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Friday Grab Bag: Intel Launches Major Ultrabook Campaign

April 6, 2012 by


Intel is launching its biggest marketing campaign in over a decade with what it calls a multi-faceted global push for the “New Era of Computing”. The company will be on the television, in the print media and using a variety of social media driven efforts to get and hopefully hold consumer and corporate attention to these ultra-slim notebooks.

This is not surprising first after CEO Paul Otellini’s keynote at CES earlier this year had so much emphasis on the notebooks. Second, and this is something that seems to have to some degree gotten by (at least me) under the radar. There are already 26 models available for purchase worldwide including offerings from Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba and Dell with additional 10 models from Acer, Fujitsu, Gigabyte and Lenovo having been announced.

Next week is the start of corporate earning reports and I will be very interested to hear what Intel executives say about the sales of notebook computers as well as how its effort to establish itself in the tablet space are going.

Recently Apple talked about the death of the PC but really what are you going to use to write the apps for the iPhones and iPads? I kid, I think that the desktop PC may become a dinosaur but notebooks will have a strong demand from a large segment of the corporate and consumer market.


Is Tiger Woods the true #1?
Or at least so says Rory McIlroy, currently the #2 ranked golfer in the rankings. He said that if Woods is on his game he is the best golfer in the world, adding that you cannot judge a player on how they have performed in the last few weeks. If we go by that it really does not look too good for Tiger, but then this is a nice change from the usual trash talk that happens in sports. This weekend could also change his opinion.

iPhone to reach regional carriers later this month?
Apple Insider is reporting that five regional U.S. carriers are going to announce that they will begin selling Apple’s popular iPhone on April 20. The carriers are Alaskan Communications, Appalachian Wireless, GCI, Cellcom and nTelos.

The report also states that the carriers will for $50 less than the so-far subsidized price at other carriers, with phones starting at $150 for the 16GB model, $250 for 32GB, and $350 for 64GB. The older iPhone 4 will be available in an 8GB version for $50.

Samsung and Apple hurting HTC sales?
Smartphone developer HTC has reported a 70% drop in profits while revenue dropped 35% from the same quarter in the previous year. The company has recently expanded its offerings with four additional smartphones, all running the Android operating system.

At the same time Samsung has reported record quarterly profits of $5.15 billion, with very strong results pulled in by both its smartphone business and its Galaxy Note hybrid tablet/smartphone products.

Is Google really losing billions on Android?
A piece at Yahoo.com argues that the company is and that it is because of a number of reasons, however I found it rather unconvincing. With 300 million Android phones out on the market and 15 million tablets the company has a huge installed base and seems poised for huge additional growth.

NBA to sell ads on jerseys?
Over at HoopsHype the bet is that the NBA will very soon have ads on players game jerseys. It makes a persuasive argument about how, among otrher things. MLB is a business and it just does not make sense to leave money on the table.

Baseball has twice, to my knowledge, played a series with ads on its uniforms. Both were in Japan and so not seen by most American fans. It seems inevitable that ads do come to that space and as the article points out, the Dallas Mavericks came out with ads on their uniforms in 2009.

I think it will be interesting to see what types of rules the league, and others when they follow, will set for who is acceptable and who is not. Can Hooters advertise? Alcohol? I am pretty sure tobacco companies need not apply.

Joe Posnanski departs SI
While a bit late on this but for fans of Joe Posnanski, his work at this weekend’s Masters Tournament will be his last for Sports Illustrated as he is leaving to join the growing USA Today/MLB Advanced Media joint venture.

If you are not familiar with him, you should give him a try. I feel that he is one of the best sports writers around, offering solid information backed by facts, all with a good dash of humor. He was at SI for roughly three years and he will be hard to replace.

