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Neva-The Talking Ski Poles may be coming to Your Slopes

May 17, 2012 by

There is another interesting item over at Kickstarter that is seeking funding and I think one of the things that the project highlights is how increasingly easy it is becoming to network everything, even items that you might not have considered such as ski poles.

A company out of Salt Lake City called SlopeScience is touting Neva, which it calls the evolution of the ski pole by adding wireless communications capabilities to so that it can talk with your smartphone and relate information to you while you are skiing, and just as important, so you do not have to remove your gloves.
Seeking to raise $100,000 it has so far gathered 80 backers and raised $12,218 towards its goal. In case you have forgotten if you do not reach your goal you get nothing and the funding round ends June 6.

The poles will feature the ability to display when a call is coming in and a simply swipe can ignore or answer the call, Text messages can also be displayed. It leverages SlopeScience’s capabilities and can show your slope angle and aspect when used with a Google Earth plug-in. The company hopes that future versions will have text to speech capabilities as well.

The basic device includes a low powered Bluetooth adapter for communications with the smartphone, and is capable of talking with both Android and iPhones. There is a 0.96” OLED display that is capable of being read in bright sunlight. The rechargeable battery is good for three days on a single charge.

I have a semi humorous vision of the completely connected athlete of the future. Say that they are a skier. Smartphone securely packed away in a pocket with no need to get it out. They have goggles that provide a clear image of the terrain and can connect to the phone and listen to music.

Then they have on their Pebble watch so that they can connect to the phone, view the menu at the snack bar and see what their friends are texting from the beginning slops. I do believe that with all of the emerging options it will be interesting to see which technologies and products pan out and which ones do not. There is no doubt in my mind that used properly some of these products will certainly enhance the outdoor experience.

Filed Under: Apps, Kickstarter, Outdoor Activities, Recon Instruments, Skiing, Smartphone, Startup

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

May 16, 2012 by

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.

Filed Under: 4G LTE, Apps, Informa Telecoms & Media, Live sports via mobile, Live Sports Video Consumption, Major League Baseball, Market Research, NCAA Football, NFL, NHL, Smartphone, Social Media, Social Media Data, Sports Social Media, Sports Social Media Data Tagged With: ,

Mobile Sports Report TechWatch: HP is Back with New Tablets

May 14, 2012 by

Study finds that 74% of smartphone owners use location services
A report from the Princeton Survey Research Associates shows that 74% of smartphone owners use their device to get real time location-based information. The study also found that 18% used a geosocial service to check-in to locations.

With roughly half of all Americans using a smartphone this is very good news for companies that take advantage of the variety of services that provide information about local businesses such as Yelp.

Hewlett-Packard vows return to tablet market this year
PC World is reporting the Hewlett-Packard executives are touting the company’s imminent return to the tablet space, something that they said will occur later this year. It plans to so with models that will support the Windows 8 operating system from Microsoft.

It is expected that HP, along with other Windows 8 tablet developers will focus as much on the business market as the consumer space .The company famously left and then reentered the hardware market and the tablet space over the last year, highlighted by the failure of its TouchPad tablet with HP’s own operating system.

I suspect that we will start seeing a great deal more –preannounced intentions to use Windows 8 as the launch date gets closer and it could make for an interesting dog fight in the tablet space. Will Windows 8 be accepted, will it erode Android and Apple’s iOS appear? Or maybe just make inroads in one of the two rivals space? It is too early to tell but it will make for an interesting end of the year.


Do people share too much info on-line? Intel study says yes.
A recent study conducted by Ipsos Observer and sponsored by Intel on the dual topics of “Mobile Etiquette” and “Digital Sharing,” reaffirmed what I believe many feel intuitively, that 90% of Americans adults believe that online users are sharing too much information.

This is the third such survey conducted by Intel and had some interesting results including a total of 85% said that they share information online while one-third surveyed said they are more comfortable sharing information online than in person and half said that without mobile information they would not know what was happening with friends and family.

Slow Internet Connection top issue for mobile users
In a mobile survey conducted by Prosper Mobile Insights focused on smartphone and tablet users the top issue that is a cause for concern is slow Internet connections with 36.9% listing it as the top service provider issue. Others that rated highly in the complaint list were cost of data plan at 32% (that low?) and dropped calls at 24.1%. Head over and see where your pet peeves were ranked.

