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Webscorer Debuts Timing Apps to Save Plenty of Time at Races

May 29, 2012 by

Sports fans, coaches, event organizers, timing companies, publishers and even proud parents can now easily track sporting event results with a new a comprehensive platform that automates much of more complicated manual timing formats.

Webscorer Inc., based in Redmond, Wash., has introduced a platform that includes three integrated components, also usable separately: a race registration tool, a manual race timing app that runs on the iPad and iPhone, and a website that supports race results posting from the Webscorer timing app and other sources via an open interface.

Webscorer PRO is available as an in-app subscription from Webscorer FAN at the following rates on the iPhone and iPad versions for $9.99 for one week and $49.99 for one year. Webscorer Online Race Registration Service Webscorer has varying costs. Webscorer .TXT Results Posting Service is free.

“As a racer myself, I witnessed the difficulty race organizers were having in timing races and providing timely results to racers,” said Vesa Suomalainen, CEO of Webscorer. “With the emergence of the mobile Internet, we saw an opportunity to help modernize the pen & paper method still widely used in recreational racing today.”

Founded in July 2009, Webscorer began with a mission to make race timing easier, more affordable and to improve the quality & speed to get the results to racers.

The full Webscorer platform is available worldwide. Webscorer has identified 36 timing-sports that can benefit from its products.

For more information, visit www.webscorer.com as well as the company’s Facebook, YouTube  pages and Twitter account (@webscorer).

Filed Under: Apps, Cycling, iPad, iPhone Tagged With: , , , , ,

NHL FanCam to Engage Fans at home and at Stanley Cup Games

May 29, 2012 by

I think everybody knows at least one sports fan that is always claiming that they were at any number of prestigious events, but oddly never seems to have the ticket stub or any other evidence. Well if you are attending the Stanley Cup Finals in the upcoming days you will have a unique way to prove you were there.

A second round of the NHL FanCam presented by Ticketmaster will make its appearance for both games 1 and 3 that will be played on May 30 and June 4 respectively. It is as simple as it is high tech, but you have to be in your seat at the right time. The first time the NFL broke out the FanCam was earlier this year for the 2012 NHL All-Star Game in Ottawa.

The FanCam takes a high-definition, 360 degree photo of the inside of the arena. All a fan has to do is find their image in the photo at the FanCam website, and any friends that might be along for the games as well. You then ‘tag’ yourself and you can share it with friends via email, Twitter and Facebook. Proof for everyone to see and believe!

The NHL is also using the FanCam to engage fans in another way. It is holding a contest called Hunt for the Cup in which fans can search for a picture of the Stanley Cup that will be in the FanCam and posted at the website. The advantage to this is that for the unfortunate fans that cannot attend the Stanley Cup Finals they may still participate in this event.

All of the fans that find the cup are entered into a drawing for a chance to win two tickets to the 2013 Bridgestone NHL WinterClassic, two roundtrip airfare tickets, two New Year’s Eve Party passes,
as well as transportation, accommodations and fan apparel for the event. This sweepstakes is open to US and Canadian citizens 21 years or older and the sweepstakes closes July 31.

This is an interesting use of this type of technology and much better than the relatively static approach of just showing fans in the stands so that they can cheer for themselves. By using a bit of high technology and a simple approach it can really engage fans into visiting the web site. By creating a contest that fans that cannot attend the games the NHL helps expand the experience for them as well.

Filed Under: NHL, Stanley Cup Tagged With: , ,

Wanna Bet? World Series of Poker is Here

May 29, 2012 by

For those of you in the non-betting category the World Series of Poker has started and will run from May 27 to July 16 in lovely Las Vegas. As usual the rooms are packed with the hopefuls and the hapless vying for a total of 61 bracelets..

The official site is an interesting hodge podge of good and bad. Live reports from the ongoing events are nice, a link to Twitter feeds is always a positive and so is live video of events. Links to Facebook and a mobile app are great. But where is a general event news link? I am not just talking about past results- how about who has left the tournament, who did not attend, etc…? It might actually be there but it is not easy to find.

Also there appear top be a number of new events including a re-entry event and the $1 million buy in tournament, as well as more tables on the Rio’s floor for the main event which will mean a faster overall tournament.

