TeamPages, a niche online social network start-up out of Victoria, BC today announces their Series A round of financing, as led by Burda Digital Ventures, and several local angel investors. The amount invested has not been disclosed, but was to be directed towards growing the team, upgrading the look and feel of the site, and "really expand the marketing efforts," according to CEO and founder Mike Tan.
eamPages bills itself as "an online social network for parents, coaches, and athletes of sports teams that helps all participants stay in touch with each other and keep up to date with the team's schedule of games and events." I took a look at the service, and it lives up to its promises, and has a fairly complex system in place for everything from communication to scheduling to even statistical tracking. It's a great system.
I get the feeling, though, that calling it a social network is a bit of a misnomer. Perhaps it is just me, and my social networking fatigue, or perhaps the feeling is actually pervasive to everyone else, but but I take a deep breath and sigh every time I see a new one pop up. It's not that I don't enjoy writing about the space, but there is so much stuff popping up these days being passed off as the next big thing in social networking, when it's really just an incrementally better solution than the last one.
All that to say that in a different time where social networking wasn't the marketing term du jour, this tool called TeamPages would have just been called an great online software solution for solving the organization nightmare that kids sports can sometimes be. Perhaps some of the cash they've raised for marketing the product will go towards dialing back their buzzword compliance a notch or two. I think it might help them in the end.