Fans of college basketball who compete with friends to pick winners during March Madness each year need only look to their iPhones for an easier bracket-sharing system.
Tom Klimek, manager of network design for the Office of Information Technology, launched the application "Men's Bracket 2012 College Basketball Tournament" earlier this month. The app is his third men's basketball March Madness bracket system for the iPad and iPhone.
Klimek said the application eliminates the hassle of manually filling out, and tracking a March Madness bracket.
"Instead of everybody having to fill out paper copies of a bracket and then give it to somebody to keep track of, you can just download the app, create your own pool, invite your friends and all the scoring is done automatically," Klimek said.
Klimek said both the men's and women's bracket applications he developed with his business partner Peter Massey have been extremely successful, breaking the top-10 paid sports applications within 24 hours of their releases.
Klimek said he attributes the success of the applications to a process of constant dialogue with customers.
"I think the success is due to listening to our customers," Klimek said. "Also, we're basketball enthusiasts ourselves, so we try to put everything in the apps that we know we would want ourselves."
Klimek said he and Massey decided not to advertise this year's application since past promotions have shown little increase in sales.
"It seems that most of our apps are found by people who are just searching for an app on their phone, instead of by people looking for a specific app after viewing an advertisement," Klimek said.
Klimek said numerous journals and consumer reports have reviewed their applications, and Microsoft even approached them to do business.
"They wanted to do a men's bracket app for the Windows 7 phone, which we felt we didn't have the time to do," Klimek said. "But it was still nice to be recognized by such a big company."
Klimek this year's tournament has been a rough one though, with his championship pick of Syracuse failing to pan out.
"My fourteen year-old daughter picked a much better bracket than mine," Klimek said. "She picked Kentucky to win it all."
