Nike today confirmed that it will start selling products on Amazon.com, starting with “a limited Nike product assortment,” setting aside its longtime reluctance in a sign that working with the Seattle-based e-commerce giant is increasingly unavoidable for the world’s major brands. The confirmation by Nike CEO Mark Parker followed a report by the Wall Street Journal that Amazon had agreed to better police counterfeit and third-party sales of Nike products. “In the US, we’re executing a new pilot with Amazon with a limited Nike product assortment,” Parker said on Nike’s earnings conference call today. He added, “As we do with… Read More
The Fisherman’s Terminal in Seattle might be the last place you’d expect to find a company that is aiming to keep NFL players safer on the field. But nestled in between the fishing vessels and seafood wholesalers is where Seattle startup Vicis is making hundreds of high-tech football helmets that will be worn by NFL and NCAA players this upcoming season. GeekWire toured the recently-opened 3,000 square-foot production facility that is pumping out hundreds of Vicis’ ZERO1 helmets which are designed to mitigate the forces thought to cause concussions. The production facility has the feel of a car manufacturing plant mixed with a… Read More
The sports media landscape seems to be changing everyday, but some investors like the potential they see in HERO Sports. The Seattle-area startup just reeled in a $1.3 million investment round led by PN Cellular Inc. and Alliance of Angels. HERO Sports originally launched in 2014 as BennettRank, which ranked college sports teams across the U.S. The company later rebranded as HERO Sports and expanded beyond just numbers; today it provides more holistic online coverage of more than 20,000 NCAA teams. The site has a similar feel to sports media giant Bleacher Report — Bleacher Report CEO Dave Finocchio just… 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
Summer is finally here, and that means one thing: Our big GeekWire Sounders Day party is back! On July 19, we’ll once again take over the amazing rooftop deck at Dell EMC, bringing together soccer fans and tech geeks for this one-of-a-kind networking party. Tickets are on sale now here for both the party and the match, but move fast as we usually sell out. This is one of our favorite events of the year, a fun night to hang out with other geeks before a Seattle Sounders soccer match. If you’ve never attended Sounders Day, here’s how this unique sporting… Read More