Facebook’s Instagram purchase could be delayed
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has started a competition probe into Facebook’s $1bn purchase of Instagram, a move that could push the deal beyond the second quarter and so cause some heartburn at Facebook. The probe was expected as it is usual for deals of this size; the issue is that t could take as long as 12 months and Facebook has been telling people at its IPO road show that it would close in the second quarter.

Microsoft gets delay in German court
Microsoft, already on the end of a major losing patent battle with Motorola Mobility had its current case delayed by a German court. This trial has to do with a different patent that Motorola claims that Microsoft has infringed on, in this case one that deals with two way communications devices.

Facebook updates data use rules
Facebook has update its data use policies about what it gathers from users of its popular social site and how it uses that information. The move was motivated by an audit performed last year by Irish data protection authorities, Facebook said.

New charge in Oracle vs Google
Oracle has managed to get back on the winning track last week in its copyright and patent infringement case against Google over use of the Java technology. Oracle’s request for a judgment as a matter of law regarding an additional eight files copies directly into Android’s code base was granted, giving Oracle an additional copyright infringement win against Google. However as with its first win it still needs the matter of ‘fair use’ to be resolved.

Le Pan now Matsunichi-New Tablets due
Matsunichi has eliminated the Le Pan named that it was using earlier this year and has self labeled its tablet offerings as it enters into the cost effective tablet market. The company now has the MarquisPad MP977, a 9.7-inch table that is powered by a dual core 1.2GHz processor from Texas Instruments.
The $249 device features a 1024 x 768 display and will use the Android 4.0 operating system. There is 4GB of storage if you include the microSD card, or 2GB internal without the card. It has a front facing VGA camera.

The company has an additional tablet in the works, the MarquisPad MP979 that will have a more powerful dual core 1.5GHz processor with 8GB of storage as well as an additional 2GB MicroSD card, and it supports up to 32GB. The 9.7-inch device will also have 1024 x 768 resolution.

Filed Under: Android, Apple, Apps, Facebook, FTC, Google, iPad, iPhone, Lawsuit, Mashable, Microsoft, Motorola, Oracle, Smartphone, Tablets Tagged With: , , , ,

Friday Grab Bag: Are Replacement Refs in the NFL’s Future?

May 11, 2012 by

Mashable does a nice job showing how fast eight technologies have penetrated the US market since the telephone was patented in 1876. The speed upon which each succeeding generation of technology grows is interesting as many of them piggybacked on older technology. I mean you cannot have these technologies until electricity reached all of the country.

I was interested to see how relatively slowly the Internet caught on compared to mobile phones, but I guess that is partly due to a number of issues from slow connections early on, lack of a substantial amount of meaningful content ( I mean at one time one of the most popular site on the internet was watching a coffee pot) and emerging rival modem standards that helped confuse non-technical users.

From the charts it looks as if it is possible that the two emerging fields, tablets and smartphones are headed to being the fasted technologies adopted to date. Smartphones make sense since they are an extension of an already known commodity but tablets are a relatively fresh start. The data covers the past five years and the numbers from the next five look to be very interesting.

NFL still not produced evidence on Saints bounty program, NFLPA claim
The NFL Players Association continues to claim that it has not been given “specific, detailed evidence of player involvement in a pay-to-injure program.” Domonique Foxworth, president of the NFLPA has an opinion piece in USA Today in which he stated that punishment demands evidence and the league is not willing to produce it.

He claims rather than produce the evidence the league has used media leaks, pr campaigns and character assignation to manipulate public opinion.

Apple wins one
Apple, on a recent losing streak in the legal department won a case this week when a judge threw out the Proview Electronics Co.’s trademark lawsuit against Apple. The case, which has bogged down Apple in China, has ruled that Proview cannot sue Apple in California.

The case revolves around Apple’s purchase of the iPad trademark from Proview and then Proview claiming it did not sell the rights to the iPad name in China. The two are reportedly looking at a cash settlement but are far apart on the terms.

St. Louis Blues sold
The NHL Board of Governors has approved the sale of the St/ Louis Blues hockey team to Tom Stillman, a beer distributor, for an estimated price of $130 million. Stillman has been a minority owner of the team since 2007, Yahoo! reports.

