LockerDome Lands $6M From Square Co-founder & More To Help Sports Fans Connect With Their Favorite Teams & Athletes
LockerDome, a social media publishing platform designed to connect sports fans with their favorite athletes, teams, brands and sports properties, announced today that it has raised $6 million in series A financing. The round was led by Cultivation Capital Growth Fund, a new venture fund created by Square co-founder Jim McKelvey, with contributions from St. Louis Cardinals President William DeWitt, III, a Milwaukee Brewers exec and veteran NHL defenseman (and Hart Trophy winner) Chris Pronger, among others.
It’s a little ironic that adrenalin-fuelled, sometimes dangerous extreme sports like windsurfing, kiteboarding and skiing also have a very pedestrian angle to them: it’s hard to do them when the weather isn’t quite right. There have been apps developed to try to meet that challenge by tapping into weather data providers, but sometimes these don’t actually give a personal feel of how the wind or water in a particular place can be, so two extreme sport enthusiasts, Katerina Stroponiati and Yiannis Varelas, who also happen to be techie-minded, decided to take matters into their own hands.
For sports fans, and fans in general, nothing beats meeting your favorite athlete, celebrity or musician and getting to capture that experience — a signed photo, shirt, etc. — take it home with you and proudly display it to your friends. There are many that would happily stand in long lines to get their favorite author to sign their new book with a personalized autograph, but for many others, acquiring an autograph is too pricey, time-consuming and static.
As second, third and fourth screens become increasingly popular among sports fans, Twitter has been among those platforms to see a significant increase in sports-related chatter. Social media and Twitter in particular have become popular destinations for fans looking to share their thoughts and engage in conversation during the action.
Two years ago, 
With the NBA season now fully underway and our attention spans being continuously pushed to the max (not to mention Yahoo’s 
“There’s a major piece missing from the social graph,” Chris McCoy tells me over coffee, “and it’s sports.” Naturally, McCoy is a former baseball player, Quora devotee and a religious consumer of all things sports. But, perhaps surprisingly, he’s not alone in the way he views the current sports landscape.
Mobile and social gaming have exploded in popularity over the last few years and both are quickly becoming multi-billion dollar industries. With an estimated 35 million players in the U.S., 
Oh, it’s on. Over the last year or so, ESPN has been experimenting with better ways to present and distribute its content on the Web and on mobile. Essentially, they realized (or at least I hope they did) that their user experience on their digital properties wasn’t great and that others were sneaking up on and passing them — their dominance in TV notwithstanding. Yesterday, they launched a new product in beta called 