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Archives for 2012

Mobile Sports Report TechWatch: Apple Files New Complaint Against Motorola

February 20, 2012 by

Congress approves spectrum sale
The US Congress has approved of the sale of spectrum that had formerly been allocated to television. The move will enable an increase in the amount of spectrum available for use by telcos in supporting greater bandwidth for mobile phones, especially smartphones.

Are Facebook’s numbers not what they appear?
Shel Israel over at Forbes does a nice takedown on Facebook’s claims that it has 850 million users that visit the site at least once a month. While he admits to a few potential flaws in his math, and points out Facebook may have the same flaws or slightly different ones and he does come to an interesting conclusion. Head over and see if your math is any better.

Mobile app platform developer July Systems lands $15 million in VC money

July Systems, a developer of a cloud-based mobile application platform has raised $15 million in equity investment. The round was led by Updata Partners and included both Intel Capital and WestBridge Capital.

July, which has already had three previous funding rounds including a $7 million Series C, said that the funds will be used to accelerate its product roadmap, boost the sales momentum, and increase the company’s market reach.


Will the lack of a single unified version of Android harm tablet market?
That at least is the point that James Kendrick makes over at ZDNet. He has a strong point and it was the fact that at the last minute Sun prevented Java from becoming fragmented that helped make that platform ubiquitous. Will Google do the same here?

This week in lawsuit news

Apple wins a round vs HTC
The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) has handed Apple a victory in one of its battles with Android handset manufacturers. The ITC ruled that Apple did not infringe on patented technology that is owned by HTC.

The complaint, filed two years ago alleged that Apple was infringing on five HTC patents that had to do with technologies related to power management and phone dialing. In its complaint HTC had requested that Apple be prohibited from importing some versions of the iPods, iPads and iPhones into the U.S.

Apple files competition claim against Motorola Mobility
Fresh off a victory in German court against Motorola, Apple has filed a filed a complaint with the European Union claiming that Motorola is violating a pledge to license industry-standard patents on fair terms.

According to a report from Bloomberg Motorola has said that it is willing to work with Apple to negotiate a patent license deal. Earlier reports have showed that Motorola was purportedly seeking 2.25% of Apple sales for a license.

This will be an interesting one to watch since that very topic was explicitly mentioned by the EU when it gave the Motorola/Google deal its approval. It said that it would be watching to ensure fair practices not only going forward but also looking at past practices as well.


Today’s foolishness

I will take that iPhone with a side of mace
Well not really mace but pepper spray. Piexon, A Swiss developer has created an iPhone case called the SmartGuard iPhone 4/4S that features a detachable canister of pepper spray, for emergency uses only, of course. I can see this going bad very quickly.

Technology at the Olympics
Here is an interesting look at how technology usage has evolved at the Olympics since the founding of the modern game. First radio broadcast was in 1924 for instance or that the 1956 games in Melbourne resulted in only three hours of footage shown in the US.

Filed Under: Android, Apple, Apps, Intel Capital, iPad, iPhone, Motorola, Olympics, Smartphone Tagged With: , , ,

United Way Seeks to Leverage NFL’s Social Media Strength

February 20, 2012 by

The United Way, one of the largest charities in the United States is partnering with the NFL in an effort to leverage the football league’s huge social presence into heightened awareness of the charity and what it does.

The two entities are already long term partners, having worked together for almost four decades and it has been a common sight during NFL broadcasts to see one star or another stand up and talk about how he is working with the charity for the good of the community.

In addition players volunteer to work in the community one day a week performing a number of services including encouraging kids to stay in school, serving meals to the elderly, and helping to build homes for low-income families.

Now the United Way is seeking to take the relationship to another level, as the NFL’s success has helped it establish itself as a huge presence not just on the airwaves but also online and in a variety of social media outlets.
The charity is currently hiring people that it will call player promoters, and they will be assigned to promote specific NFL players, according to a piece in Mashable.

