Archive for News Roundup

Greetings, fair TechGraphs readers. It’s a good weekend for sports fans — what with the beginning of the baseball season, the winding down of the NHL regular season, and yet another edition of The Masters. In case you were too busy getting your DFS lineups ready (void where prohibited), here are the news stories that we found interesting this week.

Speaking of The Masters; they released a new app for iOS that will let you stream the whole tournament. The streaming capability is obviously cool, but the whole app itself looks like a really well done production.

If audio is more of your thing, you can catch full Masters coverage courtesy of TuneIn. Golf of the radio?! How will we contain our excitement?! What a time to be alive.

If you’re anything like me, VR makes you a bit motion sick. However, it might be willing to stomach it (pun 94% intended) if it means I can use StubHub’s new tech to see the exact view from my perspective seat.

If VR doesn’t make you queasy (and you play professional baseball), you can now use VR for batting practice.

Wrestlemania was this past Sunday, and it appears that some WiFi outages at AT&T Stadium had some wouldbe attendees stuck at the entrance gates.

Apple and MLB have always been pretty tight when it comes to product integration, and now it seems that Apple is turning Siri into some kind of baseball trivia guru. Full disclosure: I asked her/it a bunch of questions and she did not perform well. She didn’t even know the Astros record in 2005!

The NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament is over now, so you can stop checking your brackets online. Many articles have been written about how much companies lose due to people making/checking brackets at work. However, Techcrunch has an interesting look at the possible security implications of all those people visiting sports web sites on their work machines.

We already covered it here, but in case you missed it, you’ll be able to watch some NFL games on Twitter this season. That still feels weird to type.

We’ll have more on this in the future, but it’s a pretty big deal that MLB is now allowing (some) wearable tech on the field this season.

This could be big news for Zepp’s new, very cool bat sensors, though they haven’t been approved as of yet.

ESPN Radio (along with some more music services) can now be streamed on your T-Mobile phone without hits to your data cap, thanks to their Bing On plan.

That’s it for this week. Have a great weekend, and be excellent to each other.

According to the solar calendar, spring arrived in the northern hemisphere this week. According to that regular calendar on your desk with the new Jeopardy! answer to tear off every morning, it’s just another Friday, which means it’s time for the weekly TechGraphs News Roundup, wherein we bring you the sports-tech stories from the past week that we found interesting.

March Madness has been pretty wild this year, with the first two rounds of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament featuring a number of shocking upsets. The Sweet Sixteen tipped off last night, and the Maryland Terrapins, who advanced to that round for the first time since they left the ACC to join the Big Ten conference, lost a tight game to the favored Kansas Jayhawks. A disappointing on-court result for Maryland, to be sure, but not for a lack of technology-driven training off the court, where the Terps have been employing an array of biometric monitoring tools. Much of their technological application surrounds team practices, which begin with readings from the OmegaWave system’s monitoring of central nervous system activity. During practice, they incorporate the Zephyr system for heart-rate and G-force tracking. Coaches keep an eye on all of the data these systems collect in real time and adjust training regimens accordingly. Sure, we’re just talking about practice, man, but, at least in College Park, basketball practice in 2016 looks like it has a lot more A.I. in attendance than it did in Philadelphia in 2002.

The latest chapter in the daily fantasy sports legal saga finds FanDuel and DraftKings shutting down all of their paid contests in New York pursuant to the terms of a settlement agreement with the New York Attorney General’s office. We’ve called Yahoo! the “third wheel” in the daily fantasy marketplace, but it was not a party to that settlement agreement and therefore appeared to be the big winner in the Empire State, at least temporarily. The New York Daily News reported that Yahoo! still was taking paid bets in New York on Monday after FanDuel and DraftKings had ceased such operations, but, on Tuesday, Yahoo! agreed to join its DFS competitors in ceasing paid contests. The legal battle will continue in New York, with further court arguments set for later this year, but, for now, the New York Attorney General’s office appears to have won a substantial victory.

PITCHf/x, the baseball pitch-tracking and mapping technology, has been a major boon to the study and analysis of America’s pastime, and it’s a foundational pillar of much of the crack baseball analysis you’ll find in the pages of FanGraphs. The recently introduced StatCast technology expands beyond PITCHf/x to track batted balls, defensive positioning and movement, and baserunner movement. “But what about cricket?”, you might have wondered. That worldly mixture of baseball, bocce, lawn darts, and fraternity-style hazing now has PitchVision, a camera-driven technology that tracks ball and player movement and can compile and analyze the collected data. PitchVision is designed to be portable and relatively cheap (kits start at around $52,000, if my Rupee-to-Dollar conversion was accurate), and the manufacturer, miSport, is marketing them to cricket training schools and teams.