Filed Under: Amazon, Android, Apple, Apps, Google, HoopsHype, HTC, iPad, iPhone, Major League Baseball, NBA, Samsung, Smartphone, Sports Illustrated, The Big Lead Tagged With: , , , , ,

MLB has App to Wirelessly Order Food at Select Ballparks

April 4, 2012 by

Minute Maid Park

As I was perusing the iTunes store, primarily looking for the Civil War Today app, but being easily diverted I wandered over to look at what MLB has to offer, which seems to be growing every time I head over.

I tend to gloss over established apps, just taking a quick look at what new features that they might include, now often just additional hooks into social media, but also there can be some surprises, which I found at MLB.Com At the Ballpark.

The free app does tout new social media integration, park info such as layout, parking, security and a rewards program but what really caught my eye was access to mobile food and beverage service at select ballparks.

Currently this is only available at is accessible at the following MLB ballparks: Citizens Bank Park (Philadelphia), Minute Maid Park (Houston), Chase Field (Phoenix) and Marlins Ballpark (Miami) but MLB has said that additional ones will be available.

I imagine that the parks the league is currently looking to establish networks in will be the next in line as these will likely have enough capacity to handle the additional traffic. While it may seem like a no-brainer that the network could handle it, heavy use can swap the network, which is why increasingly parks need separate networking equipment, such as the new Marlins ballpark.

The one piece of information that is not included, but which we will check in with MLB is where will this be available in the park? For all fans with iPads and iPhones or just ones in select section?

This is not the first time that a service has been available at a ballpark, but it looks as if MLB is going to take the bulls by the horn and establish a standard method to do so. Last time I was in box seats behind home at AT&T you could order food electronically from a server in the stands and even back at old Candlestick Park the service was available, however there was a fairly steep premium on beer carrying charges, as I recall.

Now I wonder if it will be available at the Anaheim er… Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim’s ballpark., They have just expanded the menu, primarily for fans that are traditionalist in that they need their hot dogs (like me ) at the game, but are willing to try new versions (like me). The Angels now offer a bacon wrapped dog, a hot dog wrapped in a tortilla and then deep fried and a hot dog topped with BBQ beef. For dessert there is now the Arctic Nachos which are cinnamon-sugar nachos topped with vanilla ice cream, then doused in caramel and chocolate sauce. Too much you say? Hah!

Next up larger seats?

Filed Under: 4G LTE, Apple, Apps, Baseball, iPad, iPhone, Los ANgeles Angeles of Anaheim, Major League Baseball, Tablets Tagged With: , , , ,

Verizon Puts DAS Network Into Miami’s New Ballpark

April 4, 2012 by

An example of a Distributed Antenna System (DAS) antenna atop a light pole. Credit: Sidecut Reports.

Verizon Wireless announced it has installed a Distributed Antenna System (DAS) inside the new Marlins Park in Miami, to better serve fans who want to use their Verizon phones and tablets at the games.

Though Verizon also notes that its new 4G LTE wireless network is up and running in the Miami area, big crowds with cellphones can easily swamp the regular cellular network in and around stadiums. One of the steps providers like Verizon and AT&T are now taking is using DAS deployments to install a number of small cellular antennas inside and outside arenas, to provide more connection points.

While today’s press release doesn’t try as hard as previous ones, it is still interesting that Verizon tries to make good news about the fact that their previous network installation simply can’t handle the new demands of the always-connected fan. Still, any capacity increases are good news for the fans who have in the past been frustrated by the lack of connectivity at the ballpark.

Here’s a look at the new ballpark, with its fish tanks and retractable roof.

Filed Under: 4G LTE, AT&T, Baseball, iPad, iPhone, Major League Baseball, Wi-Fi Tagged With: , , , , ,

Look to Mobile Apps to Stay Competitive in Fantasy Baseball

April 3, 2012 by

With the second start to this year’s MLB season, and I am still not sure what the league gained by starting last week in Japan followed by a long layoff, all fantasy teams should be in place for the long haul to October greatness.

However the fact that the draft is completed means that only the first step is finished, and then comes the monitoring of teams and players, keeping a hawk eye not only on the waiver wire and the injury report, but also how your own roster is performing so that gaps and shortcomings in a lineup can be repaired quickly and efficiently.

