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University of Oregon embraces Social Media with Quack Cave

August 30, 2012 by

Oregon's Quack Cave

The PAC-12 Network’s introduction yesterday of its Pac-12 Now for iPad is just the latest conference effort to expand its brand to a wider market but some of the individual schools are also making a push to create a stronger bond with their fans and alumni.

One school at the forefront of this effort is the University of Oregon which has been aggressive in the past with programs such as its GoDucks.com web site and other initiatives but now has gone another step with its Quack Cave.

Touted as the first social media hub in college sports and modeled after an effort by the NHL’s New Jersey Devils the school has outfitted a room that would be the envy of any technophile, filled with flat screens connected to iPads.

While the site is not just sports specific it looks like it will be sports centric. The Quack Cave will be charged with representing the school on a wide variety of social medias including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube.

The schools previous efforts at digital outreach have been very successful, with approximately 500,000 Facebook and Twitter followers, but the current effort could make that number seem small potatoes. Housed in a former storage unit near the school’s Autzen Stadium

The school is still in the process of setting up the effort and the site www.QuackCave.com was not active as of this writing but I expect that a big push is underway in order to get it up and running by this weekend when the football season opens for much of the nation. Fans can also follow at @QuackCave on Twitter.

I think this is a great idea, not just for Oregon, but any school. It seems that it will have a much more immediate and personal impact than the conference efforts, which will have to be more balanced (hopefully). If your school is doing something similar drop me a line at gquick@mobilesportsreport.com

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Filed Under: Apple, Facebook, iPad, Live sports via mobile, Live Sports Video Consumption, NCAA Football, Pac-12, Pinterest, Sports Social Media, Sports Social Media Data, Twitter, University of Oregon Tagged With: , , ,

Mobile Sports Report TechWatch: Olympics a Big Win for NBC

August 13, 2012 by

The Pew Research Center has done a study on the Summer Olympics in London and U.S. viewership and the numbers are truly amazing, and must make the bean counters at NBC very happy indeed since it invested $1.12 billion for the broadcast rights.

According to the report 78% of Americans were watching the game either on broadcast television, online or on social media. TV is head and shoulders above any other option as the most popular viewing medium with 73% watching the big screen.

The approval ratings are very high as well, with 76% giving the broadcasts either an excellent (29%) or good rating (47%) with 13% said it was fair and 5% said it was poor. Looks like the “vocal minority” (as NBC execs called them) criticizing the games and the broadcast schedules on Twitter didn't keep their friends from watching.

Google gets $22.5 million fine over privacy breakdown
The Federal Trade Commission has come down hard on Internet search giant Google, hitting the company with a $22.5 million fine, the largest ever from the FTC, for its manipulation of Apple’s Safari browser.

Google has developed a method for tracking people Safari users and gather data on their activities, even though the company had promised not to do anything along this line. The move violated Google’s settlement with the FTC on a different issue, it concluded.

I wonder how this will impact Google’s current testing of using information garnered from users’ gmails to help come up with search results. I know that if this becomes a mainstream feature I am off gmail.

Nokia sheds app unit- puts more eggs in Microsoft’s basket
Nokia is parting way with its QT app tools unit, agreeing to sell the unit to Digia Oyj, Bloomberg reported. Nokia purchased the tool company back in 2008 when it needed its expertise to help create apps for two operating systems that Nokia owned at that time — MeeGo and Symbian.

It has since curtailed those operating system efforts and has been focusing on delivering phones that run on Microsoft’s operating systems. With that in mind it can now leverage the ecosystem that Microsoft is growing in terms of app development without a self funded effort.

Android and iOS dominate smartphone OS
The latest report from market research firm International Data Corp. s

hows that between Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS operating system the two own 85% of the smartphone OS market. I don’t think that this comes as much of a surprise to anyone, but it is great to see hard numbers on the issue.

Overall in the second quarter of 2012 IDC found that Android phones had 104.8 million units shipped good for a 68.1% market share while Apple’s iOS had 26 million iOS products shipped, good for a 16.9% share. Samsung appears to be the big winner, accounting for 44% of all Android phones in the second quarter of this year. BlackBerry came in third at 7.4 million units and a 4.8% market share.

