TAYLOR’S TAKE ON THE WEEK IN SPORTS TECH: It’s not uncommon to brush shoulders with celebrities roaming around at the big Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. But it wasn’t always normal to see top athletes checking out the latest geeky gadgets and innovations at the world’s largest tech expo. That has changed in the past few years, and the increasing presence of the NFL Players Association at CES is one example of that. Led by The OneTeam Collective, a business accelerator created by the NFLPA with partners like Intel and Harvard, there will be more than 30 current and former NFL… Read More
Amazon is getting serious about streaming the world’s best soccer matches. Bloomberg reported Friday that Amazon will submit a bid in next month’s auction for rights to stream Premier League soccer. The Telegraph reported Thursday that Amazon is consulting “industry experts” as it prepares to make its bid. Rumors of Amazon’s interest in streaming Premier League matches have been swirling for months. It shows Amazon’s commitment to streaming live sports; the tech giant paid a reported $50 million to stream Thursday Night Football NFL games this season, and has inked a variety of other deals for sports streaming rights that add… Read More
Plenty of Pacific Northwest startups raised big funding rounds this year to fuel their growth in 2017 and beyond. The largest round was a $115 million cash infusion for Remitly, which operates a mobile remittance platform in 10 countries. The Series D round was led by PayU, an international online payment service provider and the fintech arm of Naspers, a global investment company with equity stakes in tech giants like Tencent and Flipkart, among hundreds of others. The $115 million round, approved by regulators in December, was the largest in the Pacific Northwest since OfferUp’s $120 million round last year. The funding will help Remitly expand… Read More
[Love sports and technology? Sign up for our sports tech newsletter to receive this rundown from GeekWire’s Taylor Soper via email every week.] TAYLOR’S TAKE ON THE WEEK IN SPORTS TECH: Each Sunday for the past four months, millions of fantasy football users fired up their Yahoo apps and browsers, setting lineups and checking their team scores. It takes a ton of technology to ensure that Yahoo’s tech platforms can withstand huge spikes in traffic and provide constant live scoring updates. For this week’s sports tech newsletter, GeekWire caught up with EJ Campbell, a senior director of engineering for Yahoo Fantasy Sports, to learn more… Read More
The International could be heading north. Valve isn’t yet talking publicly about its plans, but several clues point to the video-game giant moving its huge Dota 2 esports tournament from its backyard in Seattle across the border to Vancouver, B.C. The International is one of the largest esports events in the U.S., drawing sold-out crowds that pack KeyArena to watch the world’s top Dota 2 players compete for a $24.7 million prize pool. The tournament, which started in Germany six years ago, was previously held at Seattle’s Benaroya Hall before Valve moved it in 2014 to a larger venue at… Read More