I still know one or two people that primarily use one source for all of their information, but with the growing number of sites that are available it makes sense to have multiple sources for data, and to have an app or two loaded in your smartphone or tablet so that you can react instantly.

Most of these are available on both Android and Apple’s iOS. One or two are available on a BlackBerry and I did not find any that specified Windows Phone, although I imagine that will change in a year.

These are in no particular order and with that we will start with Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball ’12. Many fans are familiar with this free app and a few new features have been added including Facebook and Google logins as well as features such as real time score updates and player stats.

Another I am sure most are very familiar with is ESPN’s free Fantasy Baseball app, although when you say free there is a pay option of sorts. The basic app gives you team management, the ability to accept or reject trades from other managers and a host of news, tweets and video from ESPN’s Fantasy Baseball analysts.

If you are an ESPN Insider, or want to join for the extra features you also get push notifications when players are benched or are send to the DL. It also has exclusive video and news from the ESPN team. For those looking towards next year it is good to remember that it also has Spring Training notes so get the app early. A user must have an ESPN Fantasy Baseball team.

Fox Sports is not about to be left out in the cold on this and has a new version of Fox Fantasy Baseball. It allows you to join an established Fox league or form a private one with customizable rules and offers a variety of scoring systems including rotisserie and head-to-head.

The app allows a great deal of league customization with leagues ranging from four to 20 teams and a variety of draft, trading, and score keeping options available.

CBSSports.Com has its Fantasy Baseball app that has three different main settings. For the casual fan or those new to a fantasy league there is a setting for you, and you can organize a league or enter into an established one.

At the second level, called Premium Games, a player can win up to $3,500. This has four levels of participation, in part determined by the fan’s experience and the entry fee that they wish to pay, with fee’s for a first team ranging from $29.99 for the $150 prize to $499.99 for the $3,500 prize. Cash prizes awarded to the winner of each ten team league.

For the experienced that want a customized experience there is the Commissioner- where you can set customized rules for the league, rosters draft format and a variety of other features. CBSSports offers a range of apps that will work with the league.

We have already covered Bloomberg Sports Front Office 2012 here so all I will say is that it is a very full featured app that covers a wide range of areas that fans would want or need information about players or teams.

For those that are late or waiting until the first week of the season to hold their draft there is GlassWareMobile’s Fantasy Baseball Draft Wizard for Android. While not specifically for stat heads it helps to understand simple terms such as VORP. It provides three years of stats for players and gives dynamic adjustments to players’ value in real time.

Roto Sports RotoWire Fantasy Draft Kit 2012 is another place to go for the draft information that you need. You enter your league parameters and it will generate a draft either based on player rankings or dollar vaue. It contains 2012 projectsions for over 1,000 players and continuously updates them

Interested in tracking minor league players in case you are in a league that allows September call-ups to count? Try MiLB.Com Triple-A 2012. No video on the $4.99 app but it has pitch by pitch tracking for the International and Pacific Coast League teams as well as standings schedules and other information.

For those that do not bother tracking minor league players you do not know what you are missing. I love how some guy in a windswept PCL team will come to the majors with gaudy numbers that just do not translate well the MLB parks and pitching. This is a way to stay ahead, especially if your league requires a rookie each year.

There is just about something for everybody here, aside from operating system limitations. Most but not all are free, a positive price in my mind, and deliver and increasing array of information to fans. I would be interested to hear any pros or cons on these apps from any users out there.

Filed Under: Android, Apple, Apps, Baseball, Bloomberg Sports, CBS Sports, ESPN, Fantasy Baseball, Fox Sports, Google, iPhone, Live Sports Video Consumption, Major League Baseball, RotoWire, Smartphone, Tablets Tagged With: ,

MSR Tech Watch: The Masters is a ‘Major’ IT Challenge for IBM

April 3, 2012 by

Everything about the Masters, from Magnolia Lane to the blooming azaleas to the old-timey scoreboards, oozes tradition. But to make sure that you can see all that old-timey stuff on your iPad, it takes a lot of new technology and online-infrastructure smarts. That’s where IBM comes in, as the white-bibbed caddie who makes the Masters come alive online.

