RosterBot, the service aimed at streamlining all team organization for youth and recreation leagues, will introduce a chat feature in January, Sports Illustrated recently reported. The feature will allow coaches, players and parents to plan pizza parties, coordinate practice schedules or share a video of the game-winning hit, an attractive tool to an already solid team management service.

“It keeps (communication) in one place, where you can read it at your leisure,” said Bret Hedican, a former NHL player and current San Jose Sharks broadcaster and RosterBot co-owner, to Sports Illustrated. “There are always things to talk about and we want all that info in one spot.”

For those that want to spend more time coaching and less time on the administrative side of the job, RosterBot is a coach’s dream come true. Coaches enter a team roster and can create events, or games, and players or parents can check off which games they will or will not be attending. The player editor lists players’ names, contact information and positions, and a coach can blast an email team-wide with one click. And with the chat feature to come, gone are the reply-all emails that chew up an inbox’s space and grind at the patience of the recipients.

Created in 2008 as an experiment by Ian Bell, RosterBot received over $1 million in seed funding, as it announced earlier this year. Former NHL player Paul Reinhart’s investing group Sora Capital led the financing and was joined by Hedican along with David Tedman, co-founder of Hootsuite. Additionally, RosterBot has partnered with Invoke Labs, which specializes at accelerating growth for startups, as it did with Hootsuite. Tedman also founded Invoke Labs.

Reinhart, a father of three hockey players — including Sam Reinhart, drafted second overall in 2014 by the Buffalo Sabres — told Beta Kit that RosterBot will become essential in all levels of sports.

“It’s a service that I certainly wish existed 15 years ago when my career as a hockey dad began,” Reinhart said.

But RosterBot’s value isn’t just for youth sports. Ever manage an adult rec league team? The biggest pain is collecting league fees from players. RosterBot will handle the bookkeeping. The app won’t count a player as active until they’ve paid their dues. And can you imagine the smack talk with the chat feature? Expletives galore.

RosterBot (free) is available for both iPhone and Android and users can also log in at rosterbot.com to access their accounts.

(Image via RosterBot)

As the NBA as a whole continues its light-speed advancements in advanced data analysis, the Milwaukee Bucks are investing in the face to gain an edge in player evaluation.

As The New York Times reported Thursday, the new owners of the Bucks – hedge fund billionaries Wesley Edens and Mark Lasry – hired renowned facial coding expert Dan Hill to build an emotion metrics database in an attempt to quantify the previously unquantifiable – character, personality and chemistry.

Hill uses methods developed from the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). Published in 1979, FACS based combinations of 43 facial muscle positions which correspond to seven emotions: happiness, surprise, contempt, disgust, sadness, anger and fear. Today, FACS has been established as a computed automated system which detects faces in videos and spits out quantified data based on every smirk, furrowed eyebrow and smile a player makes.

“Actions speak louder than words,” Hill told ESPN of muscle movements in the face.

He said players that score highly in his evaluations have only a moderate degree of happiness. He doesn’t want to see players too easily satisfied, and says that it identifies coachable players. Meanwhile, players that score highly in happiness tend to become sloppy.

Hill, whose 16 years of facial analysis have mostly been for marketing and advertising, also values disgust and anger, as they show levels of drive. Of course, it all comes in moderation, as high levels of anger lead to a hot head. Finally, cocky expressions are good, while arrogance on one’s face is a bad sign.

The Bucks hired Hill — owner of Sensory Logic, Inc. in Minnesota and the author of Emotionomics — in May, and he’s already made his mark. Working alongside team psychologist Ramel Smith, Hill watched video of potential draft picks, assessed the players and reported back to Smith. The Bucks considered Australian point guard Dante Exum with their second overall pick, but ultimately grabbed Jabari Parker, who was one of the top rookies in the league before a knee injury ended his season.

“Nothing against Exum, but emotional resiliency, stability and an immediate, assured presence were all key considerations in support of selecting Parker,” Hill told the Times.

Facial coding isn’t widely accepted. Until now, more interest has come from law enforcement and anti-terrorism agencies, along with marketing, rather than academia.

“To me the big question is, how well does the method actually work?” said Martha Farah, a cognitive neuroscientist and director of the Center for Neuroscience & Society at the University of Pennsylvania, in an interview with the Times. “It’s not easy to get good evidence, because a player’s performance and teamwork are complex outcomes, and the teams are not run like clinical trials, with coaches and managers blind to the facial coding findings and so forth. So it’s hard to know whether this system works well, gives some marginal benefit or does nothing at all.”

Facial coding has made waves in another sport as well. Jeff Foster runs the NLF’s scouting combine and hired Hill in 2011 to evaluate prospects. He said Hill’s methods could be especially helpful for teams considering quarterbacks and safeties early in the draft, as those players require unusual leadership and cerebral traits difficult to project.

Washington State head coach Mike Leach had Hill evaluate players in 2012. He was just hired and wanted to know what kind of players he inherited to develop his coaching methods around.

“Someday Dan will be able to get hard data linking the face to on-the-field performance, and I don’t want to miss that,” Leach told the Times.

Not one to be behind the curve, I’m pretty sure Houston Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow has already left Hill 17 voice messages.

(Photo via Keith Allison)

Starting tonight, Orlando Magic fans have a new way to pay for those ten dollar cold ones.

The Magic is the first team in the National Basketball Association to offer Apple Pay to its customers. To start, it will only be available at 60 concession and retail locations throughout the Amway Center. However, the team will be expanding locations during the season and aim to reach 200 for the start of the 2015-16 season.

