I’ve been working behind the scenes on updating Stats by Numbers for the NBA 2012-2013 regular season that will be starting on October 30th, 2012. In order to get the site ready for the new season, I had to make some drastic changes to the core structure. It had been well over a year since I’d done any work to the site and I knew I needed to get a fresh start for it. Some of the design decisions I’d made in 2007 were not so great and the only way to fix things was to scrape the entire frontend of the site. This also meant reworking the database design on the backend to create ways to map my old data into the new formats I’d devised.

The updated scores page for Stats by Numers, with a weekly carousel and date selector.

I’ve mostly completed the backend work and am getting the site ready for launch by processing the box score and play by play data for the last 3 seasons. This amounts to quite a lot of data as there are about 1.64 million plays in just the last few seasons alone. There is still a little more than a month before the season starts and ample time to get everything ready. Over the course of the next few weeks, I’ll be updating Stats by Numbers with more content and adding posts to the blog on the site.

Dynamic Sandbox

In other news, my brother and I are in full production of our to be announced game. Our game company, Dynamic Sandbox, will be releasing the title in the next 6 months and I will be able to share more information in the coming months. We are both lifelong gamers and are very excited to be working on something we are so passionate about. What I can say now is that we’ve chosen MOAI to be our framework; this allows us to write one set of code and port the game to many devices thanks to the cross-platform architecture of MOAI. I can’t wait to share more about we’re working on in future posts!

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It’s been a while since the last update, but that is because there has been a lot going on behind the scenes in the meantime. I’ve been working on establishing a record label to release my own projects and those of my friends. That record label officially launched on August 10th 2012 and is called Make Music Productions. Make Music Productions released Opener by A Rising Force, my band, on August 9th, submitting the song through TuneCore to iTunes, Amazon, Rhapsody, and other music distribution stores.

With the release of Opener, there has a been a significant increase in the fan base due to the promotion of the single.  The SoundCloud page now has 135 followers and continues to grow steadily.  The A Rising Force Facebook page is up to 145 fans, but is largely dependent on running ads to gain fans; without the full album available, it’s hard to promote a single song for a very long period of time without other content to go along with it.

Jango Airplay Internet Radio

The other tool I’ve been trying to promote the band and the single is internet radio airplay.  I’ve been using Jango Airplay to promote the band using paid plays after other similar artists.  There was a bit of a challenge in finding the exact right artists to match for the song, but I’ve tweaked the settings over the last few weeks and think I finally have it down.  I started off strong with a PopScore of 85, which I’m guessing means 85% of the people liked the song or something to that effect.  That score netted my a bonus of 100 song plays for my first week (I used a few hundred plays to get that score so not a bad trade).  Things went downhill once I started messing with the targeting controls trying to get into the 90s.  Bad move.  The next week I slipped to a PopScore of 55, still enough to earn 50 bonus song plays, but not the effect I wanted.  I knew I needed to change course and go back to what was working week one, so I stripped back the targeting and focused on what had worked the first week.  The results for week three were better, getting me a PopScore of 59, but more importantly – I was finally starting to understand what I needed to do to reach the right audience.

Jango Airplay – A Rising Force : the PopScore is back up to 82 this week from 59 last week.

The trick that I finally learned was to focus on only the minimum number of bands required for targeting.  This means you only choose 5 bands to play songs after.  That strategy seems to work the best and I’ve been able to tailor the bands to the exact song I’m promoting.  What I also learned was that as much as I’d like to think fans of my favorite artists may like my music, they may instead be a bad fit or the song could be too different from the style of that artist.  It turns out that fans of the Arctic Monkeys like my music the best.  I would never have guessed this, but with the analytics available to me through Jango, I’ve been able to discover it.  I’m pleased to say that using my new techniques, I’ve been able to get my PopScore back up to 82 this week!  We’ll see where it lands, but I’m very happy with the results so far. I’ll be using these techniques when with other Make Music Productions by A Rising Force and other artists I’m developing.

Before I sign off for this post, I’ll say that I’ve been working on some updates for Stats by Numbers.  I plan on launching a new site soon and preparing for the upcoming NBA season.  More to come about that in the next post…

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With regards to my other side projects, I’m still heavily looking into some type of app (leaning towards game) development for the iPhone/iPod Touch. The only problem here is the capital investment of buying a Mac. I’d probably get an 13-inch MacBook Pro or a Mac Mini if I wanted to save some $$$.

The other project is a website focused on NBA statistics. I can’t talk about too much yet, but I plan on launching it in the very near future.

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