Facebook settles privacy issue with FTC
The Federal Trade Commission has reached a final settlement with Facebook over what users’ personal data Facebook can expose. The company will now need an explicit ‘opt in’ from the user before it can change the types of information that it will make public. Facebook will also face an audit every other year for the next 20 years to ensure compliance.

Apple vs. Samsung Week 2
Nothing earth shattering has come out of this lingering case. It looks like an iPhone, it does not look like an iPhone. Does Samsung’s products confuse consumers or are they already confused? One interesting piece of information was the total iPhone sales in the platforms five years of existence. In the US market the company has sold 85 million iPhones, good for a hefty $50 million. It sold 34 million iPads in the US market in the last two years, good for $19 billion in revenue. It appears Apple warned Samsung in 2010 that it believed that Samsung was infringing on Apple patents and that it wanted between $30-$40 per device in licensing fees.

Smartphones pay off for Microsoft, just not how you would expect
Microsoft is still seeking to establish a major presence in the smartphone space, trailing Android, iOS and even Symbian-based devices, but if a report from Trefis is correct, it still rakes in the big dollars in the smartphone market.

The reason is patents, and some of the most successful players in the smartphone space including Samsung and HTC, pay Microsoft a bundle in royalty payments each quarter. According to a piece in Yahoo news, Microsoft made approximately $792 million in the second quarter of 2012 just from the two companies mentioned.

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Filed Under: Android, Apple, Facebook, FTC, Google, HTC, iPhone, Lawsuit, Olympics, Samsung, Tablets, Yahoo Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

PGA Goes Big With Social Media at Golf’s Final Major

August 8, 2012 by 5 Comments

Screen grab of the PGA's Social Caddy page. Credit: PGA

We’ll have a separate Watching Golf this Week post tomorrow with all the details as usual, but I think it’s worth taking a quick look today at how the PGA is going big with social media for the year’s last major, the PGA Championship, which starts tomorrow.

Aside from the usual flurry of tweets and posts from the tour, it appears that the PGA is leaving no social media stone unturned this week. Starting with something they are calling the Social Caddy — a catch-all portal page with a bunch of links to things like Twitter streams and Instagram photos — the tour also has people roaming around grabbing fun, pointless little Viddy videos like this near-worthless “inside” meetup with World No. 1 Luke Donald.

There’s other stuff too, like assigning a writer to capture the predictions of fans from the PGA’s Facebook page. Pretty neat. But I’m not sure where I stand on the whole Social Caddy page idea — one thing I hear from a lot of people is that they are at the social media exhaustion level, and the idea of having to monitor or join one more place to share is not very appealing. But that may just be the media/golf insider thing. It may very well be that there are a lot of golf fans who are new to things like Twitter and need a helping hand to find Twitter handles for players, golf writers and other interesting folks who might have something worthwhile to say. (It looks like a lot of self-promoters and golf advertisers have found the PGA’s “fans” column on the Social Caddy Twitter feed so I am not sure how worthwhile that stream will be going forward)

So far it also looks like most of the “social” content is being generated by PGA.com types, which can be amusing (there is a Viddy clip of someone standing at the back of the driving range, challenging players to hit him) but will probably get stale soon. It would be much better if the PGA’s Instagram page, for example, had Instagram pix from the players themselves — as we’ve learned from Kevin Love and the Olympics some of that real-insider stuff can be pretty good and bring us a lot closer to the athletes than ever before.

Though golfers are notorious for being cell phone addicts — like Rickie Fowler, who tweets from his private plane — I also seem to see that most of them shut down the streams when the tournament starts. And it’s really not so hard to assemble your own golfing social caddy, by just finding and following people who are interesting in your main Twitter feed. And, I am guessing a lot of this effort is going to be lost anyway due to the atttention conflict with the last weekend of the Olympics. But when it comes to social media, clearly the PGA is trying hard.

Filed Under: Facebook, Golf, PGA, Social Media, Sports Social Media, Startup, Turner Sports, Twitter, Viddy Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Google Buys Social Media Startup Wildfire for $250m

August 2, 2012 by 2 Comments

Wildfire joins Google

Social media marketing startup Wildfire has been sold to Google for an estimated $250 million, an interesting partnership considering that the four year old Wildfire made its name in the Facebook space.

