Golf – Page 5

Updated PGA Tour 14 app greets new season

January 14, 2014 by Greg Quick 1 Comment

The PGA Tour has revamped its existing PGA Tour ’14 app from the ground up to offer an enhanced experience for fans that are both attending its events as well as ones that are following tournaments from remote locations.

Using apps at events is very popular because a fan might be following one group but is interested in a host of players and how they are doing not just hole by hole but shot by shot and the app addresses this and much more with enhanced existing features as well as additional ones.

Starting off it gives you a live, up to the second leaderboard. As a leaderboard feature there are players’ listings that can provide a thumbnail profile of the player, current scorecards and video of select shots. From there the fan, if they so desire, can follow an individual players’ live scorecard that now features play by play with shot trails and live up to date stats. The tee shot trails feature is only available at courses that support ShotLink laser technology.

Moving from the individual to the group there is the ability to check on groupings with both time and location of tee times. There is video on demand that provides a wide variety of features including player features, recaps of every round and tournament highlights. Of course the entire season schedule is also available.

The PGA Tour ’14 app covers approximately 130 tournaments featuring the PGA Tour, Champions Tour, Web.com Tour, NEC Series-PGA TOUR Latinoamérica, PGA TOUR Canada and PGA TOUR China. The app is available for both Android and iOS devices.

Filed Under: Android, Apple, Apps, Athlete to Follow, British Open, Golf, iOS, Live sports via mobile, Live Sports Video Consumption, PGA Tagged With: Android, iOS, PGA, PGA Tour 14

Pebble takes second step in smartwatch space

January 7, 2014 by Greg Quick 2 Comments

Pebble has brought out its second generation smartwatch with the $249 Pebble Steel Watch, a more fashionable, and expensive version of the original $150 Pebble offering from last year. The watch is being shown at the current CES International trade show in Las Vegas.

The Steel Watch will be available in either a brushed stainless or black matte finish as the company develops a look that would not look garish on an executive. It replaces the plastic cover with Gorilla Glass and comes with both steel and leather straps.

The battery life is good for between 5 and 7 days and it is waterproof to 5 meters. The company has added a tri-colored LED and as with the earlier model will run both the Android and the iOS operating system. Scheduled to ship at the end of the month the move coincides with the launching of the Pebble Appstore, a place where users can easily find apps designed to run on the device.

Pebble, the Kickstarter favorite, wow the market when its funding effort went massively over the amount that the company founders were seeking, something that slightly harmed the company, at least public relations wise, by forcing it deliver the product late because it needed to build significantly more than it had expected in its early run. Not that this is not a problem that most startup companies would kill for.

Pebble was certainly one of the groundbreakers, if not the groundbreaker in the wearable computing technology with mainstream devices that connected a watch with a cell phone to bring data to your wrist. There were already sports specific devices that did some of the same features in areas such as golf and running but none that seemed to serve as a pure extension of your mobile phone.

That started a land rush by larger mobile developers to lay claim to this space as well, with Samsung, Apple, Google, Sony, Dell and others delivering products, planning to or simple becoming part of the rumor mill that they have one in the works.

Samsung, Qualcomm and Sony have already brought out products with the Samsung Gear, Qualcomm Toq and the Sony SmartWatch and I am sure this year we will see a wave of additional devices introduced to the market, much like how the tablet space exploded a few years ago. A number will be simply me-too devices while others will take the time to create truly differentiated offerings.

Filed Under: Amazon, Android, Apple, Apps, Dell, Golf, Google, iOS, Kickstarter, Live sports via mobile, Samsung, Sony, Startup Tagged With: Android, Apple, Apps, Dell, Pebble, Qualcomm, Smartwatch, Sony

PGA Tour Develops Social Media Hub in time for FedExCup

August 22, 2013 by Greg Quick Leave a Comment

Two-year-old startup Mass Relevance has teamed with the PGA to create the PGA Tour Social Hub, a website that will serve as a central aggregation point for a wide variety of social media content that pertains to the PGA tour.

The Hub is being launched in time for fans to use it to follow the action for the FedExCup Playoffs, which begin today with The Barclays at Liberty National in New Jersey City.

The website, which can be located here, will use content filters that seek out relevant content including keyword and hashtag searches. Among the media sites that will be represented at the Hub will be Twitter, Facebook, YouTube videos and Instagram photos and videos.

The PGA said that one of the driving reasons was that fans often used different hashtags or terminology when tweeting or communicating about events and that by creating a single unifying site it will make it easier for fans to follow events as well as comment on them in real time.

For Mass Relevance, founded in 2011 with almost $2 million in seed funding from Floodgate and Austin Ventures it is the continuation of the SaaS developers rise as a leading partner to a wide and growing set of clients.

The company has partnered with experience developing golf-focused social hubs, having previously created one with TaylorMade-adidas Golf Partners earlier this year and developed worked on a program with Callaway Golf to bring social media to serious golfers. Other partners include the Washington Redskins, Twitter, MTV, Pepsi, Campbell’s, GE, Target, Walgreens and Microsoft.

Filed Under: Apps, Facebook, Golf, Instagram, PGA, Social Media, Sports Social Media, Sports Social Media Data, Twitter, YouTube Tagged With: Facebook, FedExCup, Instagram, Mass Relevance, PGA Tour, Social Media, Twitter

Sportsmanias.com Gains Funding: Rolls Out New Team-Focused App

August 15, 2013 by Greg Quick 1 Comment

Sports news aggregator startup Sportsmanias has raised $1 million in venture funding as it seeks to expand its reach by providing a new team-focused sports app that will enable users to track hard news about their favorite teams by focusing on news and reports from team beat writers.