The NFL Player Promoter program will couple a promoter with a player in an effort to drive increased traffic to that player’s specific social media accounts. The players’ accounts will of course have a United Way message and so it will enable the charity to reach additional fans. According to Mashable the NFL has 4.6 million Facebook friends and 2 million Twitter followers.

Of course some players also have significant following in one or both of these places as well. Steelers’ Troy Polamalu has 2 million Facebook fans and 400,000 following him on Twitter, while Chad Ochocinco has a combined following of over 5 million, according to FanPagelist.com

However it should be noted that not all are United Way spokesmen. It is interesting to look at who are the most recommended accounts to follow on Twitter by CBS and to see how heavily followed some of the analyst and news sites are as well.

I believe that we will start seeing a fight in the future for additional partnerships, both charity ones such as the United Way as well as advertising ones in not only the NFL but in all major sports. Social media is an excellent way to reach fans, especially ones on the go, and it will be interesting to see how the leagues manage to monetize this trend.

Filed Under: Athlete to Follow, CBS Sports, Facebook, Mashable, NFL, NFL Network, Social Media, Twitter Tagged With: , , ,

CrowdOptic Gets Super Bowl Beta for Focus-Based Fan App

February 20, 2012 by

The folks at CrowdOptic are reporting a successful Super Bowl beta test of a prototype point-and-join social media sports application, based on the company’s unique ability to “triangulate” the most important things people may be pointing their phones at during an event.

As we’ve reported before, the San Francisco-based CrowdOptic is developing technologies to provide analytics and real-time results from social, mobile audiences. With a small app installed on a phone, CrowdOptic takes info from the phone’s GPS service and its camera, and feeds it into a system that can then provide “Google style analytics” to show what the fans are pointing their phones at.

According to CrowdOptic, at the Super Bowl the company staged an invitation-only beta test of focus-based discussion pages at the Super Bowl Village festival in Indianapolis during Super Bowl XLIV. The triangulation technology used by CrowdOptic allowed people in the beta test to be instantly joined in a live social network with people who were pointing their phones at the same thing.

Here’s the company’s official statement on how the test went:

During the soft launch of the application at the Super Bowl Village, participants in the beta trial said the simple act of pointing a phone was a far more appealing way to join an online following than searching for indexed tags. Users also praised the ability to microblog live with other spectators who share a specific common interest and to move effortlessly in and out of mobile discussion groups simply by holding up their phone or taking photos, as they normally would. CrowdOptic’s core capability is detecting significant clusters of mobile phone users who share a common focus in real time, instantly joining them together online, and creating a common call to action among them, such as an invitation to comment.

Though CrowdOptic has had several other beta-type demonstrations of its technology, using its triangulation features to empower fan-focused discussions appears to be a winning step forward, since the company said it will now make the technology available to its media partners. A screen shot of the beta test technology is below.

Filed Under: Apps, NFL, Social Media, Sports Social Media, Super Bowl Tagged With: ,

PGA’s ShotTracker: A Pretty Good Live TV Substitute

February 19, 2012 by

Once again, golf fans are faced with a half-hour gap in live TV coverage Sunday, this time from the Northern Trust Open at Riviera in Los Angeles. We tweeted the Northern Trust’s Twitter feed and got back the suggestion to check out the PGA Tour’s ShotTracker page, which we did. It’s pretty cool. It’s not live TV, but you can “follow” the action shot by shot.

@ We’ll be doing our best. But to get the most complete coverage #NTOpen2012 visit @ ShotTracker: http://t.co/Yp3hhBR1

February 19, 2012 11:25 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@NTrustOpen

Northern Trust Open

If you look at the screen grab it takes a few seconds to figure out — but then you realize how the thing works. It basically follows each player shot by shot on any given hole and reports the length of each shot. It also has color-codes to show where shots landed, rough, fairway, etc. It updates pretty quickly with a good Internet connection; not sure if there is a mobile option or not (didn’t see one on the page and couldn’t find one in the Android store) but without live TV it’s as good as say, ESPN’s GameCenter service.