“The Masters is all about being more than a tournament, it’s about being a service to the game of golf,” said John Kent, sponsorship marketing technology manager for IBM, which provides much of the technical underpinnings for the Masters.com site and all the tournament’s scoring tabulations. “The challenge is to preserve all the history and tradition, and balance it with technology.”

Take those scoreboards — the iconic white signs that provide drama all their own, when names and scores are manually shifted in a pleasing delay after roars are heard from distant parts of the course. Though technology exists to create LED leaderboards that could update in real time, Kent said the tradition of the manual white boards isn’t going away from Augusta.

“There’s a lot of drama at the course with the manual scoreboards — you can be sitting at 18 and hear a roar somewhere else, and then you watch the scoreboard and wait for that tile to disappear,” Kent said. “The funny thing is, those are the most highly automated manual leaderboards out there, with wireless connections to the crew in back.”

Real-time video another Masters innovation

Since most golf fans aren’t lucky enough to have a Masters badge, the next best thing to being there is live video — and IBM helps the tournament provide a plethora of streaming images at the Masters.com website. During last year’s tournament Kent said the site served up 3 million video streams on Saturday and another 4 million on Sunday, an amazing online total when you consider that many golf fans are glued to the regular broadcast and its almost commercial-free serenity.

According to Kent, the explosion of handheld devices that can serve up video images is partly responsible for the growth in online viewing of the Masters — the Saturday and Sunday online video totals mentioned above were 40 and 80 percent higher respectively than the stats from the same days the year before, and he expects more growth in mobile viewing this year. “We’re seeing a trend of people using the Masters.com site at work on Thursday and Friday, and then using mobile devices on the weekend,” Kent said. “They’re just taking advantage of the best experience available.”

And to make sure that experience is Masters quality, the IBM tech team does its own “range work” in the offseason. This year that meant testing numerous Android-powered devices so that the release this year of the first Android Masters app would be green-jacket good.

“The complexity this year was in the number of devices we had to test,” Kent said. Apple’s iOS, he said, is easier to support since there are a finite amount of things to look at. But with Android devices, Kent said, there is a wide range of differences, not just in hardware form factors but in the different ways the manufacturers implement the Google OS.

At the golf course, IBM does bring in a truckload of servers to help gather, encode and send out to the Internet the video streams for the seven different channels on the Masters.com site. But you might never see any of this infrastructure on camera — just another part of how the tournament and the Augusta National club combine new technology with tradition.

One advantage the Masters has over other major tournaments is that it is played on the same course every year. To support quality images — Kent noted that the Masters was the first golf tournament to be broadcast in color, and the first to use HD — Augusta National has buried miles of fiber beneath its azaleas, to bring signals from cameras without cables lying around.

“The Masters uses plenty of technology, but you’ll never see it,” said Kent.

IBM customers benefit from Masters tests

While there are few businesses that have the kind of explosive one-weekend stress test traffic that the Masters does — Kent said the Masters.com site attracted 10 million unique users last year, who totaled 197 million page views — IBM does learn a lot about how to dynamically allocate resources during the event, which ultimately serves corporate customers better.

“We have a single cloud infrastructure that supports it all, the scores, and the live video,” Kent said about the Masters.com back end. “And our [corporate] clients struggle with the same things — how to build the right cloud and how to dynamically allocate resources as efficiently as possible.”

Filed Under: Android, Apple, Apps, CBS Sports, Golf, iPad, iPhone, Live sports via mobile, Live Sports Video Consumption, PGA, The Masters, Tiger Woods Tagged With: , ,

Sunday Sermon: CBSSports.com Does Digital Right

April 1, 2012 by

If I told you that CBSSports.com has broadcast 15,000 live events across its digital and broadcast properties since September, you might think it was just another April Fool’s joke. But this very serious factoid, divulged in an interview with CBS last week, is just another hint that the “Big Eye” network is getting things right when it comes to bringing sports fans more of what they want, no matter how it gets there.

