Live Score Addicts App Scores a Goal With Soccer Fans

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Name: Live Score Addicts

Quick Pitch: Live scoring updates, customizable push notifications and video highlights from soccer leagues around the world.

Genius Idea: Customizable alerts and an extreme depth of content — more than 420 leagues from 98 different countries are included.

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In a span of just several months, the iPhone app Live Score Addicts has proven to be a huge hit with soccer fans around the world. Now, with the 2012-2013 European soccer season set to kick off this weekend, the app's founders are pressing their advantage with the introduction of new versions for Android and iPad that launched Tuesday.

Live Score Addicts currently boasts about 400,000 weekly users, according to co-founder Patrick Arnesson, and has been a big success since its initial release in February. Four days after launch, it had received 4 million page views, Arnesson says, and racked up 50 million in its first month. With the Android [Google Play link] and iPad [iTunes link] versions joining their original iPhone offering, Arnesson and his Sweden-based team are aiming to hit 200 million page views for the month of September.

Here's how the free app works: when you sign up, you set preferences for teams, leagues and players to follow as well as when you'd like to receive push notifications on score and stat updates. With information from more than 420 leagues in nearly 100 countries, you'd be hard pressed not to find what you're looking for.

The concept is simple but effective — especially, Arnesson says, in a soccer industry that is digitally stagnant, with many team and league websites not looking much different than they did several years ago.

"There is almost no innovation in football, even though it's one of three biggest industries in the world — you've got sex, religion and football," he says.

Live Score Addicts' staff now totals seven members, and started as a bootstrapped effort supported by web consulting side projects. Now, the app makes money largely off of its slick advertising integration. In one example from last season, Live Score Addicts partnered with Nike to get a list of the players that the sportswear company sponsors to wear its shoes in European leagues. Then, every time one of those players scored a goal, the app updates would say who scored and what shoe they scored with. A link took interested users to that particular shoe in the Nike store.

"The app will always be free for everyone," Arnesson says. "If we ever have people saying they want to pay to not get ads, we are doing something wrong because the ads should add value to the experience."

So what's next for Live Score Addicts, other than the newly released iPad and Android apps? Arnesson says his team is already working on adding more social integration and user interaction to complement the robust offering of live score updates that have proved, well, addictive, to soccer fans worldwide.

Does Live Score Addicts sound like an app you might use? Let us know in the comments.

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Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

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The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Thumbnail image courtesy toksuede, Flickr.