According to a blog post on Wildfire’s site the company is starting a new chapter in joining Google, where it is expected to continue operating as it has before/. The company was founded in order to run a promotion on Facebook and has strong ties with that company including receiving investment from Facebook.

Wildfire has established itself as a player in this space. The company, which has roughly 400 employees, 16,000 customers and the successful integration of its software across a range of social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and a number of others.

It runs many of the contests, promotions and marketing campaigns that are seen on social media sites and does not use keyword inquires as its targeting mechanism but rather relies on individual users’ data that is held by the social media sites.

The company said that the deal will not alter its relationship with its customers, but it will be interesting to see if that is true. Increasingly we are seeing technologies that once purchased by one social media company slowly becoming excluded from rival platforms, so it is hard to say.

The company was founded in 2008 by Victoria Ransom and Alain Chuard and has launched over 250,000 social marketing campaigns using its software tools. It has received investments including from a number of venture capital firms including Accel Partners, Founders Fund, Summit Partners, 500 Startups, Felicis Ventures and SoftTech VC as well as Facebook’s fbFund.

Filed Under: Apps, Facebook, Google, Social Media, Social Media Data, Startup, Venture Capital, Wildfire Tagged With: , ,

Google, Facebook buy Apple-Focused developers

July 24, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Hooking onto Apple’s money making bandwagon seems the way to go and two rival giants are doing just that, using their deep pockets to buy up technologies and development teams that will enable them to have more Apple iOS and related development skills in house.

The moves should not be a surprise for many reasons. Facebook and Apple have been moving closer together in recent days. Apple’s latest version of its mobile operating system, iOS 6 has a great deal of integration with Facebook.

Google, while there are some signs of discord between it and Apple, particularly in the area of maps, has been a very aggressive company in the mergers and acquisition space for some time and this seems like a natural continuation of that activity.

First up is Google, which has acquired a company called Sparrow that makes email clients for both Apple iPhones as well as for its Macintosh desktop products, as some call a better way to use Google’s Gmail. So the fit seems a natural in many ways as the development team, which will be attached to the Gmail team, will seek to simplify the communications app. The Verge is reporting that the deal may have been worth $25 million.

Facebook’s deal, acquiring the development team at Acrylic Software, is actually more personnel focused. Acrylic is an app design studio that also designs for Apple’s iOS. This move is also following a trend by Facebook, it did not acquire the apps that the company has developed, notably a news reader and a secure wallet app, but rather it gained the company’s two employees, it a move that is called an acqui-hire.

Filed Under: Acrylic Software, Apple, Apps, Facebook, Google, Sparrow, Uncategorized Tagged With: ,

NBCOlympics.com, Facebook Collaborate on Sharing Option During London Games

July 23, 2012 by 3 Comments

As if Facebook and NBCOlymics.com aren’t both about to experience monster traffic on their own during the Summer Olympics, imagine the two portals working together.

That’s about to happen. Facebook users who add NBCOlympics.com to their Timeline will automatically be able to share with friends anything they’re reading and watching on NBCOlympics.com without the need to click ‘share’ or ‘like’.  

The process is simple, click on the TRY IT button, you will be asked to give permission to allow NBC Olympics to display your activity from NBCOlympics.com on your Facebook timeline.

Adding NBC Olympics to your Facebook timeline lets you express who you are through the things you do – what you are reading, watching or voting on.

Sharing your NBC Olympic activity helps your friends get to know you better and lets them discover interesting new NBC Olympic content.  You can also see what your friends are doing, so you can find really cool videos or stories you might be interested in checking out.

An NBC Olympic account isn’t required. Rather, an interested user in the feature, simply needs to access their Facebook account through NBCOlympics.com

Each time you read a news article, blog post, or watch a video on NBCOlympics.com, it will be automatically shared with your friends. Feature user can control the social sharing at their discretion.

To learn more about the TRY IT feature, visit: www.nbcolympics.com

James Raia is editor and publisher in Sacramento,  California. Visit his site: www.tourdefrancelife.com

Filed Under: Apps, Facebook, Live sports via mobile Tagged With: , ,
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