• Fanatix enhances the way friends interact around live sport and music

• Creates real-time private messaging networks for fans to exchange opinion, photos and video securely

• Free SDK available for event owners to integrate fan discovery and messaging platform into existing mobile apps

• Free API available for event owners to add fanatix platform to league and club Facebook Pages

Sports and music fans will, for the first time, be able to create private messaging networks around live events following the launch today of the new fan discovery and group messaging platform from Fanatix. Available as a free iPhone App, Fanatix automatically connects friends around live entertainment, and enables group chat via iMessage, iPhone’s new messaging service.

Fanatix seamlessly matches a user’s Facebook friends and their activities with a database of over 200,000 sports events and concerts at more than 16,000 venues in 186 countries, before connecting them via iMessage. The platform makes it easy to discover which friends are watching the same game, or going to the same concert, and start a private group chat with them from anywhere in the world, for free.

For live sports fans, Fanatix will find out which friends are at the game or who is watching on TV, and allow users to initiate private group chats; share opinion, photos and video; and send taunts to rival fans. For fans going to a concert, Fanatix will find friends going to the same gig, and enable them to open a group message to arrange tickets, travel and general shenanigans.

Founder and CEO of Fanatix, Will Muirhead said: ‘Every football match watched on television results in a flurry of phone calls and text messages sent from friends and family. It’s a hopelessly inefficient way to share the experience. Fanatix changes that and makes identifying relevant friends and sharing a conversation with the group as easy as possible.’

‘72% of the UEFA Champions League television audience watch alone and, although some of the biggest spikes in Twitter activity occur around live sport, most fans are reluctant to share their opinion on public forums, preferring instead to revert to older technologies like SMS and even placing a voice call. By providing an automatic way to connect relevant groups of friends, fans can now easily share in groups without sharing with the rest of the world.’

For more information, or to speak to Will Muirhead, please speak to Ed Worthington on 0207 340 8582

Please note that more Fanatix images and logo’s are also available.

About Fanatix
Fanatix was founded in 2011 by Richard and William Muirhead to provide event owners and fans with tools to automate groups and private messaging around live entertainment.

Prior to forming Fanatix, Will Muirhead founded SportEV at Edinburgh University in 1999. SportEV provided IP video delivery platform solutions and related consultancy services to FIFA, the English Premier League, Serie A, Vodafone, BT and AOL. The Press Association acquired SportEV in 2005.

Prior to forming Fanatix, Richard Muirhead co-founded Orchestream, which floated and reached a market cap in 2000 of US$1.4 billion (or over US$1 billion), was Entrepreneur-In-Residence at Accel Partners and was Founder, Chairman & CEO of Tideway, which was sold to BMC Software in 2009.

More information is available via the Fanatix website www.fanatix.com