SAP doesn’t usually do much consumer software. Its enterprise software serves as the modern foundation for companies. But its analytics technology came in handy in creating an online dashboard for fantasy football fans.

SAP has provided its dashboard for fans who participate in the NFL.com Fantasy Player of the Year 2012 competition. The dashboard, which is live on NFL.com/Honors, shows the stats of the top eight finalists in a visually rich format. It combines SAP-generated analytics with NFL.com fantasy football data. It recognizes the football player that has outshined everyone else in fantasy football leagues.

The winner of the competition will be announced for Super Bowl XLVII at the second annual NFL Honors primetime awards special on Feb. 2 on CBS. SAP has all the data you’ll want on the finalists, with information from 16 weeks of fantasy football. It has overall season points, points per game, and average player figures in comparison to others who play the same position. The database also provides a week-by-week point graph, a quick analysis of each player’s performance and other data for fans. The site has gamification features (the use of game-like incentives for non-game applications).

“Fantasy football fans love stats almost as much as watching the action on the field,” said Jonathan Becher, chief marketing officer at SAP. “The SAP dashboard enhances the NFL.com Fantasy experience by distilling millions of data points and allowing fans size up their favorite players more easily. Soon fans will be able to use the analytical power of SAP to predict the most valuable players for their fantasy teams.”

In October, the NFL and SAP announced a multiyear marketing sponsorship, and the NFL will adopt SAP’s on-demand technology.

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New York City sports analytics startup NumberFire first caught my eye a year ago with its ability to help people dominate their fantasy sports leagues. Now the company is ready to go for this year’s football season with even better features and statistics.

NumberFire blends sports with “big data” by providing statistics and recommendations to its users and to numerous sports publications. While it offers stats on basketball and baseball, the startup’s biggest money maker is fantasy football, which attracts an estimated 27 million Americans each year. It offers stats for both NFL and college football.

To get ready for the new season, NumberFire has not only improved its number-crunching abilities but has also added a new recommendation engine. For example, you can import your fantasy team from Yahoo Sports (the most popular fantasy sports site) into NumberFire and it will make recommendations for which players you should trade. Ideally, with each season, NumberFire’s ability to help its users win their leagues will keep improving.

“We generate new recommendations on a daily basis and send them to your inbox,” NumberFire CEO Nik Bonaddio told me. “Whether it’s adding players, dropping players, or initiating trades, you’re covered. The system can also recommend which players to start on your team and which players to add from the waiver pool.”

NumberFire is going into the football season with revenue up 800 percent and users up 300 percent year-over-year. On top of charging users (there are some free perks too if you don’t want to pay), the company is generating revenue from partner referrals and cross-promotions. The startup has partnerships with big names like just-purchased Bleacher Report, Sports Illustrated, SB Nation, and an unnamed “major broadcast partner.” (Bonaddio previously mentioned partnering with ESPN, so that’s my guess.)

NumberFire raised $750,000 in a seed round earlier this year, with investors including RRE Ventures, Penny Black, and former TechStars managing director David Tisch. NumberFire is also a graduate of the ER Accelerator program. The company has just five full-time employees but is looking for interns.

“Given how small our team is, we’ve got our hands full,” Bonaddio said.

Granted this football season is success, Bonaddio hopes to attract a first round of funding early next year. He also is looking to expand beyond U.S.-based sports, with a major interest in international soccer.

Click on the photo below to see NumberFire’s latest incarnation.

Mizzou football photo via Jim Ross/Flickr

Fantasy Politics is a new site that combines Fantasy Football and politics. Sign in with Facebook or Twitter and start building your own fantasy team of politicians and pundits. You can organize a league of four to eight friends, or go all in and join a public league. You can play daily and rack up points, draft or drop players, and pick a starting player. It’s free to play, but there’s a fee if you want to compete in the national championship. The startup showed off its game at the DEMO Spring 2012 conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Thursday.

Fantasy Politics CEO Aaron Michel

“It all started with a really bad idea,” said CEO Aaron Michel. “In 2010 I decided to put together a political game … I threw $1,500 into it, hired an outsourced developer and a young guy right out of college to run things. It wasn’t good.”

The pet project got some media coverage and over time grew into an idea for a real company. The San Francisco-based startup’s first investor was treasurer of the DNC, Andy Tobias, who also happens to be a software entrepreneur. Between Tobias and family members, Fantasy Politics has raised $50,000 in seed money to date.

The two-year-old startup was founded by a cadre of five founders with an impressive mix of political, programming, game, and business experience. CEO Aaron Michael is a Harvard Business School grad who spent two years working on a presidential campaign. Chief technology officer George Marootian has 15 years’ experience building equity trading platforms. Head of product Matt DiVito is the token expert fantasy-game player. Morgan Muchnick has tons of political experience as director of government affairs for a lobbying firm. Finally, Deepak Saxena, head engineer, previously founded a fantasy sports company.

