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Archives for January 2012

Mobile Sports Report TechWatch: Samsung’s Note a Tablet-Smartphone Hybrid

January 16, 2012 by

Microsoft Windows will soon have an app that enables Skype, hardly a stunner since Microsoft purchased the company last year. Still this will be good news for users of the popular VoIP technology, even if it is a bit later than originally promised, according to the Verge.

According to the report the first version will not be deeply integrated with the rest of the Windows Phone software but that future releases of the Skype app will be more tuned with future releases of the Windows Phone OS.

Huawei venture into high end smartphones
One of the more interesting corporate pushes at CES came from Huawei, with a range of products and technologies across the show. One of the products that caught my eye was its high end smartphone, the Ascend P1 S.

Touted as being the slimmest smartphone available and with a very clear and precise screen, if and when available it could be the next hot buy. While I only got a very brief demonstration of the device there are a number of good hands on pieces available to get a good evaluation of the product.

Tablet News

Samsung’s Galaxy Note-a bit of everything mobile?
Samsung introduced its Galaxy Note at the CES show and it’s kind of a tweener product, not clearly a phone for some and not clearly a tablet for others. The device has the largest display for a phone at 5.3-inches, or is I one of the smallest displays for a tablet?

It serves as a full smartphone, includes a camera and comes with a stylus for input but also has full touch capabilities. It has a memo app that allows for the taking of notes as in a paper and pen scenario but also has the capabilities to allow a user to annotate any image or screen capture.

Not sure yet how I feel about the product. It has a range of features that separate it from the everyday smartphone including advanced security programs but is its size going to be detrimental? Also if I use my tablet as an e-reader a great deal, is this a step down due to the smaller screen? A lot of unanswered questions and what segments of the market adopt it will be very interesting.

E-Readers spur book sales
Have you written the Great American Novel and yet no one has the vision to publish? A growing coterie of writers is going it alone, and some are finding a good deal of success. The Guardian has a nice piece on some who are doing quite well pushing books using tools from Kindle and other platforms.

It is not all tremendous reviews and instant fortune and the amount that you ear could be nothing or a very small sum, but it does show the impact the e-readers are having on the book business from two sides, publishing and consumption.

More iPad 3 rumors…
The latest rumors about the forthcoming iPad 3 is that it will have a quad core chip that should provide it with a nice performance boost as well as being compatible with LTE a wireless standard called long-term evolution that is just now starting to see widespread deployment by cellular carriers.

The resolution on the screen is expected to match that of the current generation of iPhones and that combined with the new processor is expected to ensure that videos and images are razor sharp. Rumors still have the expected delivery date sometime in March.

The usual legal issues…

Oracle vs Google spat sees trial delay
Ars Technica is reported that the case, originally expected to go to trial by March will now see another delay. The judge, William Alsup, has decided to wait until Oracle can propose a reasonable methodology for measuring damages.

As usual the fight is over patents; in this case one’s that Oracle claims it owns related to Java that is incorporated in the Android operating system’s custom Java runtime environment and compiler

The judge has been impatient with both parties as they have worked to deliver what he views as an appropriate methodology for the damage assessment and seems to have been very critical of Oracle’s most recent efforts. I bet this trial gets another delay.

Filed Under: Amazon, Android, Apple, Apps, iPad, iPhone

Bookeen Seeks to Break Into U.S. E-Reader Market

January 16, 2012 by

French E-Book developer Bookeen seeks to break into US market with its Cybook Odyssey, a reader that incorporates the company’s high speed interface that it claims will help differentiate its platform from rivals.

The reader features a 6-inch E Ink Pearl with 800 x 600 pixel touch display. It is powered by an 800MHz Texas Instruments Cortex 8A OMAP3611 processor with 128MB of memory. The Wi-Fi only system comes with 2GB of on board storage that it said can store as many as 2,000 e-books. This is expandable to 32GB with the microSDHC slot.

The user interface is available in 23 languages and it uses Linux 2.6.31 as its operating system. It will initially ship with 100 books already preloaded, with 30 in English and currently only a French dictionary.

The reader supports open book format such as ePub and PDF. It also has MP3 music and supports JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIF and other picture formats.

The company used the International Consumer Electronics Show as the backdrop for its introduction and said that the $159.99 Cybook Odyssey will be delivered to U.S. retailers in the near future and is currently available from the company’s web site. The company said that different sizes models are likely in the pipeline as well as color models.

It looks like this could be a hard sell. With much greater name awareness and market presence rival eBook developers such as Amazon with its Kindle lineup and Barnes & Noble with its Nook lineup are already well on their way to dominating this space.

Bookeen will need to show strong advantages over these two in order to become an established player, and right now its price and performance do not set it apart, but this is just a step so it will be worth following to see what the company develops going forward.

Filed Under: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kindle, Tablets Tagged With: , ,

Can CBSSports.com Become the iTunes for Fantasy Sports?