The team has been for sale for the last two years, ever since the current ownership group, led by Dave Checketts and his Sports Capital Partners Worldwide, started to look around. It had originally been looking for investors to buy out Towerbrook Captal Partners which held 70% of the team but could not find investors.

Google wins a bit more in trial versus Oracle
After a jury ruled that Google did infringe on Oracle’s API copyrights but could not reach a decision on if that action was protected by the ‘fair use’ doctrine that allows copyrighted material to be used Oracle asked the judge to throw out Google’s ‘fair use’ defense.

The judge declined saying he did not think that it would be correct for him to rule in favor of Oracle. Experts now expect at least a partial retrial of the first portion of the case.

Who do Crowdfunders Invest in?
We have started talking a lot about crowdfunding, but mostly in relation to just a very few efforts, and yet that industry is starting to emerge as a huge source of funding for startups, enabling a wide variety of developers to get seed money and more to launch products.

Well if you were interested in a breakdown by category of where the money is going at Kickstarter wonder no more because there is now a great graphical breakdown of the effort. A few interesting facts-50,000 projects have sought funding since it opened its doors in 2009 and film and video is the top pledge earner, with $60 million pledged to date. There is a host of interesting information so head on over and take a look.

Replacement officials in the wins for NFL season?
Fox Sports is reporting that the NFL has started to look at replacement officials for the upcoming season in case it cannot reach a new agreement with the NFL Referees Association- currently the talks are at an impasse.

The league is asking its officiate scouting department to help identify potential replacements with an eye out for recently retired college officials as well as current officials at a variety of levels of the sport including semiprofessional leagues. The NFL used replacement officials in 2001 at the start of the season.

Smart Shoes the next trend in computing?
Computer scientists from e Telekom Innovation Laboratories, the University of Munich, and the University of Toronto have taken a step forward on a research paper on the next generation of wearable computing with the publication of a joint paper entitled “ShoeSense.”

The gist of the paper apparently calls for the development of sensors that would be placed in shoes that have the ability to understand customizable hand and arm gestures that are then relayed as commands to a smartphone. Users would be able to then send messages without appearing to while in meetings, at dinner and other places that it is not always appropriate to do so on the handset.

Nielsen looks at smartphone owners in US
A recent report from Nielsen shows that smartphone ownership continues to rise in the US and is now the preferred handset of more than 50% of Americans, actually 50.4%, up from 47.8% in December 2011.

Android is the dominate operating system with a 48.5% market share then followed by Apple’s iOS with 32%. Research in Motion’s Blackberry platform has 11.6% followed by Windows Mobile, Windows Phone and then others.

Filed Under: ABC, Android, Apple, Fox Sports, Google, Kickstarter, Lawsuit, Mashable, NFL, NHL, Nielsen Ratings, Oracle, Smartphone, Yahoo Tagged With: , , , , ,

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

May 10, 2012 by

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.

Filed Under: Android, Apple, Apps, Facebook, Live sports via mobile, Live Sports Video Consumption, Rugby, Smartphone, Sports Social Media, Sports Social Media Data Tagged With: , , ,

Lenovo to Enhance Focus on Tablets & Smartphones

May 7, 2012 by

Lenovo to Leap into Tablet Space Next Year

The Lenovo Group has started building a new facility as part of an overall plan to expand its offerings into the mobile Internet market and will be investing approximately $800 million over the next five years as it seeks to become a player in that market segment.

The goal of the project is two sided. It wants to optimize its supply chain but it also wants to enter what it calls the PC Plus space, that of the mobile internet with tablets, smartphones and other mobile appliances

This appears to be a reboot of its presence in these spaces as it already has both smartphone and tablet offerings available globally. I suspect it is taking a page from Dell’s playbook in going back to the drawing board to come up with a fresh offering that can stand alone on its own merits.

The new Lenovo Industrial Base will be used primarily as a research and development site for developing its tablets and smartphones with the intention of creating the first generation products for the huge Chinese market as well as the global space.

The company has aggressive sales expectations and foresees revenue of approximately $1.5 billion by 2014 with a 5 x increase in the following five years. I wonder if it has selected an operating system for its tablets and smartphones yet. I suspect that both Microsoft and Google are hat in hand touting the pros of their respective platforms and the cons of their rivals.

Filed Under: Amazon, Android, Apple, Apps, Google, Lenovo, Microsoft, Smartphone, Tablets Tagged With: , ,
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