This, however, will not be Apple Pay’s debut in professional sports. MLB Advanced Media paid an undisclosed figure to install more than 300 terminals at Kauffman Stadium and AT&T Park in October for the World Series, marking the first use of the service at any sports facility. Meanwhile, down on the farm, the minor league Akron RubberDucks announced in October that it will accept Apple Pay at Canal Park for the 2015 season.

Here’s how it works. Using a near-field communication (NFC) chip, the iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus will send a payment to a store or restaurant’s reader when the user holds or waves the phone while keeping a finger on the Touch ID home button, which uses fingerprint recognition security. The payment will be processed using credit card information entered in the Passbook app that will assign a device an account number, which is encrypted and securely stored. Each transaction is authorized with a one-time unique dynamic security code.  All major credit card companies are on board, as are a growing number of banking institutions and credit unions. Unfortunately, older iPhone models are not able to use the Apple Pay feature.

Ideally, a customer would wait in line to buy food. After ordering, the cashier rings up the cost, and the customer pulls out the phone, holds the Touch ID button, waves it in front of the reader and the payment is complete. This should take, what, ten seconds? Can we dream of an in-stadium experience where we won’t miss two innings waiting in line for a hot dog and a beer?

Alex Martins, chief executive of the Orlando Magic, told the New York Times earlier this week:

“One of the biggest pieces of feedback we get from our fans is that the food and beverage lines are too long,” Mr. Martins said in an interview. “It keeps them from going to the concession stand because they don’t want to miss the action. This, and technologies like Apple Pay, will speed up our service.”

To be fair, it’s not like what Apple is doing is anything new. Samsung, MasterCard and Google Wallet have been around for some time. The optimism is that because of Apple’s reputation and giant consumer draw, any problems that existed with previous tap-to-pay services will evaporate.

For now, the Apple Pay experience is raw. Anecdotal reports reflect retailers don’t know how to use the system correctly, if at all. And that Apple training retailers would go a long way to create a much smoother experience. Fast Company’s technology editor Harry McCracken went a week without his wallet, only using Apple Pay to make his Whole Foods and McDonald’s purchases. And while he faced plenty of problems, McCracken, as he wrote in October, is hopeful about the future of the product.

But even though my experience with Apple Pay wasn’t perfect, and despite obstacles such as recalcitrant retailers, I had a good time using it. I expect to reach for my phone rather than my billfold quite often from now on—partly for convenience’s sake, and partly for the privacy and security benefits of being able to pay a store without sharing any information about myself. And if mobile payments finally start to catch on—which seems likely to me—we could end up looking back on last week as the most important moment so far in the history of the technology.

Whatever it takes for me to get my beer quicker.

(Image via Tom Baker)

Before logging on to Amazon to wrap up your Christmas shopping, you’ll want to flip through The Art of Negotiation. It could save you a few bucks.

Last week Amazon unveiled “Make an Offer,” a new feature which allows customers to negotiate lower prices with more than 150,000 items. For the initial rollout, Amazon has limited the experience mainly to collectibles – sports, entertainment, coins, history and political memorabilia – and fine art.

The sports category easily lists the most items featuring the Make an Offer opportunity. Photographs, uniforms, balls and trading cards are some of the most abundant memorabilia available, with Major League Baseball and the National Football League represented the most.  There’s even a pair of wrestling trunks signed by Hulk Hogan.

First, the seller must enable the option on an item’s listing. The customer can then either purchase the listed item at the available price or click the Make an Offer button and enter an offer. Amazon sends an email to the seller, who then responds within 72 hours. The seller can accept the offer, reject it or submit a counter offer. Now, this is when that copy of The Art of Negotiation comes in handy. Because now it’s on. Negotiations continue via email. Should the customer pull off their best Donald Trump impersonation and the seller accepts an offer, the item is placed in to the customer’s shopping cart at the negotiated price for checkout and purchase.

For example, check out this Derek Jeter clubhouse chair listed by Steiner Sports, used August 24 when the New York Yankees hosted the Chicago White Sox. The Yankees won 7-4 and Jeter went 0-for-5. It’s listed at $2,500. Now, I’m not a Yankees fan, and while I respect The Captain, I’m not obsessed with him, and I certainly don’t have a disposable income that would allow for such a purchase, though I do need a new office chair. So I made an Arte Moreno-esque take-it-or-leave-it offer of $500 with the ultimatum that my offer will stand for 72 hours. I can’t imagine Steiner Sports accepts my low-ball offer, which is 80 percent off the asking price. But if they do, I think I can sell it to the wife, seeing as I was ready to drop $175 on an office chair from Ikea. Knowing her, she’ll use Lysol wipes to clean off any Hall of Fame lingering germs and drop the value of the chair by 40 percent.

Steiner Sports is looking forward to a better shopping experience between customers and sellers utilizing the Make an Offer service.

“The ‘Make an Offer’ experience gives customers more control and better deals than they may have received prior to this program,” said Steven Costello, Executive Vice President of Steiner Sports Memorabilia, Inc. “The negotiation experience will hopefully get more communication between us and our customers to help us better gauge the price for certain items. We love the ‘Make and Offer’ program, and it is only going to get bigger. Once customers know this is an available feature more offers will come, leading to more sales.”

Amazon emailed me confirmation of my offer within a few minutes. Other customers can still purchase the item at the current list price. So there is risk involved. However, if a customer is looking for value only in the Amazon market place, this shouldn’t be much of a concern.

Amazon said it plans to expand the number of Make an Offer eligible items in 2015. So there’s time to hone those negotiating skills.