CHICAGO - Sept. 27th, 2016 - Tech startup Blinkfire Analytics has launched a new set of benchmarking tools that enable their customers to compare the online presence, social media engagement, and earned media valuation of sports entities.

Blinkfire’s benchmarking tools provide a simple and intuitive way for users to compare themselves with their competitors and receive a better understanding of their shortcomings and strengths: from the number of followers or social channels, to their audience growth, engagement numbers, and how much value they generate for their sponsors on social channels.

"In addition to best-in-class computer vision technology quantifying earned media for our sponsors, Blinkfire's new Benchmarking feature affords us the opportunity to not only compare our own teams' social statistics, but also measure against any NBA, NHL, WNBA or other team around the globe across a myriad of key attributes,” said Alex Kerr, Director of Strategy & Research at Monumental Sports & Entertainment.

The rise of social media has changed the landscape of sports information in the past decade. Sports teams, leagues and players themselves are continually publishing content for their followers on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. Blinkfire tracks that massive flow of daily information. The platform  uses proprietary and patent pending technology to identify brand logos in the images and videos posted by players, teams, leagues, media companies and fans on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Sina Weibo.

Blinkfire’s core technology uses computer vision and machine learning to value the exposure of brands in digital and social media in real time. Blinkfire uses Microsoft Azure to deploy, balance and scale its sponsorship recognition technology through multiple virtual machines. Thanks to the Azure management portal, Blinkfire Analytics can easily scale the size and number of virtual machines in seconds. 

“Azure enables us manage our infrastructure in a few clicks with extraordinary simplicity. Our technology relies on the high availability and scalability of Azure to compute tens of thousands of pictures and videos every day,” said Alejandro Tatay, CTO at Blinkfire Analytics.

“Microsoft is pleased to see Blinkfire taking advantage of a broad range of Azure services such as Compute and Cognitive Services for its real-time computer vision brand analysis and valuation platform” said Nicole Herskowitz, senior director of product marketing, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Corp.. “With its high scalability, advanced analytics services and artificial intelligence tools, Azure is an ideal choice for Blinkfire’s powerful solutions.”

Founded in 2013 by Steve Olechowski and Juan Luis Hortelano, Blinkfire Analytics is a technology startup headquartered in Chicago, IL, and Valencia, Spain. Blinkfire uses the power of computer vision technology to provide teams, agents, and brands the visual analytics they need to drive engagement and accurately value sports sponsorship opportunities.