“People don’t realize how many live events we do,” said Jason Kint, senior vice president and GM of CBSSports.com, in a phone interview last week. This time of year, as usual, is CBS’s time to shine with its back-to-back big events, the men’s NCAA hoops tournament followed by golf’s crown jewel, the Masters. And while the events are huge regular-broadcast ratings earners, they are also prime examples of how to do digital sports coverage right, from depth of content offered to technology-based innovation.

Getting the Rights Right is Step No. 1

It wasn’t too long ago that trying to watch as much of the NCAA tournament as you could was an exercise in futility. CBS kept the broadcast rights close to its vest and only showed select games to select regions of the country. Remember the old “look-in” snippets of exotic games? Or trying to find sports bars who could get satellite feeds of the distant regionals?

Several years ago, all that changed when online video emerged as a stable platform, and CBSSports.com embraced it for the NCAAs in a bigger way than any other major event had. All of a sudden, seeing every game you wanted to live online was possible. And even though the fees and locations are still a work in progress — one year the cost was $10, last year it was free, and this year there was a $3.99 charge for mobile device app viewing — the bottom line was that every game was out there for fans to see, on multiple platforms.

At the Masters there is also a little bit of overlapping coverage — you can see all the CBS coverage directly at Masters.com or via a Masters-issued mobile device app, or you can go directly to CBSSports.com, either via a wired connection or through a mobile-device browser. The big point is, there’s no digital shutout to cause consternation, like the regional blackouts that frustrate baseball and football fans.

“A lot of [digital coverage] is slowed down by the way the [broadcast] rights are constructed,” Kint said. “With the NCAAs we started out with rights across multiple platforms so we were able to move forward in unique ways, thinking about what the fans wanted.”

Innovation pushes the fan envelope

The Masters was another early digital sports standout, breaking away from any other online event coverage, golf or otherwise, with an enormous amount of additional content. Who knew that fans would keep their computers glued to coverage of “Amen Corner” for hours at a time? But that is what has happened, and the online viewership for the event only keeps growing, Kint said.

“You have to give credit to Augusta National for being forward thinking, yet doing things in a way that keeps it exclusive and special,” Kint said. Part of what makes the Masters a compelling online attraction is the fact that half the competition takes place on Thursday and Friday, when many U.S. fans are still at work. The second part is that the Masters has a unique history, being the only major contested at the same course year in and out, so that places like Amen Corner or other holes like 13, 15 and 16 become fan favorites all their own.

Plus, for many golfers the lyricism that is Augusta is a welcome harbinger of spring and summer, the seasonal reminder that grass is growing and it’s good to be outside.

“Masters online viewing has long hang time — we see a lot of average viewer times of more than an hour,” Kint said. “It’s almost therapeutic, to just leave it on in the background.”

This year, the CBSSports.com/Masters online coverage will add new treats, including coverage of the Wednesday par 3 contest (which will also be covered via regular broadcast outlets, like ESPN and on CBSSports.com’s cable channel) and a new “On the Range” talk-show segment beginning Monday of Masters week.

And though we probably aren’t to the point yet where fans’ tweets will be shown on Masters scoreboards, you can bet that CBSSports.com will continue to find ways to stay at the forefront of the social media conversation. We really liked its after-the-game chats during the college football season, and you can bet the signing of former ESPN personality and Twitter champ Jim Rome to a show on CBSSportsNet (which starts Tuesday night) will help CBSSports.com push the fan-interaction envelope going forward, and keep its digital-sports winning streak intact.

Filed Under: Apps, CBS Sports, ESPN, Golf, iPad, iPhone, Live sports via mobile, NCAA Hoops, PGA, SEC, The Masters, Turner Sports Tagged With: , , ,
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