1. What does OleOle do?

OleOle has created the world's leading global social media site that enables football (soccer) fans to report, discuss and get news and information on any team or league or player in professional football.

The OleOle Football Platform combines blogging, publishing, and media sharing with social community features so fans can follow and debate every move their favourite team makes without having to visit dozens of disparate websites.

The platform is a place for fans to easily find and share different types of information on their favourites – from live scores to fantasy football, photos to podcasts, history to forums. The football platform harnesses and organizes 100% fan-driven content across 10 languages.

2. How does OleOle benefit football fans?

Football is a global sport, but today’s online news outlets are inherently local. News and information on different teams requires fans to visit multiple sites, and this information is typically only available in the team’s native language. The most popular sites in football generally publish “unbiased” information, based on official news and written by reporters trying to remain neutral. Fans don’t want neutrality; they want the real, unfiltered news about their teams and the bias that goes along with it.

There are few outlets online today for a two-way discussion, and those are limited to specific teams or players. By enabling fans to report and discuss news on any team, match or player, and in 10 languages, OleOle users participate and drive discussions about topics they are passionate about. Through fan journalism, there’s no limit to the depth of coverage even for 2^nd or 3^rd division teams in the smallest of countries. OleOle aims to be the single largest source for football information both for the world’s most popular teams and also the “long tail” of teams, leagues and players.

3. What is the history of the company?

• The company was founded in December of 2006 and began initial beta testing of the platform in May of 2007. Over the next 9 months the company added functionality in 7 languages.
• The company became the defacto online presence of the 2007 Copa America in July. As the Official Hospitality Provider for this South American competition OleOle covered all matches in Venezuela.
• The Oceania Football Confederation launched their website on the OleOle Football Platform in July of 2007.
• In August 2007, OleOle became an official Travel and Hospitality Partner of the US Soccer Federation and US Men’s National Team.
• OleOle launched a Beta II version of the platform on April 28, 2008, and the first public version of the OleOle Football Platform was released on May 19, 2008 in 10 languages.

4. Who are the founders of the company?

Doug Knittle, chief executive officer, and David Mok, chief technology officer, founded the company in late 2006. They worked together previously at RazorGator, an online ticket broker also founded by Doug Knittle.

5. Where is the company located?

OleOle is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California (9777 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 1004, Beverly Hills, CA 90212), has development offices in New Zealand as well as offices across South America and Europe.

6. Why are you located in the US where football isn’t very popular?

OleOle is a true global company with employees distributed around the world. There are millions of football fans in the United States that follow MLS teams as well clubs outside the US - America has other sports, but football is still quite popular.

Most importantly, California is an ideal place to headquarter a technology company -- to leverage the latest technologies originated in the region, as well as benefit from an experienced social media talent pool. California’s time zone is also a perfect half-way point between Asia and Europe, enabling more efficient global coordination. And, the weather can’t be beat.

7. How many employees does the company have?

The company has about 27 full time employees (May 2008) and also employs a team of localization experts. Bloggers and reporters are not employed by the company but some may benefit from revenue share based on advertising as well as official press credentials, paid travel to matches, and match tickets.

8. How is the company funded?

OleOle, LLC has been privately funded to date by its founders and other individual investors. The company’s social media platform has received approximately $5M USD in a Series A investment. For more information on investment, please contact us.

9. What kind of people use OleOle?

OleOle has primary three types of users:

Information seekers, who want to stay updated on their favourite teams, players and leagues. Typical football fans follow their national team as well as 1-3 professional clubs, and being able to find this information all on a single home page makes it easy to stay on top of scores, player transfers and upcoming matches.

Fans, who want more than just information, they have an opinion and aren’t afraid to share it. They actively support their favourite teams and clubs, and participate on OleOle by commenting, voting on content, discussing topics in forums, and submitting interesting news.

Football Fanatics, who devote hours each week to following their teams and want to actively share this information with others. These fans are sports journalists, or photo journalists, might work in football, or are simply aspiring amateur writers with day jobs. Football fanatics start and participate in online and offline fan clubs, blog about their teams on a regular basis, document team facts, history and stats, and love to debate with other fans and supporters of rival teams.

10. How many users does the company have?

OleOle has maintained about 30,000 active members through its Beta period, with hundreds of thousands of site visitors.

11. How big is the site? What does it cover?

OleOle covers all of professional football. This includes more than 170 competitions, 300 professional leagues, 208 national teams and football associations, 5,580 football clubs, and over 57,000 players. Each of these topics has a separate, user-controlled section on OleOle that offers photos, videos, facts and history, news, blogs, football scores, forums and much more.

Every section is available in each of ten languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

12. How is OleOle different from Facebook or MySpace or Orkut?

OleOle is not a social network, it’s a vertical social media platform. Football fans can interact on the site using many social community features, but the platform is designed to provide fans with a multi-lingual infrastructure to have two-way discussions and debates about the sport and specific topics.

The entire site is built around the “real-world” structure of football, and fans can find the teams and information they need, and discuss vote and comment or create new content. There are Fan Clubs that allow groups of people to organize around a specific team or player and focus on a local region. These are much more specific and representative of real world fan clubs, unlike the generic and huge groups setup on social networks.

13. How is OleOle different from Wordpress or Blogger?

Bloggers and reporters can and have shut their blogs on Wordpress and Blogger and moved their posts to OleOle because of the high concentrations of traffic around specific topics on the site. OleOle blog tools offer the same functionality as other popular blog tools, but are integrated into the OleOle Football Platform. That means bloggers don’t need to maintain separate websites themselves, and their posts can be instantly accessed by everyone on the Platform interested in that topic. As many bloggers know, it’s difficult to build an audience – it takes great content, time and some salesmanship. On OleOle, bloggers can focus on what they really love and what they’re good at - writing great content.

14. How does the company make money?

OleOle is building the largest vertical advertising platform focused on football properties. The OleOle vertical ad network will serve ads across OleOle and also on third-party sites and blogs. Football online is fractured today, so global advertisers must work with many small sites to get enough reach. On OleOle media buys can be global or local, segmented by user demographics, language and country, and section sponsorships are available to global brands.

In addition to advertising the company will offer other premium products and services that football fans want – merchandise, tickets and travel packages, internet TV and other exclusive content.