As in past years the event will be broadcast by ESPN, starting July 3, but as yet does not have a prominent position on the sites web page, you have to look under the More Sports section to find it. There is one event that ESPN is doing on its own that I did not realize had been ongoing- a Fantasy Tournament.

Over the years I have been in a number of different fantasy leagues, baseball, football, NASCAR and one year golf but I have never been in a fantasy poker league, and yet not only is there one but it is in its seventh year.

This Fantasy leagues is however a closed one, which I suspect may change a bit if ESPN decides it wants to do a bracketed tournament of some type like it does with March Madness, for instance, but it still makes for some interesting watching for poker aficionados.

There are ten teams, and the owners of the teams select 8 players and during the course of the tournament they can add/drop one player during the course of the tournament. Many of the team owners are probably well know to poker fans since there are a fair number of pros.

The professionals include professional poker players Daniel Negreanu, Dwyte Pilgrim, Eric Baldwin, Josh Brikis and Bernard Lee. There are two from ESPN, Gary Wise and Andrew Feldman while the remainder of the field is comprised of Bluff editor-in-chief Lance Bradley; Chops from WickedChopsPoker; and PokerNews contributor and 2010 fantasy poker champion Chad Holloway.

Players on teams score points for a variety of actions including finishing in the money, making a final table and finishing first, with additional points being earned on higher buy-in games. I think that this is an interesting way to follow the World Series of Poker and I am a bit surprised that I have not noticed it before.

I am also surprised that it is not more heavily hyped by ESPN as a draw to its site. There are plenty of poker players spending a great deal of time online and this is a way to draw them to ESPN’s site.

Filed Under: ESPN, World Series of Poker Tagged With: ,

Mobile Sports Report TechWatch: Facebook Phone, Dell Tablet Specs?

May 29, 2012 by

Toshiba has announced that it is getting out of the netbook market and will not be offering new ones, at least in the United States. This follows a trend that has been developing for some time as others have already discontinued their efforts, including Dell.

Toshiba said that it will instead be focusing on the ultrabook, an emerging class of notebooks that feature light, sleek form factors coupled with powerful processors, according to Liliputing. I suspect that the netbook category is going to be killed, at least in the US, by ultrabook from one direction and tablets in the other.

Dell Tablet specs leaked?
I am always a bit leery of publishing leaked information unless it was leaked to me personally but the piece over at Neowin looks pretty compelling. It appears that Dell is developing its forthcoming Windows 8 tablet around Intel’s Clover Trail dual core Atom processor and that the device will have a 10.1-inch HD display with 1366 x 768 resolution.

Other features include 2GB of memory and as much as 128 GB of SSD storage. An interesting feature looks to be a removable battery that allows users to choose between one that has a 6-8 hour life and a larger one that has 10-12 hour life.

Apple’s response to DOJ a good read
While I have not read the legal documents the people at Forbes have gone to the trouble and bring out some marvelous quotes from Apple’s filings and some interesting commentary about how they foresee the case progressing.

Not being a lawyer hinders any real objective opinion on my part but I think that the author of the piece, Philip Elmer-DeWitt, makes a pretty compelling argument on Apple’s side. Head over for his piece and a like to the Apple filing.

Crowdfunding site flaws?
I increasingly talk about crowd funding as it is an interesting method for small developers to get the initial funding needed to launch a product. However there is another side to the equation that is clearly brought out by Gizmodo — the failures.

It points out that companies that you see on its front page are ones that are getting funding, while ones that fail, or are on their way to failure, seem to completely disappear from the site, as it only wants to show winning or potential winning offerings.

Since, according to the article, Kickstarter gets a percentage of the amount pledged; this makes sense since only projects that get 100% of their request get anything. To see why some of them might have failed head over to Mashable for a short piece on crowd funding mistakes.

The Patent Wars continue

Microsoft wins round versus Motorola in Germany
Apparently Microsoft owns patents relating to how you splint one log text message into two smaller ones and Motorola has violated those patents. A German court ruled that Motorola’s technology to permit this feature infringes on Microsoft’s patents. It was reported that while Microsoft could ban Motorola products in the country it is instead seeking a license fee.

