Frog Picks
Sports fans are competitive. But so far there hasn’t been a great app that lets them jockey for pole position without putting money on the line.
Science Inc., the company behind the crazy popular teen app Wishbone, thinks it has the answer.
Each day, the new Frog Picks app gives users 13 questions — will the Cavaliers or Pacers win tonight? Will Kobe score more than 30 points? — and sports fans make their picks.
The easy tap-t0-vote question style doesn’t require as much skill as fantasy sports — and there’s no money involved. But it’s just as addictive.
That’s because polling is a super way to keep fans coming back, Mike Jones, former MySpace CEO and head of Science Inc. has found.
It’s similar in nature to Wishbone, where teens choose between vanilla and chocolate, or yoga versus pilates, and get instant feedback on whether their preference is the popular one.
Frog Picks’ questions are more about facts and can’t be submitted by fans.
The Science Inc. team chooses the questions. Once a fan selects their choice for who will the game or number of yards gained, they’ll see how their vote stacks up against everyone else’s.
All picks have to be in by 3 p.m. ET before the events start.
After the games are done, fans return to the app the next day to see how well they did and how that compares to their friends.
Thanks to the Panthers losing the Super Bowl, I only scored within the top 74 percent for Sunday’s question set. Put another way, only 25 percent of people in the app did worse than me, and I had a 7-6 win record.
Without money on the line, unlike in DraftKings or FanDuel, the picks only bruise your ego if you’re wrong. (A sigh of relief after my 7-6 record.) And compared to Facebook sports stadium or following the game on ESPN, it’s nice to have a stake in the games that doesn’t interfere with me actually watching it and bragging rights if I beat my friends.
As companies from Facebook to DraftKings are fighting over millennials’ sports fandom, Frog Picks might hit the sweet spot of fun.
To get the app for iOS or Android, start here>>
