

Ask HN: Idea Feedback - Mobile Sportsbar/Pub Trivia - throwaway_90210

Given ideas are a dime a dozen, here's one I had the other day.   At Buffalo Wild Wings and some other venues I've seen BuzzTime Trivia, it's a location based trivia game that people can play at the venue using controllers on the table while monitoring results on TVs around the restaurant.<p>BuzzTime seems married to their hardware business, and from the little pricing information I've found, it's pretty expensive for an owner/proprietor to get it installed (@ $10-15K setup + monthly subscription fees for content packages at over $300/mo.).   I would venture this price point is too expensive for many venues who are interested but scared to commit to the initial investment to see if it helps business.<p>Given the mass proliferation of smart phones with network connections, what about a more affordable version that uses phone instead of the table top terminals?<p>The idea would be:<p>- Players check into the venue (something similar to 4square to reasonably ensure the player is at the actual location) to play.   Ideally you do the entire game in the browser without requiring a native app to start.<p>- Compete for prizes, prestige at the venue by playing against others.   Start with just once devoted niche like Monday Night Football fans to start before branching out.   Perhaps the trivia is curtailed to the venue's location and oppposing teams: e.g. Green Bay, WI trivia along with Packers and Broncos questions.<p>- Provide a dashboard app for owners to hook up and show game activity in the venue.   Make it skinnable and allow them to integrate their current promotions, specials, etc.<p>- Integrate with the usual social media channels to increase visibility for the venue through players that participate<p>- Price it as an affordable SaaS type offering with just a monthly service fee that can be cancelled at any time.<p>I'm thinking of contacting some restaurant managers but before doing so, I thought I'd post it out to HN to see if others have some feedback.   Any feedback is welcome.  Perhaps there are ways to make it more fun, etc.   Perhaps it won’t be any fun at all!   This definitely feels like a vitamin and not a pain killler, as they say, but Buzztime shows there is a market at least.   I’m not trying to build the next Google, only instead find a profitable niche for a small company that allows me to work independently.<p>I have no idea how feasible it is from a technology perspective yet, but I'm hoping a real time, multi-user trivia app on current mobile browsers is possible.<p>Thanks! 
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dbcfd
As both a developer and a bar owner, yes. 

I had stayed away from buzztime due to the hardware requirements, however, the
iphone app intrigues me.  Not enough to put up the cash for buzztime, but
intriguing nonetheless. 

Trivia is a great way to bring patrons to a venue, but works best when prizes
and some sort of mc are involved.  The quiz alone is fun for patrons that are
there, but doesn't necessarily draw significantly more patrons.  The app would
need two modes, a constant running game for leaderboard, and an event mode,
which could allow managers to set start/stop times with prizes, localized to
the venue.  It'd be great if it could integrate with an mc, who can tailor
questions based on venue crowd. 

It's very feasible from a technology perspective.  I've been working on another
web based geo location app using Scala/Lift, and this isn't much of a stretch. 

If you decide to go down this road, shoot me a message.  Be more than glad to
help from either a developer or restaurant owner perspective. 

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waterside81
It's not a crazy idea.  The technology component probably isn't your biggest
obstacle - selling is.  You'll most likely have to spend a lot of time (&
money?)  hitting the pavement, talking to bar owners / managers etc.  Getting
big chains to sign up en masse would help of course. 

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rgarcia
It looks like buzztime has an iphone app?  <http://www.buzztime.com/iphone-
playmaker>

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throwaway_90210
They do have an iPhone app, but it only works at a venue that has already
purchased the system.  I can't see them doing something like this since it
would cannibalize their hardware business and anger customers who shelled out
for the full system. 

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JulianMiller520
currently working on something in this space ;-)

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bmelton
I like the idea, and have considered doing something with it if only because
I'm friends with a few bar owners who have complained about how painful trivia
night is. 

In fact, the best trivia nights are not the BuzzTime ones, but the smaller
ones that don't have hardware at all. 

All you really need is a database of trivia questions that the hosts can
retrieve from, and a way to mark which questions that host has used before. 
Ideally, you could let the host tailor the questions to his crowd so that, at
a sports bar, you weren't asking a ton of questions about Justin Bieber, and
that sort of thing. 

~~~
callmeed
I've been thinking of hacking together a trivia question builder that
continually scrapes/parses Wikipedia articles to build the questions. 

For example you could take pages like
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_League_Baseball_Most_Valu...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_League_Baseball_Most_Valuable_Player_Award)
or
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammy_Award_for_Record_of_the_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammy_Award_for_Record_of_the_Year)

And build a ton of multiple choice questions just from the tables of past
winners. 

~~~
mapster
build this.  a great mobile app idea!