Mobile App Roundup: March Madness Edition

With March Madness right around the corner, here’s a look at a few mobile applications that will help you celebrate your favorite teams or compete against friends for bragging rights during the 2015 NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship. NCAA March Madness Live (Free on iOS, Android) - This official March Madness app allows users to watch live-streams of all 67 games (a paid TV subscription is required for games broadcast on TBS, TNT and truTV). Users can explore an interactive bracket and receive real-time score and stat updates. The app also offers the official bracket of March Madness, alongside team profiles to help players decide their 2015 tournament results. Live radio broadcasts of each game are also available. Bracket the Madness (Free on iOS, Android) - This bracket pool app allows users to create pools and brackets and share them with friends on Facebook (or through email and text). The app offers complete game schedules, scores, pool leaderboards, chat messaging and more. To turn the app into more of a game, and to monetize the experience, the app allows user to purchase, for instance, a $1.99 “Bracket Shield,” which protects their brackets from view by other users. The 2014 Turbo Tourney mini-game rounds out the experience, testing players’ memory of the matches from last year’s tournament. SwiftKey (Free on Android) - SwiftKey has released its first branded keyboard themes for sports fans, only on Android. Currently, the app offers nine NCAA teams in the “Basketball Fever” theme collection: Kentucky, Virginia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Texas A&M, Iowa, Notre Dame, Florida and Ohio State. More are potentially on the way. Users can keep track of the themes with the most downloads here. ESPN Tournament Challenge (Free on iOS, Android) - ESPN’s bracket app has been updated for the 2015 tournament, and it allows players to start a group and invite their friends to join. Players make their picks and compete for a chance to win $20,000 and a trip to the Maui Invitational. FanReact (Free on iOS, Android) - A sports-themed social media app, FanReact has partnered with Yahoo Sports Radio to throw the YSR Bracket Challenge on FanReact. To enter, users are asked to take a picture of any bracket they fill out and post it to the proper YSR Bracket Challenge board on FanReact. This promotion will accept participants from March 15 through 19, with the winner being chosen April 8, after the championship game April 6. The user with the best overall bracket will receive a three night, deluxe room stay at the Venetian or Palazzo in Las Vegas in July, among other prizes. More information on all of FanReact’s sweepstakes is available here. Thuuz Sports (Free on iOS, Android) - The Thuuz Sports app looks to highlight the best moments in sports, using a six-tiered system that rates events based on “game pace, parity, novelty, momentum, context and social buzz.” Each game is then given an excitement rating of 0-100, with four different ratings available for each game, depending on the person watching (the home team fan, the visiting team fan, the neutral fan of the sport or a general sports fan). This algorithm translates into notifications so players don’t miss the best moments of games. Users can customize their alerts to match their favorite teams, favorite overall sports and more. CBS Sports (Free on iOS, Android) - The official CBS Sports app offers a bracket manager for creating and managing a bracket pool of up to 400 members. A standard Bracket Challenge is also available, which lets fans make picks for multiple brackets before sharing them with friends and competing for prizes, including a trip to the 2016 NCAA Final Four. In addition to these bracket games, players can use the app to receive score and stat updates, news, analysis, expert picks and more throughout the tournament.

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Mobile App Roundup: March Madness Edition

We take a look at a few mobile apps that can help you celebrate March Madness season.

Brandy Shaul

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Brandy Shaul