January 16, 2012 by

In a move expected to be announced at this week’s Fantasy Sports Conference in Las Vegas, CBSSports.com is going to open up its fantasy sports game infrastructure to independent developers, in an effort to perhaps become the iTunes of fantasy sports.

Reported by the Sports Business Journal Daily, CBSSports.com’s move is a bold one in the largely secular world of fantasy sports, where almost every provider has traditionally tried to keep customers to itself. Unfortunately for fantasy players that often means that if you play in different leagues on different platforms you must maintain separate lists of teams, passwords and logins, an especially tough task if you are trying to access your league info on a mobile device.

Theoretically, by opening up its fantasy infrastructure CBSSports.com could build an iTunes-like ecosystem where third-party developers could create applications that blend the CBSSports.com player environment either with new over-the-top apps (like ones that allow fantasy players to talk smack to each other) or with apps that might let a player access teams from different fantasy platforms in one place. Just like under iTunes, developers will share revenue with CBSSports.com on a 70-30 split, with 70 percent of associated revenue going to developers and 30 percent back to CBSSports.com.

MSR favorite developers Bloomberg Sports and StatSheet are part of the first wave of CBSSports.com partners, according to the SBJD report. Here’s a money quote from Bloomberg head honcho Bill Squadron:

“This effort by CBS connects directly with the vision for fantasy that we also have,” said Bill Squadron, head of Bloomberg Sports. Bloomberg will enhance its Front Office fantasy baseball and Decision Maker fantasy football applications using the CBSSports.com fantasy data. “Having this level of deep integration is going to be very helpful.”

Here’s the Wall Street Journal take on the announcement.

Filed Under: Apps, Bloomberg Sports, CBS Sports, STAT.US, StatSheet Tagged With: ,

Sunday Sermon: Dialing Back on Negative Tweets

January 15, 2012 by

It took me all of two weeks to break my New Year’s resolution of “being less negative” and I didn’t even realize that I was doing it — all I was doing was sending out a Tweet, taking an easy pot-shot at the second-tier announcing team from Fox for Saturday’s Niners-Saints game, the crew of Kenny Albert, Tony Siragusa and Daryl Johnston. They were distracting at best, with Johnston in particular talking about some idiotic concussion-phone system while the game was going on and then blowing a replay prediction that was pretty obvious to anyone watching. So I hit send on this:

This announcing team for the Niners-Saints is so bad it makes me wish for Joe Buck and Tim McCarver. OK not really. But they are bad.

January 14, 2012 4:01 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@paulkaps

paulkaps

After I posted it we had a momentary glitch in the Internet stream here at MSR HQ and as such I had to take an involuntary social-media break. That allowed me to look at my impromptu slam and wonder: Where did all the bile come from for guys who were just doing their job? Do I have the right to smack publicly on Tony Siragusa and Daryl Johnston just because they rub me the wrong way? What does that make me, other than JAOJ (just another online jerk)?

I mean, it’s not like the Fox crew was factually incorrect, or slurring their speech, or saying something morally reprehensible. Like many people I just don’t like the ha-ha attitude they take, the whole Moose-and-Goose show tenor of the announcing this crew puts out. But it must test positive for some percentage of viewership, otherwise (you hope) that Fox would find some other talent to replace them. From watching all the commercials during the playoff broadcasts this weekend, there’s apparently a lot on TV that I would never spend a minute watching, like “Glee,” “Two and a Half Men,” and “Alcatraz.” So I am probably not in the mainstream when it comes to offering programming commentary.

And then even if I was, look at that Tweet — if you are going to be critical, you should follow the Jim Rome rule of “have a take, don’t suck.” And that tweet has about a half a take or less. It just says the Fox crew is bad, not saying how or why — and then takes a sideways poke at Joe Buck and Tim McCarver, which is out of context since baseball season ended roughly 26 months ago and if I wanted to make a Joe Buck call it should have somehow involved Troy Aikman, his NFL broadcast partner. And I actually don’t mind Buck as much on NFL as on baseball.

So I would say looking back that my Tweet was the opposite of the Rome rule: It had no take, and it sucked. A good lesson in that negativity is usually the worst choice when it comes to commentary, one I will try to remember when engaged at the keyboard next time. That Twitter makes it easy to slam someone every second isn’t Twitter’s fault. It’s called operator error. And with any luck I’ll be doing it less as the year progresses.

Filed Under: Awful Announcing, Fox Sports, Twitter Tagged With: ,

Friday Grab Bag: Bud is Back!

January 13, 2012 by

Selig has two year extension in the works-I assume it is guaranteed

The Good people at HardballTalk, among others, are reporting that MLB Commissioner Allan “Bud” Selig will sign a two year extension to remain at the helm of the sports. The deal is expected to be announced at the owners meeting taking place in Az. this week.

It comes as no surprise that he is staying there, who wants to give up an $18.4 million annual salary. I imagine he will dedicate the next two years to keeping players salaries down. Did anyone really think that he planned to retire?