The recent $1 million investment has come from Mas Equity Partners, which is led by founder Jorge Mas, who also serves as Chairman of the Board of MasTec, a $4 billion infrastructure engineering and construction company based in Coral Gables, Fla.

Sportsmanias.com, founded just last fall, has an existing web site and app that serves as a news aggregator for all major US sports including NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL and the NCAA. In addition it covers a wide variety of domestic and international soccer news, teams and leagues. The news feed that a user gets can be customized to meet their sporting preferences. The company was founded by the mother/son team of Aymara Del Aguila, an advertising executive and son Vicente J. Fernandez, a student-athlete and sports writer at the University of Chicago.

Now the company has enhanced its presence in the mobile digital world with an updated free app for both iOS and Android powered devices. The Team News app will focus on providing news that has been originated by beat writers that regularly cover the team, rather than just culling all news stories that are generated about a team across the nation, often from sources that do not have direct contact and coverage of the team.

The app does not just exclusively provide beat reporter news on a specific team. It also provides team and player tweets. Two interesting features are the Rumor Filter, which collects league and team-specific rumors from top rumor sites, and a Video Filter, which aggregates footage from YouTube and Twitter.

These features have the ability to data mine rumors and videos in real time so that a fan can be up-to-date on what is going on as well as what is suspected to be about to happen. Other new features for the app include a scoreboard to follow ongoing games, and keyword search capabilities.

The company said that it currently is getting 500,000 unique visitors to its web site monthly and that with the new features and capabilities of its app it expects that it will see a strong jump to 1.5 million monthly visitors by year end.

The upgrades look to be a very good move by the company because increasingly flexibility and customization are now becoming standard in sports apps. The rumor and video filters are solid features that will help them create separation from many of the current apps that are now available, as many as just text based, and any rumors tend to be generated in house. However the need for these features, particularly video is obvious and others are headed in this direction.

Filed Under: Android, Apple, Apps, Basketball, English Premier Soccer League, FIFA, Golf, iOS, Live sports via mobile, Major League Baseball, MLS, NBA, NCAA Football, NCAA Hoops, NCAA.com, NFL, NHL, Soccer, Sports Social Media Data, Startup, Tablets, YouTube Tagged With: App, MLB, NBA, NFL, Sportsmanias, Twitter, YouTube

CBS Sports App Finally Supports Video, Tablets

August 14, 2013 by Greg Quick 1 Comment

CBS Sports has updated its app (v.6.0) and brings much needed new features including tablet support as well as live video which will be added to its existing sports scores, stats and other information that it had previously supplied.

The old version of CBS Sports’ app could be viewed as a sort of dinosaur, apparently designed at a time when its developers believed that all a user needed on a mobile device was access to a web site for the information that they were seeking.

The addition of live sports video really was a necessity since there are other options, usually specific to one sport such as MLB At Bat that already offer sports highlights. Also by adding tablet support it reaches a huge new audience that surveys show often use a tablet when watching sports for additional information.

The live video will cover the PGA tour, NCAA basketball, and SEC football with additional on-demand options. You can also get personalized push notifications and it includes both CBS branded commentary and news content but also has the ability to add a Twitter feed focused on a favorite team that will include outside reporters, news services and fan commentary.

Aside from these additions the app still includes a huge range of other information that sports fans seek such as scores and stats from Pro and college football, MLB, NBA and NCAA hoops, NHL, PGA, NASCAR, F1 and a wide range of soccer including (Premier League, MLS, Champions League, Bundesliga, La Liga, Serie A, Europa League, Ligue 1, Scottish Premier, Dutch Eredivisie, Mexican Primera, Brazilian Serie A, and Argentina Primera.

There will also be special features regarding major sporting events such as the NFL draft and a number of CBS Sports programming will be available such as Jim Rome’s show.

Filed Under: Android, Apple, Apps, Barclays English Premier League, Baseball, Basketball, CBS Sports, FIFA, Golf, Live sports via mobile, Major League Baseball, NASCAR, NBA, NCAA Football, NCAA Hoops, NFL, NHL, Soccer, The Ligue de Football Professionnel Tagged With: CBS Sports, FIFA, MLB, MLS, NBA, NFL, NHL

Viewers flock to on-air and digital PGA Championship broadcasts

August 13, 2013 by Greg Quick 1 Comment

The Turner Sports decision to present an aggressive online presence for the PGA Championship as well as strong over the air coverage resulted in strong results as the event sees big growth in viewership in both areas.

The over the air broadcast of the 2013 PGA Championship from the Oak Hill Country Club East Course in Pittsford, N.Y., shown on TNT received the network’s highest rating for the event in 3 years with an average of 1.6 million viewers, up 54% from last year. It had an average of 1.2 U.S. house hold rating, a 50% increase from last year.

Probably as no surprise most of the top regions in terms of viewership are also hot golfing destinations and all rated much higher than the national average. They were markets for all four rounds of coverage on TNT were Las Vegas (2.7), West Palm Beach (2.6), Columbus (2.4), Greenville, S.C. (2.4) and Orlando (2.3).

While the broadcast numbers were strong, the digital numbers were even stronger, showing that there is a large market that wants to experience sporting events but often cannot get away to view them on television.

The PGA.Com umbrella that handles both mobile and broadband streaming delivery was up 69% during the Championship and live streaming hours across platforms are up 85% compared with 2012.

Filed Under: Apps, Contests, Golf, Nielsen Ratings, PGA, TNT, Turner Sports Tagged With: PGA, PGA Championship, TNT, Turner Sports

Updated PGA Tour 14 app greets new season

Pebble takes second step in smartwatch space

CBS Sports App Finally Supports Video, Tablets

Viewers flock to on-air and digital PGA Championship broadcasts

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