By Allan Maurer

ATLANTA—Once upon a time content was king online. Now, there is so much content available that organization of content is really what it’s all about, says David Eckoff, co-founder of the sports news and social networking site, Spitter. Spitter aggregates sports news from 10,000 sources, presenting it, along with social networking features such as the ability to interact with other fans, in a user-customized Twitter-like stream.

Signing up for Spitter is easy and quick. Users put in a name and password and chose the teams they want to follow from the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, PGA, motor sports, and college sports, then receive a personalized stream of news and comment about the teams picked.

Eckoff, also president of Revolutionary Ventures, a company that specializes in taking “revolutionary ideas from the drawing board to market,” was also a vice president of new product development and innovation at Turner Broadcasting, a senior director at RealNetworks, and a senior VP at Rivals.com.

Eckoff is one of more than 75 top Internet entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, executives, bloggers, and others participating in TechJournal South’s second annual Internet Summit Nov. 4-5 at the Raleigh Convention Center (see: www.InternetSummit.com for more information. Last year the event turned away those who waited until the last minute, so it’s a good idea to register early).

An admitted sports buff, Eckoff also founded Inside Carolina, which covers University of North Carolina sports, and later sold it.

The founding team at Spitter, a name which suggests both Twitter and the gum and tobacco chewing spitters in baseball, all worked together at Rivals.com, Eckoff notes. All sports fans, they thought it would be cool to start a new media site focused solely on sports. And the name Spitter has a certain wackiness that makes it easy to remember. “If you think about it, a lot of Internet names are wacky,” says Eckoff. Think Google, Yahoo, Bing, Twitter.

They asked themselves if there was anyplace online where fans could go to get all the headlines related to their sports interests, including those not just from news organizations but blog posts and other sources and have fan discussions. “We couldn’t think of anything like that,” he says.

“This stuff was spread out over so many Web and social media sites. Who has time to go to all of that?” Since nothing like what they envisioned existed, they built it.

Already, Eckoff says, although the site has only recently emerged from closed alpha testing into a quiet open beta, sports fans have responded that the free site was exactly what they wanted. The site’s number of regular users has already surpassed their early predictions by 300 percent, he says.

Eckoff says he and his founding team take many cues from Google. “Google doesn’t own its content,” he notes. “It’s about organization of content.”

Other lessons he learned from the search engine giant include “Ship early and ship often,” he says. That means, get a product out fast and call it beta. “That way you get feedback from real users rather than just on a whiteboard. If you wait until something is perfect to launch it, you’ll never launch it. Many entrepreneurs wait a year and half to launch and the market passes them by.”

One particular metric from feedback interests Eckoff more than any other, he says. That is how people answer the question of whether they would recommend the service to friends and family. “The only statistic that consistently correlates with profitable growth is how many people would recommend it, so I put excessive focus on this across all my businesses,” he says.

On Spitter, 80 percent of the people using the site say they are extremely or very likely to recommend it.

“That’s how you grow a business,” says Eckoff. “You don’t see a Facebook or Google advertising. Your experience Facebook is better when your friends are part of it. People see it and bring their friends into it.”

Although Spitter is only a few weeks into its beta test, “We already see that, so I’m pleased early on,” says Eckoff.

Plans to bolster the site’s infrastructure with an ultra-fast server and more improvements so that the user experience is even better are important to the site’s ultimate success as well, he says. “When I talk to people from Google, they discuss measuring things in a fraction of a second, even though those fraction of a second gains seem almost imperceptible,” he says.

Eckoff’s wide experience has taught him a number of other business lessons he’ll be sharing at the Internet Summit in November. They include that “A product will live or die on whether it is solving problems for people.”

He also notes that he is working with the experienced people from the Rivals.com team on his current venture because VCs tend to look at two main things before investing in a company. One is the idea and the other is the team. But while a dozen people may come up with the same idea, the team that can execute on the idea is what is usually most important.

Another lesson he points to is that a company can actually raise too much money. “It’s one of the lessons I learned at Rivals.com,” he says. “They raised $90 million ten years ago. If you raise $90 million and you are overfunded, it leads to bad decisions.” Then, a company ends up with too much office space, too many people, expensive chairs and “All those things you heard of from 1999,” he says.

Spitter, which may look for venture funding down the road, is currently funded by its founders.

Online: www.spitter.com; www.InternetSummit.com

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