Vergence Labs latest with Connected Glasses

It seems that after Google made a short blog post about its Project Glass it has lit a match under the market and both new startups and established players are rushing to let you know about how well their individual efforts are going in this space as well.

The latest to appear on the radar is a company called Vergence Labs, and it is taking an increasingly familiar route to funding by appealing to individuals at a crowd funding site, and this one is using Kickstarter.

The funding here is seeking to raise $50,000 and the drop dead date is June 7th, so as of this writing it has 15 days to go. It also has already raised almost half of what is seeking as it now has $22,008 pledged.

I like the pitch which in part claims “become part of the future human-computer revolution!” I thought that I did that when I bought my first PC, an Apple II with not one but two floppy drives. The computer enabled eye wear will have the ability to record HD images and video from a first person point of view at the touch of a button. In addition they are being touted as the world’s first electric sunglasses with chromatic shifting conductive glass by which it means they darken when in sunlight.

The company sees the glasses as a social media tool and is establishing a web sharing site called YouGen.TV from which users can share experiences and export to Twitter, Google + and Facebook. I can see sports fans doing this and I wonder how the leagues will take to it.

MLB has been particularly tough about posting images from its games onto YouTube and I cannot believe that it is going to relent simply because computer powered glasses have made it easier to record the event.

Vergence also has pretty ambitious plans in the future hopes to make glasses that can perform a variety of tasks including sending information directly to a users eyes, and possibly develop interfaces for robotic devices that can be controlled with a gesture.

As with many of the Kickstarter offerings I love the creativity that developers are bringing to the market. Of course it is cracking the market that is the challenge. It is much harder, in my opinion, for hardware developers to do so that software. It is a snap to download a dozen apps in a few minutes, but most people I know, myself included, are concerned with how they look in glasses, just to take the lowest possible issue.

Then there is the competition. Google was very vague about its Google’s Project Glass remarks so it is hard to judge what it plans to do, and others have come out with, or at least talked about, connected glasses and goggles including Recon Instruments and Oakley. Still it looks like there is some momentum in this space and someone is going to break through and establish ‘glasses’ as a new computing device category.

Start Your Browser Windows: Indy 500 Events Already Ramping Up

Memorial Day holiday is just over a week away and that of course means a lot of things to people, honoring the nation’s men and women who died while serving, parades, BBQs and of course the roar of the crowd at the Indianapolis 500.

While there will be more to report next week this is a look at some of the events that will be upcoming next week, and a mention of a few events that already occurred because you can start enjoying the racing now. This race and the Coca Cola 600 will make for a great day of racing next week.

More than 400,000 fans head over to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway to watch the race that has been called ‘The Greatest Spectacle in Racing’, yet that is just the end of an eventful week that will start this Saturday or to be more accurate two weeks since the official Opening Day was last Saturday with the Celebration of Automobiles.

While all this week there have been practice rounds available to the public, and the qualification draw is Friday night the event gets to the real beef starting Saturday when qualification begins. It should be noted that it is also Armed Forces Bump Day and there will be an enlistment ceremony in the morning.

There will be qualifying most of the week, not just for the Indy 500 but also for the Firestone Freedom 100 that starts on Thursday. There will be a range of events all week if you are lucky enough to be in town including vintage car races, autograph sessions, pit stop contests and a live concert by Lynyrd Skynyrd on Friday prior to the Freedom 100.

Sunday May 27th is the day that everybody waits for with events starting at 8:30 am and the race beginning at noon for the 96th running of the Indianapolis 500. However you can start to get your speed fix in now if you wish. The race has a page called Live Timing & Scoring that features live practice and pre-race video so if your sound is off your boss might never know. It also shows the current rank of all of the drivers, lap speeds and engine type.

Twitter
Get the latest updates by tweeting @IMS. Or try #indy500 #brickyard and #IndyGP.

Facebook
Here’s the Indy 500 Facebook page.

Mobile Data Consumption Set to Explode- Will Sports Cash in?

A recent report is highlighting the massive growth that is expected in mobile data consumption as users of smartphones increasingly use their devices for watching video, playing games, interacting with a variety of social media and other uses.

According a report from Informa Telecoms & Media, by the year 2016 mobile users will consume eight times more social media than currently, downloading 14 times as many megabytes of applications and browsing will increase six fold.

The two driving factors will be the increased use of smartphones, which currently are roughly half the handsets sold and the increase in overall mobile users. Not listed in the report but most likely also a driving factor is faster networks.

This presents a major opportunity not only for sports teams and leagues but also for the growing ecosystem of app developers involved in this space, from office league sponsored developments such as MLB At Bat 12 to sports aggregation news readers such as Recapp. With smartphones increasing in storage capacity app developers can also make larger, fuller featured products to grab users attention.

