As we saw at the second annual GeekWire Sports Tech Summit last week, there is plenty of opportunity for entrepreneurs and engineers to come up with new tech-powered products and services that serve the massive sports industry. Much of that excitement carried over to the Seattle Sports Tech Hackathon this past weekend, where six teams spent more than 36 hours coming up with innovative ideas that ranged from an Airbnb for sports fans to a prediction app for soccer matches. The winning group was Sportxts, a real-time sports news notification service powered by text messages that pulls live data from… Read More
Bleacher Report CEO Dave Finocchio has some advice for Facebook. Speaking at the 2017 GeekWire Sports Tech Summit the co-founder of what has become the second largest sports website in the United States said social media can be a struggle for publishers big and small. He noted that Facebook pushed publishers to use its platform as a way to spread content far and wide, but over the years it became harder to get stories linke back to a website promoted. “I think the days of being able to drive massive referral traffic back to your website are coming to an… Read More
There is more happening at the intersection of sports and technology than ever. That much was evident at the second annual GeekWire Sports Tech Summit this week at CenturyLink Field in Seattle, where we had so much fun welcoming 400 executives, entrepreneurs, engineers, investors, founders, athletes, general managers, gamers, scientists, and many more to our one-of-a-kind event. We had the pleasure of hearing from top thinkers and leaders from across the sports tech landscape, ranging from NFL COO Tod Leiweke, who talked about the league’s streaming deal with Amazon, to WNBA legend Sue Bird, who explained why athletes need to… Read More
If you’re a fan of the Seattle Sounders FC, you’ll grasp at anything that might explain away that painful 1-1 tie with Orlando City SC on Wednesday night at CenturyLink Field. Back at the scene of the sports tragedy on Thursday, Dave Tenney, director of performance and sports science for the team, took a shot at the question of whether data analytics could have helped prevent the last-second goal that doomed the Souders. Tenney was on a panel with Dr. Laila Mintas, deputy president at Sportradar U.S, during the GeekWire Sports Tech Summit. “I think where we’re at with our staff and… Read More
Everyone these days wants to be like Amazon, even the NFL apparently. At the 2017 GeekWire Sports Tech Summit, NFL COO Tod Leiweke addressed Amazon’s deal to stream 10 Thursday Night Football games this season for a reported price of $50 million. Amazon took over for Twitter, which paid a reported $10 million for the same exact package last season. Leiweke praised Amazon and compared his league to the retail giant’s approach of “customer obsession” when it comes to improving the experience for fans. “It’s been fun for us to talk to the Amazon guys,” Leiweke said. “They are just amazing… Read More