Even in its offseason, the NFL is never far from the daily news cycle, is it? The league’s owners’ meeting wrapped up this week in Florida, and, among the various rule tweaks and other minutiae announced came word that data from the RFID chips embedded in each player’s shoulder pads last season (which we told you about back in September) will be available to teams beginning in May. What they’ll do with it is anybody’s guess, but you can be sure that Bill Belichick won’t reveal any clues.

Australian researchers have created a prototype of a concussion-monitoring headband athletes can wear to allow coaches and game officials to receive brain-trauma information in real time. The goal with the brainBAND technology is to both facilitate in-the-moment concussion diagnoses that should preclude players from returning to game action and measure the smaller hits that, cumulatively, can contribute to a substantial effect on the brain. So far, the brainBAND has been tested on amateur rugby players in Australia, but it would seem to have obvious applications for other sports, including (American) football as well.

Before Oscar Pistorius became controversial for decidedly wrong reasons, his use of prosthetic legs in conventional running competitions raised deep ethical and competitive questions with which many continue to grapple. Research and development in the area of prosthetic technology, continues, of course, and a new research paper from a university in the United Kingdom proposes guidelines for avoiding competitive advantage where prosthetic leg technology is used in sporting events. The paper’s central proposal is to apply a set of practical testing guidelines, including the use of the “dynamic drop technique,” designed to generate objective data on competitive advantages that can better inform future rules and regulations.

In the moments leading up to a sporting event, athletes commonly don headphones and listen to music as part of a preparatory routine designed to aid focus, eliminate distractions, and, for those of us who really loved Jock Jams, get pumped up to come off the bench in a middle school B-league basketball game. When it comes to headphone technology, most of us just want to make sure we’re getting enough volume to our ears. Now, a Bay-Area startup called Halo Neuroscience actually wants to turn up the electricity in athletes’ headphones in order to improve their athletic performance. Halo’s headphones, which look suspiciously like Beats headphones with scalp massagers attached, actually contain neurostimulating electrodes designed to improve motor function through electrical interactivity with the brain’s motor cortex. The company’s own research suggests that their “transcranial direct current stimulation” can improve physical outcomes, but some neuroscientists are skeptical, and the company’s research has not yet been published in peer-reviewed publications. Still, the possibilities Halo Neuroscience’s headphones present have been enough to draw $9 million in venture capital funding.

That’s all for this week. Whether you plan to spend the weekend hunting for Easter eggs or just watching your team hunt for a spot in the Final Four, please remember to be excellent to each other.

The volatile month of March is upon us, and in comes this TechGraphs News Roundup, surely the lion of the sporting blogosphere and the FG family (check out our colors!), to deliver the sports-tech stories from the past week that we found interesting, along with just the right amount of bluster.

The baseball countdown clock’s still ticking, measuring our ever-closing temporal gap between the now and the start of the baseball season. One thing that might happen in the 2016 season is that Mike Trout, extremely good hitter, becomes Mike Trout, even-better-than-before hitter. If that thing happens, it might be due, in part, to his use of a new “smart bat” he helped develop. Our own Bryan Cole has some of the details over at Beyond the Box Score, where he reports that Trout, together with sports sensor manufacturer Zepp and Old Hickory Bats, the company that makes Trout’s in-game bats, have created a bat that houses a Zepp sensor– comprised of gyroscopes and accelerometers– right inside the handle of the bat itself. The idea behind this bat, which will be available for sale to the public this summer, is that increased measuring and monitoring of a player’s swing from the 1,000 data points the bat collects, can be used to help improve a player’s swing. Zepp is seeking approval for in-game use of these smart bats.

Baseball bats are getting smarter, and so too is the way MLB teams are using social media to interact with their fans. For at least a few teams, including the Tigers, Dodgers, and Giants, this digital interaction has expanded to encompass live video streaming during spring training activities. We have covered the live-streaming capabilities of video apps such as Periscope and Meerkat here before, but the MLB teams moving in this direction seem to be favoring Facebook Live, the Facebook-integrated live video app. While Periscope’s ready integration with Twitter means it probably will remain a strong player in the live video streaming space, it also makes sense for teams to bring their content to where most of their fans already exist. For now, that appears to be good old Facebook.com.

