I had my annual auction for my fantasy league that I've been in for 13 years. It's an auction league where you keep two players for $10 more than you paid the year before. My keepers were Willis McGahee and Lawarence Maroney. Here's the team:

Starters
QB: Tom Brady
RB: Lawarence Maroney
RB: Willis McGahee
WR: Larry Fitzgerald
WR: Calvin Johnson
WR: Earnest Wilford
TE: Antonio Gates
K: John Kasay
Def: Baltimore Ravens

Reserves
QB: Rex Grossman
RB: Chris Brown
RB: Chris Henry
RB: Leon Washington
WR: Troy Williamson
TE: Leonard Pope
K: Ryan Longwell
Def: Greenbay Packers

Ok, I'm a little bit thin at receiver. I think Calvin Johnson will be a fine #3 at the worst - so I really don't have a #2. I love Earnest Wilford, if you've never watched him play - he catches every thing they throw at him. Unfortunately he's slow and not that many balls come his way. Still, if you've got to be thin somewhere receiver is the spot to be thin.

As soon as the waiver wire opens up I'll trade in my extra kicker and defense for a couple of deep sleepers at WR and RB.

I'll keep you posted on my run to the championship.

-MB

When I was at the Fantasy Sports Trade Show announcing the launch of our new site I met up with a company Called VM Direct that does video emails. In an attempt to get us to use their service that taped a short video pitch about our site and sent me a sample. It's my first try at being on camera, but my wife (a former PR professional) is promising to get me on TV when we're ready to take the site from a soft launch to a full launch.

Check out the video and let me know how I did...

We took a trip to Las Vegas to unveil the new site at the Fantasy Sports Trade Association Conference. We set up a display booth with a couple of laptops to let people demo the site.

I have to say, it's humbling to be a "new guy" at a convention with people who have put together hugely successful companies in the Fantasy Sports industry. Here are some of the other companies that were in attendance:

NBC Sports
ESPN
CBS Sportsline
Footballguys.com
Commishkit.com
MyFantasyLeague.com
RT Sport
Fanball

We met lots of great people and made many  contacts, but my favorite part of the conference was sitting in on a panel discussion named "Innovation: New Products and Trends." The panel was comprised of representatives from some well established companies. I really wanted to get some inspiration from this and I did, just not in the way I though I would.

They all talked about the great new things they were doing...podcasts, video, Facebook apps...really cool stuff. But, where's the innovation? These are things other people have already started doing. Most of them were probably good ideas for the respective companies, but not new...

I left there with the realization that true innovation is more likely to come from the smaller companies...the hungry companies. Not the people who have "been there and done that," but from the people who still have it to do.

After about 8 months of hard work and thinking of nothing else (except my wedding) Fantasy Sports Factory is finally launched...well...sorta.

At least it's live on the web now. We're in a soft launch phase where we work out some bugs before we let the world know we have arrived. If you've stubled upon us I hope you like what you see so far. If not, don't write us off just yet. We're fixing the bugs and will be adding lots of new features soon. Check back in about a week or so.