IU students bring 'Madness' to the Web

The NCAA Basketball Tournament Bracket will be announced Sunday, and teams across the country will be crossing their fingers. \nMillions of Americans submitting their brackets into various pools will inevitably follow this Monday. \nBut one problem IU students might face when setting up these pools with their friends is that the tournament starts during spring break. Because many people go away during break, collecting their friends' brackets might prove difficult for IU students. However two IU students, Nick Barfell and Bobby Ullery found their own answer to this problem with the Web site www.buildabracket.com, which is part of their business, Ullery/Barfell LLC.\nSenior Barfell and junior Ullery created the site based on the popularity of the tournament both at IU and across the nation.\n"I just knew it was something college kids liked," Barfell said. "I just wanted to give a fun free game for kids. I came up with the idea, and Bobby had some experience with Web sites, so I asked him. We went from there, and now we're a business."\nBoth Ullery and Barfell have participated in NCAA bracket pools, Ullery said, which prompted them to start the Web site.\n"We had participated in some hand-written brackets in the past with 10 or 12 people," he said. "We decided it would be a good idea to make a Web site to do the same thing but on a bigger scale."\nAlthough they started the site at IU, Barfell said that so far the site has had people join from all across the United States as well as from more than 40 different countries.\nWhile people can set up their pools with their friends on the site, they can also win prizes competing with other entrants. Prizes include iPods, Mini Macs and possibly March Madness tickets.\nUllery said BuildABracket has features other sites might not offer.\n"First, the one-click selection is easy to use," he said. "Second, you can customize your own bracket background and print it out; not many sites will let you do it. Third, we will not spam you; a lot of Web sites will collect your info and you'll get 80,000 junk e-mails."\nBuildABracket also takes a new approach to giving out points. Points are still given out for correct picks ranging from 20 points for a correct first-round pick to 4,860 for correctly picking the national champion. In addition to getting the points for correctly picking the winner of the games, users also get five bonus points for referring a friend to the site, and five more if the friend signs up. They also get one point for clicking on the ads and 100 points if they sign up or buy what is being advertised.\nThe bonus points are meant to help pay for the site and the prizes, Barfell said.\n"We give points for a right pick," he said. "Since it's a free site, the way we pay for the prizes is the advertisers. It's not a substantial amount of points, it's based mostly on the picks but (the advertisements) might help."\nAnother aspect of www.buildabracket.com that makes it different from other sites is its charity auction. Barfell and Ullery contacted about 40 different schools to see if they would be willing to donate anything. They were about to abandon the auction part of the site when former IU basketball player and current Iowa coach Steve Alford donated a signed basketball.\nBarfell and Ullery use a variety of different ways to advertise their site that include Google, word of mouth and www.thefacebook.com. Barfell said that they estimate they will reach 500,000 people and from that hope 5,000 join this year. \nAs for their business Barfell and Ullery have big dreams in continuing to expand from just the NCAA bracket.\n"Right now, it's just the bracket, but it could branch out to other things," Barfell said. "Definitely the NCAA every year, move to golf events, basically anything you can put a bracket on, really, like NASCAR events, NBA finals or baseball games."\nUllery said that while the site currently focuses on sports, the two founders hope to branch out into other aspects of computer programing.\n"We are going to expand into as many sports as we can," Ullery said. "Many sports don't have brackets so were just brainstorming what we can do. We're going to try to expand to software and Web site development. We're just trying innovate things and upgrade. We're not trying to reinvent the wheel."\n-- Contact Staff Writer John Wustrow at jwustrow@indiana.edu.