We’d still like wall to wall live coverage online. But until that day happens, I guess ShotTracker is our only hope.

Filed Under: Apps, CBS Sports, Golf, Golf Channel, Live Sports Video Consumption, PGA Tagged With: ,

How Should Sports Sites Make Money? A Great Post and a Great Line

February 18, 2012 by

Since Mobile Sports Report ran a story and picture of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition this week (after all, it is a big story that the issue is available online), the whole discussion about how to drive traffic to sports sites and how online news sites make money off advertising got moved to a new level with this post from Outkick the Coverage. Read it if you are in the sports marketing biz. I think the ideas contained are radical, but deserve consideration.

I was pointed toward the article from another post over at The Big Lead that was talking about how the Boston Courant makes money because it doesn’t have a website. FYI, a guy named Dave Price, who I don’t know personally but went to school at Colorado the same time I did, does the same thing at a local daily near here in Palo Alto — no online stories to protect print ads.

You can debate if that is a realistic long-term strategy, but — I loved the line at the end of the Big Lead post by Ty Duffy, so I’ll quote it below:

This story highlights a basic fact: no one has figured out how to monetize the Internet effectively. For typed words to stand alone, media must cross two fundamental barriers. First, we need a better metric to sell to advertisers than straight pageviews, before we all burn out and/or introduce Softcore Saturdays. Second, traditional media must find some way to make a non-invasive paid subscription model work.

“Softcore Saturdays,” I love it. Of course I should also mention that on the same page as Duffy’s post there is a link to the MissCollegeFootball.com poll. So maybe softcore Saturday is already almost here.

Filed Under: About MSR, Sports Illustrated, The Big Lead Tagged With:

Major Apps Designed to Data Harvest Apple iOS Users

February 17, 2012 by

Is there a mole in your iPhone?

Are iPhone apps stealing data off your smartphone?
In a general sense it looks like the answer is yes, even if you as an individual are unaffected. A series of studies has shown that it looks like the market as a whole has not been immune to this problem but it is running rampart and is lead by some of the leading app developers.

While to some it might seem that harvesting data such as contacts is a minor issue consider that may use their smartphones for both work and personal use and there could be a good deal of proprietary information on the phone.

While the current list of offenders comes from the world of corporate app developers the next generation destined to exploit this issue will no doubt be hackers, something that could pose a major issue to all concerned.

A study by VentureBeat comes after a developer called Path was caught in the act harvesting names, numbers and e-mail addresses and storing that information on its servers. Venture Beat found that this is just the tip of the iceberg and that it is very likely that an iPhone user has one or more of the apps involved.

VentureBeat used a program called mitmproxy that is a traffic monitoring utility to observe data traffic and found that a host of applications were uploading personal data from the iPhones, in some cases unencrypted.

A list of some of the players is a who’s who of apps, much over shadowing the much smaller and less popular Path. Included in this list is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, Foodspotting, Yelp, and Gowalla. They do not all do exactly the same thing but it is an interesting read over at the VentureBeat site.

At the same time it appears that Google has developed work around for safeguards in Apple’s Safari browser that enable Google to place tracking cookies that circumvent Apple’s default privacy settings. The workaround affected not just iPhones but Mac computers, iPads, and iPod Touch.

Google has said that it has disabled the code that enabled the actions and said that it was unintentional. However a complaint has been filed against the company with the FTC.

Apps for the iOS platform from Apple are in violation of Apple’s guidelines, which prohibits the app from sending information about a user without their permission. The company said that it is working to tighten this up in the future, according to Enterprise Mobility Today.

However it is not just iOS apps that are an issue here. The Federal Trade Commission has just issued a warning that smartphone apps can invade a child’s privacy and advocates are calling for greater safeguards. I wonder if this market segment, largely left to its own devices will start to see the advent of more, and increasingly tougher regulations due to the actions of a few developers.

Filed Under: Apple, Apps, FTC, Google, iPad, iPhone, Smartphone, Social Media, Tablets, The New York Times, Top News, Twitter Tagged With: , , ,
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