Nicely done Matt. I'm sure you'll crush it!

Matt: This is great ! Thank for sharing.. Just in time for the NFL getting ready to kick off.

Hi Matt -- What a great concept, and I think it will be HUGE. I love sports, and what an incredible way to connect. What is your business model to make $$? Advertising?