The two have been going at it tooth and nail for some time in the patent department with both sides scoring what appear to be major victories. I wonder of the license fee is the first step towards resolving their issues.

Apple tops in mobile PCs
The preliminary results are in for the NPD DisplaySearch’s Quarterly Mobile PC Shipments and Forecast Report is in and to the probably surprise of no one Apple is the top dog in this field. According to the report Apple shipped approximately 17.2 million mobile PCs in Q1’12.

This is a 118% increase over the same period from a year ago and of the total iPads represented 80% of Apple’s total, or 13.6 million units. For the industry as a whole the results were nowhere near as good with shipments growing 30% year to year, reaching 76.2 million for the quarter.

Cisco kills Tablet
In a move that surprised me because the product never appeared on my radar in the first place, Cisco is killing its Cius tablet. The networking giant had developed and introduced the tablet a year ago with the stated purpose of pioneering the business market with the product.

The tablet featured a 7-inch display and had a $750 list price. Sold via its channel partners it was obviously hurt by lower cost offerings from rivals that businesses increasingly allowed employees to bring in from home.

Facebook building smartphone?
The New York Times has reported that Facebook is once again dipping its toe into the smartphone market and has a project underway that should see a new product available in the market sometime next year.

According to the article Facebook has been actively hiring hardware and software engineers including a number that had worked on Apple’s iPhone. It had been reported a few years ago that Facebook had a development project for a phone but killed it.

Filed Under: Amazon, Android, Apple, Apps, Cisco, Dell, Facebook, Kickstarter, Mashable, Microsoft, Motorola, Smartphone, Startup, Tablets Tagged With: , , , , ,

SF Giants: 12,000 Fans per Game use Stadium Wi-Fi at AT&T Park

May 28, 2012 by

If there is a poster child for the Wi-Fi in stadiums movement it’s AT&T Park, home of Major League Baseball’s San Francisco Giants. According to the team’s chief information officer, approximately 12,000 fans use the stadium’s free Wi-Fi service at every game, up from just a few hundred several years ago.

“In 2004 when we first provided Wi-Fi we maybe had 50 geeks from Silicon Valley doing their email at the games,” said Bill Schlough, senior vice president and CIO for the Giants. “By 2008 there were 400 or 500 a game [using the network] and now we see around 11,000 or 12,000 fans on the network during games. It’s a challenge to stay in front [of the usage].”

Schlough, speaking at InformationWeek’s live Valley View show last week, also said that network traffic at the ballpark is “doubling every year,” which means that his team is in a perpetual state of busy, adding capacity not just for Wi-Fi connections but also for 3G and 4G cellular links.

“You think it [traffic] is going to stop growing, but it’s not,” Schlough said. “Every year we have to keep investing [in infrastructure] to stay in front.”

Filed Under: AT&T, Baseball, iPad, iPhone, Major League Baseball, San Francisco Giants, Twitter, Wi-Fi Tagged With: , , , ,

Belmont Stakes’ Website gets Facelift with Social Media, Mobile Modules

May 27, 2012 by

Even sports steeped in tradition have changed as fans’ habits following their favorite sports continue to evolve. The Belmont Stakes, the 144th edition of which will be held June 9, is a prime example.

The website of the final leg racing Triple Crown, BelmontStakes.com, has been updated to include the Facebook page of the New York Racing Association, Inc. (NYRA) and Twitter page.

The site’s social media modules are updated in real time with the latest Belmont Stakes news.

The NYRA has also debuted a featured group on GroupMe, the New York-based chat room site, for the Belmont Stakes. It also allow fans to stay connected through mobile devices and the web.

BelmontStakes.com offers videos, photo galleries, news, race day information, a section dedicated to the race’s history, and special content from the Daily Racing Form.

The website allows fans to sign up for the Belmont Stakes Prize Package, offering the chance to win tickets, hotel, and airfare to the Belmont Stakes. Contributors include veteran journalists Teresa Genaro, Jenn Kellner, Ernie Munick and Andy Serling.

Filed Under: Apps, Facebook, Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
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