Currently mobile users can get access to a growing number of live sporting events including a wide range of college football, Major League Baseball, National Football League, National Hockey League and Soccer matches are all available, however they are often limited to a single carrier of you need to subscribe to the correct cable network.

If sports continue this path it seems that they will be missing out on a larger opportunity. It is nice that Verizon has hockey, but I don’t have Verizon. If I want NFL and hockey do I need two phones? To really cash in the leagues will need to come up with something other than exclusive deals with a single carrier, otherwise they are intentionally missing a huge segment of the market.

Follow NBA Playoffs Live Online With TNT’s ‘Overtime’

Since I’ve been mostly following hockey and golf these days the NBA playoffs have been a real back-burner thing for me, especially after Derrick Rose went down with a bum knee. But today I discovered the NBA and TNT’s “Overtime” live online broadcasts and whoa, this is online done right.

For once, the promise of multiple cameras is delivered how you might want it — a specific cam on each team, one for general play, and then a “mosaic” view that splits the screen into four separate but continuous live camera views, perfect for those of you with attention disorder deficit problems.

There’s even a popup integrated chat window (which looks pretty tame right now) and an “ask the expert” feature that is a pure sponsor play. But overall I like the camera angle choices, the easy/no login required setup and the streaming performance. Sports Geekery has a good breakdown on all the components. Screen grab of the mosaic view below.

Will the Facebook App Center be a Boon to Sports App Developers?

The list of places that you can go and search for the app that scratches your most current itch has just gotten one stop longer as Facebook has formally launched its latest service that it is calling the App Center.

What makes the site look like it might have real legs is that it is not just focused on one operating system or platform, but rather seeks to be a one stop shop for the Mobile Web, Android and iOS users, and the company said that it believes that it can be the destination site for mobile application users.
A user can view apps, select the one that they want and then download it vie either from the App Store or from Google Play. There is one caveat, the apps have to be designed to be used on Facebook and all apps need to have a Facebook login.

While one of the problems that I have found in recent times perusing app stores is that there are just so many I spend a good deal of time either honing down my search or just reading the specifications of a specific app.

Facebook is seeking to help with this issue by prominently displaying apps that garner solid reviews and ratings from users while dropping ones that continually get poor numbers. In addition it has established developer quality guidelines and apps that do not follow them will also not be displayed.

I wonder if and how sports apps will take advantage of this. Drop by a team’s official web page and you can see how popular it is and how often it gets ‘likes’ I chose the San Francisco Giants and the page has 1.4 million likes. Boy does that give a developer of an app about the team a focused market.

Of course MLB might have something to say about apps being liked on the page, a quick look shows that the huge majority of links on the site are to official MLB sites, but not all of them. This is the same with all major sports but could actually be a better tool for developers looking at niche markets.

Rather than hope a fan of say rugby is going to search iTunes for rugby apps, they could have the app mentioned on a team page with a link to the Facebook App pages. Since this effort is just getting off the ground and the paid app portion is still in beat it will take a while to see if this shakes out well for the app developers in sports and out.

Rugby’s HSBC Sevens World Series Ends this Weekend

If you are a fan of rugby, and are looking for something to watch this weekend, then you owe it to yourself by tuning into the HSBC Sevens World Series 2011/2012 with the final matches being held in London, England this weekend.

The length of this series makes the NBA and NHL playoffs appear to be short by comparison. Counting this weekend’s games there will have been nine rounds that started last year with the first matches being played November 25-26th. So far New Zealand is in the lead with three series wins and a total of 150 points followed by Fiji at 139 and then England at 123. The United States is tied with Kenya at 11.

I would have watched more of the games but aside from catching a rerun on this week I had no idea that this event was even taking place. I did notice that it does have roughly 88, 000 likes on Facebook but really that is a drop in the bucket compared to other sports. Apparently the second day will be broadcast live in the United States on NBC.

While I do not quite understand all of the rules, even though they have been explained to me more than once, I have to say that I have always enjoyed watching the sport. A while back I was in France when its national team beat New Zealand in the Rugby World Cup and the town I was in celebrated all night. The person in the bar I was in chatted with me all night, apparently failing to notice that I had no idea what he was saying.

I do not want to call this a bad example of marketing yourself because it could be that I just have not been on the right sites or watched the correct program to see when the matches were being held. Still it seems to me that on a sport such as this, which has a large international following but a small, yet avid US following, a bit of marketing might be in order.

Part of the issue could also be just the way that I find out what is on the television at night. I often just look in the local paper, although I am breaking that habit. The problem is that the local paper does not always list all of the games that will be on- mine often misses Cubs baseball on WGN, football on the NFL Network and baseball on MLB’s network.

Hopefully events like this, and non US mainstream sports such as cycling and sailing will get more media savvy and learn how to get their message, and news about their events, out to the viewing public.