Not as cool as the last two videos, but this one shows off how CowScout handles multiple users

Launch

Today we’re happy to announce the first public release of CowScout. Check it out at: http://cowscout.com

We’ve been in beta since July 20th and we’ve been really happy with the amount of feedback we’ve received. Thanks to all of our beta testers! If you were a beta tester, your use account is still active. Feel free to login and begin using CowScout!

Here’s some of the features CowScout has to offer:

Multi-Users / Multiple Teams
Create a user account and join or create your own team. This allows you to scout a match and control access to your scouting data. In order to scout a match, it’s required that each scout or device have their own CowScout account. In addition, CowScout also know which events your team in attending and helps make your user experience more convenient.

Match Analysis
CowScout takes the match results it scrapes from the FIRST website and analyzes it to generate OPR, CCWM and +/- Ratio for each team at each event.

Easy To Use Data Entry
CowScout offers an easy to use data entry system that helps maximize the amount of time spent looking at the field as opposed to looking at a screen.

Scout Master
Keep track of your scouts. Scout Master automatically assigns a scout a match and team number and provides an easy interface for your lead scout to see who is scouting who. In addition, Scout Master also analyzes the data to check for errors and notifies your lead scout so the problems can be corrected before it compromises the rest of your scouting data.

Data Organization
CowScout stores and organizes your team’s scouting data. You also have the option of making your scouting data public or private so that you can share data on other teams. This means you can have scouting data on teams you’ve never played going into a late season event.

Graphs
Scout uses your scouting data to create performance graphs. This allows you to see how a team is performing over time. These graphs also show where the 95th percentile of teams are performing to help you see where a team is performing relative to the top 5% of teams at an event.

Picklist Manager
CowScout features a pick list manager that helps you generate, sort and save your picklists for events you’re attending.

Robot Photos
Easily upload your robot photos.

In addition to being a powerful scouting tool, CowScout is also a comprehensive archive of competition data dating back to 1992. CowScout currently features:

Rankings: 1992, 2001-2011
Match Results: 2004-2011
Awards: 1992-2011
Event Lists: 1992-2012
Team Lists: 1992-2012
Team Information: 3,400+ teams

We have a team search feature that allows you to search team number, team names, sponsors, location and rookie year.

We will be releasing the Scout Manager and Data Entry features sometime during build season (once we see what the game is and develop our scouting criteria). There will be small changes made throughout the season based on feedback we’ve gotten and how the game develops.

Thanks everyone and good luck this season!

Here’s a sneak peak at CowScout’s data entry system and ‘Scout Master’

Here’s a little sneak peak at one of the features coming to this year’s CowScout - The Picklist Manager. Enjoy!

Loose Ends

The chaos of the Fall is dying down and we’re tying up some loose ends and polishing some features before CowScout is released to the public.

Since the last blog we’ve added a lot of stuff including:
  • A picklist manager that helps you create, sort and manage picklists for events your team attends. It’s pretty cool, we think it’ll be a game changer - especially for teams that generally don’t spend much time on picklists.
  • Some more interface enhancements.
  • Improved team searching. Now you can search team names, rookie years, sponsors, etc
  • Multi-photo uploading. After doing some testing we found that if you had multiple photos of a team, it sucked having to hit upload over and over and over again.
  • We’ve added CCWM (Calculated Contribution to the Winning Margin). Not a huge deal, but still another metric that can be used to measure a team.


We’re also finishing the last couple features for the new data entry screen. It’s pretty cool. We think it’ll help make managing your scouts easier.

Our target is to wrap up this round of development sometime around the first week of January and release another (minor) update for the 2012 game during build season.

Beta 2

Last night we launched the second beta version of CowScout! We think this will be pretty close to what we plan to release to the public in September or October.

Here’s a brief list of the changes we’ve made:

  1. Added a navigation bar to make navigating the site easier
  2. Added a ‘My CowScout’ page that has stuff you’d use on a regular basis (what events your team is attending, settings, etc)
  3. Added the ability to upload photos of robots (must be logged in AND a member of a team to do so)
  4. Revamped some of the pages to make them less overwhelming
  5. Revamped the navigation menus and made them more touch friendly
  6. Added mobile device detection so that CowScout can cut off long text strings and preserve it’s formatting.
  7. Added a ‘line card’ of generated statistics such as OPR, Average Score, +/-, etc
  8. We’ve added more competition data. We now believe we have probably 80-90% of the competition data dating back to the 2004 season. 

We’re still looking for beta testers too! So if you’re interested, head over to http://www.cowscout.com!

Changes!

It’s been a while since our first post, so we figured it’s time for an update!

So far we’ve invited around 20 users to beta test CowScout. The feedback the beta testers have provided has been really helpful and as a result we’ve made a lot of improvements to CowScout. 

Here’s a quick rundown of the improvements:

Navigation - We’ve begun an overhaul of the site navigation. Users will notice that the site is MUCH easier to navigate around now. It’s still not perfect, but we feel it’s a major improvement over what we had.

Improved Mobile Layout - Another complaint was how on some pages the content would really throw off the mobile formatting. We think we’ve got a much better grasp on the problem. We’ve also made changed to the layout of the team pages so that they’re a lot easier to follow.

Team/Robot Photos - We’ve added a new feature where users who are a part of a team can now upload robot photos to share with the public. 

Archived Competition Data - We’ve added a lot more competition data from previous seasons. We’ve now got awards, match results, team lists and rankings from almost every event since 2004. Up until recently we only had information for teams who competed in the 2011 season. This meant teams who folded prior to 2011 would generate errors whenever CowScout would try to access their team information (team name, location, rookie year, etc). We now have team numbers and information for every team dating back to 2003.

These changes should be made available to CowScout beta testers within the next couple days.

Looking For Beta Testers

We’re currently looking for beta testers to test the new version of CowScout. Are you interested? Check out: http://www.cowscout.com for more details!