Lisa Brummel may have retired after 25 years at Microsoft, but the former executive is still certainly keeping busy. GeekWire caught up with Brummel at the WNBA All-Star Game last month in Seattle, where the Seattle Storm co-owner joined thousands of hoops fans who had a chance to watch the world’s best women’s basketball players compete against one another at Key Arena. Brummel, who was a stud athlete while attending Yale — she played basketball, softball, volleyball, and track at the Ivy League university — was part of an ownership group that bought the Storm in 2008. The team won… Read More
Microsoft is making more moves in the sports arena. The tech giant today debuted its “Sports Performance Platform,” a new product born out of Microsoft Garage, the company’s internal incubator. The customizable platform, which is already being used by teams like Seattle Reign FC and Cricket Australia, uses a trio of Microsoft services: Power BI, Azure, and Surface. It crunches athlete performance data taken from disparate sources — like Catapult GPS trackers or the Fit for 90 monitoring software — and layers on machine learning and predictive modeling to help provide actionable insights for coaches at one centralized place. “To help… Read More
The art of cycling took on a whole new meaning during last month’s Amgen Tour of California, thanks to a partnership between Microsoft and Volvox Labs which used Kinect technology to create motion-activated images of riders participating in the race. Called “The Ride by Microsoft,” the contemporary endeavor is a “one-of-a-kind art installation” that relied on a custom-built rigs using Kinect gaming technology to capture the 3D motion of passing cyclists. The result is a unique art form that produces futuristic-looking renderings of the athletes and the surrounding terrain. The ultimate goal was to provide fans of the sport with a new artistic… Read More
Caddies are trying to make a comeback — albeit in a virtual way. Arccos, a Stamford, Conn.-based startup that builds golf-shot tracking technology, today announced a new product in partnership with Microsoft that aims to help golfers score better on the course. Called Arccos Caddie, the new software is built into Arccos 360, the company’s mobile app that pairs with sensors attached to the butt of a club grip and tracks each shot during a round while providing GPS-powered yardage information. Arccos Caddie takes the app up another level with artificial intelligence and machine learning from Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and Azure Machine Learning. The… Read More
LaLiga wants to learn more about its fans and expand its footprint around the globe — and it’s getting help from Microsoft to make that happen. Spain’s premier soccer league is one year into its partnership with Microsoft, which is providing tools like Azure and Power BI to LaLiga that helps it connect with more than 1.7 billion fans on social media around the world. “Fan behavior is changing dramatically nowadays and we have to change with them,” LaLiga Director of Technology Services Silvestre Jos told GeekWire in a phone interview. Jos joined Microsoft executives at the company’s Digital Difference event last… Read More