Michel described the game as “a gateway drug to a great civic education.” The founders are hoping what begins as a time-killer can grow into a genuine interest in and understanding of American politics. Judging by the great team, slick interface, and lively political climate in the U.S., they’ve got my vote.

Fantasy Politics received mixed reviews from a panel of expert judges following the company’s demonstration. Menlo Ventures partner Shervin Pishevar said it was too niche, but Cisco SVP of IT Communication & Collaboration Sheila Jordan appreciated the potential political educational value of the startup.

Fantasy Politics is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Football season starts tomorrow. And for those of us who aren’t 240-pound running backs, numberFire has new premium features to help you win the respect and admiration of your peers: By totally dominating your fantasy football league.

Founder and CEO Nik Bonaddio said that his year-old startup helped him do just that.

“I’ve always wanted to win when I play against my friends so I can be the alpha male of the group,” Bonaddio said. “Before numberFire, I wasn’t that good. With numberFire, I won convincingly last season.”

An estimated 20 million people play fantasy football each year, so it’s a smart field to mine. And this is an ideal week for adding new, powerful features, with the NFL’s first game of the season happening between the New Orleans Saints and the Green Bay Packers tomorrow.

“On a weekly basis, there’s 15 or more decisions you have to make on who you want to start or who you might want to trade,”  Bonaddio told VentureBeat. “It’s like being a real-life general manager. We help make people smart decisions.”

Launched in September 2010 with Bonaddio’s winnings from appearing on a TV game show, numberFire uses statistical reasoning and quantitative analysis to make the best possible predictions for fantasy football. Think of it as a Wall Street firm concerned about predicting player performance rather than stock performance.

“Sports are all about numbers,” Bonaddio said. “People know how many home runs Roger Maris hit, but they still use non-scientific and biased assumptions. People need to start applying math and logic to sports.”

Up until now, the site has been completely free and focused on generating users. But now that numberFire is in its second season, Bonaddio decided it was time to add paid features to generate better revenues.

“This season, I’m a little more concerned with making money, but it’s mostly about getting more users,” Bonaddio said. “That’s why the majority of the site is free. I want people to keep coming back.”

The three new premium level features include the following:

• Roster Analyzer ($10/season): a portfolio management tool that analyzes the weaknesses and strengths of your team and makes suggestions to improve it.
• Handicapping Module ($100/season): a tool that uses numberFire statistics to help bet on the winners of football games.
• Trade Analyzer ($5/season): a tool that should be ready next week that evaluates how beneficial or harmful a trade will be to your team.

Bonaddio and his team of two employees have been working hard the last few months to get the new features ready to go. He said he regularly spends 16-hour days at the office.

“It’s not the most fun thing in the world, but it’s my baby, so I’ve got to be on it,” Bonaddio said. “It seems like I spend 99 percent of my time programming.”

New York-based numberFire has been a member of the ER Accelerator venture capital fund since late June. The company is self-funded by Bonaddio, who got his seed money from an August 2009 appearance on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”, where he won $100,000. Bonaddio likes to joke that Regis Philbin was his angel investor.

“When I won the money, I decided to sit on it for a couple months and not make any rash decisions,” Bonaddio said. “Fast forward a couple months and I was in the thick of the football season. Each season, I ran into the same problem with bad predictions. But then I realized I had the money to solve this problems, so I made numberFire.”

numberFire didn’t just prove his to friends that he had an edge. Using statistics, the service last year correctly predicted to its users that the Green Bay Packers would win the Super Bowl.

With that sort of accuracy, it can’t be hard to imagine a sports betting site or fantasy football service picking up numberFire. The service has already attracted media partnerships with SB Nation and Bleacher Report to give the sites statistical data and analysis.

Like many startup owners, Bonaddio said he would not mind if numberFire was acquired by another company. But he emphasized his goals are much deeper than simply selling his company. He said he wants to change sports generally, much like Billy Beane of Moneyball fame did by using “Sabermetrics” to change the game of baseball.

“In the era of big data, there’s no reason to make such opinionated guesses,” Bonaddio said. “Sports are a relatively predictable chain of events. I want to be on the cusp of using math, statistics and rational logic to make predictions.”

Even with his lofty goals in mind, Bonaddio is starting small. His first targets? Sports writers and fantasy football lovers.

“Now we can use data to make a profound change to how writers write about sports and how consumers predict their choices in fantasy leagues,” Bonaddio said. “If you go on ESPN and Yahoo, these people are giving recommendations based on gut feelings. The data exists, so why not use it? It seems obvious to me.”

Photo via SD Dirk