Microsoft notches another win in its patent push
Microsoft and LG Electronics have signed a broad cross patent licensing agreement that gives LG coverage for Microsoft patents for LG’s lineup of devices that run Android or Chrome operating systems.

Included will be LG’s phones, tablets as well as other current and emerging consumer electronic devices. This is the 11th company that has entered into this type of licensing agreement with Microsoft and others include Samsung, Acer and HTC.

Apple gets egg on face, store after iPhone cancellation
After an abrupt announcement that the store would not be selling Apple’s iPhone 4S on the first day of availability in Beijing, the large crowd that had formed outside one of Apple’s stores in China became unruly and started throwing eggs at the building.

According to a piece at IDG a crowd had formed prior to the store opening and when an employee announced that there would be no phones available that day and gave no reason why.

Rams sign Fisher- Dolphins feel used
The St. Louis Rams have signed Jeff Fisher as its next head coach, according to ESPN and other sources. Details have not been released but I think it will be very interesting to see what he managed to squeeze out of them.

This has apparently irritated the owner of the Miami Dolphins, the other major suitor for his services. He had seemed to vacillating between the two and it seems Miami now was just using it for leverage in St. Louis.

I guess that the team learned nothing from its pursuit of Jim Harbaugh last year. Not only did it jack up what Harbaugh earn as a 1st time NFL head coach, Miami then had to salve its current head coach’s feelings.

I cannot wait until Miami goes on a search again- I suspect they will now massively overpay one of the former head coach/announcers out there like Gruden.

3D for Apple iOS
According to Mac Daily News Apple has filed for a patent that shows it will be developing a 3D GUI for its iOS-based mobile products. Apparently this is just one of several 3D products that are/were nder development at the company Will I be able to interface with my phone like they in “Minority Report”?

Mizco delivers cross platform USB charger for phones, tablets
Mizco International has delivered a cross platform charger that it claims will handle a wide range of smartphones and tablets, something that could make traveling with multiple devices significantly easier in the future.

Called the Cross-Brand Tablet and Smartphone Charger it is from the company’s Digipower division and is designed to support USB charging for products from all of the major manufacturers.

The $29.99 charger has a featured called a SmartSwitch that can be set in one of three positions and is capable of optimally charge USB-powered tablets from major manufacturers such as Apple, Samsung, HTC and BlackBerry as well as USB-powered Smartphones.

Filed Under: Android, Apple, Apps, Baseball, iPhone, Major League Baseball, Microsoft, NFL, Smartphone, Tablets Tagged With: , ,

4iiii Delivers Feedback System for Bikers and Runners

January 13, 2012 by

A new product from startup 4iiii Innovations could prove to be a boon for every jogger that has run into someone looking down to check their time or for every bicyclist that has hit a pot hole checking their heart rate monitor.

The company has debuted Sportiiiis (pronounced Sport-Eyes) it is a display technology that attaches to glasses to enable an athlete to check monitors for instant feedback.

Designed to be used with a heart rate monitor and other sensor technology, the Sportiiiis attaches to any set of glasses a user wears, be they sunglasses, prescription glasses or anything in between by using the device’s universal attachment points.

A user first configures the device using software that can be used on a range of smartphones as well as PCs and Apple computers, setting performance goals and ranges within which the athlete wishes to work.

The device provides feedback that can be read off a multi-colored LED boom that runs across the bottom of the glasses between them and the user and can be followed by a user’s peripheral vision without taking their eyes off of the road. The feedback can come from a rage of user-supplied monitors or sensors including heart rate monitors, speed monitors as well as power meters, via a wireless transmission.

The projection shows current and recent performance and has a red light to indicate that the user is going too hard, green if just right and orange and yellow to show that they are in between. The Sportiiiis also include built-in speakers that provide audio feedback using either a male or female voice. Both the volume of the speakers and the intensity of the LED colored lights are adjustable.

To control the Sportiiiis a user accesses its Tip-Tap technology that allows a user to tap once to get audio feedback including current heart rate or cues related to the current workout while a double tap switches between sensors and can switch between power, cadence and speed.

The company is led by Kip Fyfe who has had previous success in related sports feedback development. He was the founder of Dynastream Innovations, a company that developed a variety of technologies and products, possibly the most notable being a sports sensor that was mounted in running shoes that featured speed and distance sensors and was first used by Nike.

The company also developed ANT +, an ultra-low power wireless protocol that is increasingly finding its way into a wide variety of athletic devices (including Sportiiiis) that provide real-time feedback. In 2006 he sold the company to Garmin for $46M CAD.

He said that he realized that it was inconvenient and even dangerous for athletes to take their eyes off the road to get feedback, and being an avid runner even during Canada’s cold winters, we wanted to see his heart rate, speed and other information easily and simply, which gave both to the idea of Sportiiiis.

The device is expected to be on sale within the next month and will have a MSRP of $199.

Filed Under: Android, Apple, Apps, Cycling, Startup Tagged With:
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