Baseball fans aren’t the only ones who are into live video streaming, and with less than a month remaining in the regular season, the NHL playoff race is in full swing, making this an especially timely moment for the news that Yahoo’s new partnership with the NHL will include free live streams of real NHL games. Yahoo plans to stream four games each week, and they will make the streams available on sports.yahoo.com and on the Yahoo Sports Tumblr page (which I just had to Google) to out-of-market viewers at no cost. The first such game is tonight’s Flyers-Lightning matchup.

Did you know that the twenty-first season of Major League Soccer just kicked off? It’s true: MLS finally can share a beers with its fans. In addition to a new drinking buddy in the form of an anthropomorphic sporting league, MLS fans also can look forward to implementation of the Audi Player Index, player-tracking technology designed by an automotive company to collect near-real-time movement and secondary statistical data for every player on the pitch. The goal of the Index appears to be to boil all of this data down to a single number for each player that represents the degree to which the player contributed to or detracted from the player’s team’s win or loss. According to MLS, a top individual game Index score could fall between 500 and 1600 Index points, with the highest individual game score awarded to date being 3330 for a player who scored five goals in the game. At the end of the season, MLS will recognize the player with the highest per-game Play Index average. Fans of new and advanced baseball statistics are likely to recognize some principles of WAR and win-probability added at work here, and, depending upon how effective MLS and its broadcasters are at disseminating this information, the Audi Player Index could offer an engaging entry point for new fans.

For the NBA, player tracking is mere surface-level stuff, with player biometric monitoring continually advancing in that sport. While such monitoring soon may push up against ethical boundaries, if it hasn’t already, the teams do not appear to be slowing down in this department. According to a press release issued Monday, Kinduct, a Halifax-based company, has registered the Indiana Pacers as a new client and will be providing the team its “athlete management software . . . to collect  performance and health data for smoother visualization and analysis within a centralized location.” Does Paul George sleep well at night? Team President Larry Bird soon may be able to answer that question with a quick glance at his tablet device.

In case the sudden absence of advertising made you forget, daily fantasy sports remains a thing that exists, and, in a surprising move in light of the nationwide legal landscape, Virginia recently became the first state to legalize DFS via the Fantasy Contest Act. DFS operators badly needed a legal victory, but, like most legal victories, this one comes at a price. DFS may be expressly permitted in Virginia, but it’s not unregulated, and the regulatory costs, which include a $50,000 operating fee and an annual auditing requirement, may be enough to sink some smaller providers. On the other hand, this sort of regime is exactly what larger providers, like FanDuel and Draft Kings, want, because it shields them from both legal challenges (in the Old Dominion, anyway) and upstart competitors that can’t afford to comply with the regulations.

The annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference runs today and tomorrow in Boston, where a number of potentially interesting topics are on tap. The SXSW conference also begins today in Austin, and the conference has its own sports segment, with many events and panel discussions scheduled over the coming days. For those who won’t be on the ground in Boston or Austin this year, check next week’s roundup for any pertinent highlights that emerge from these hip gatherings.

Whether you’re spending this weekend at a sports-tech conference or just trying to enjoy some springtime weather, please do remember to be excellent to each other.

The countdown to the 2016 baseball season is on, and Friday brings us one day closer do the action. Before you crow hop into your weekend, catch up on these sports-tech stories from the past week that we found interesting.

Contrary to the wishes of some of our more outspoken readers, it looks like expanded safety netting will be a reality in both MLB and MiLB parks this year. In what should be more universally well-received news, the league released information on this year’s MLB.TV package this week. We’ll cover it in greater detail here soon, but, for now, know that the regular package is available for $109.99 (a reported $20 discount over last year’s rate) or $24.99 per month. The bigger news, resulting from MLB’s settlement of the Garber litigation, is that, for the first time, the league will offer single-team packages. The single-team annual subscription price, $84.99, is not a significant discount from the newly reduced full package price (and one wonders whether the league reduced the full package price in order to deter purchases of single-team subscriptions in a marketplace in which individual team allegiance, rather than broader interest in the sport, may be the driving factor for fan attention), and the single-team offering, like the full package, is restricted to out-of-market games. For real junkies, spring training coverage also is available.

Speaking of baseball spring training and, a popular topic here, biometric tracking, the Yankees may have found the new inefficiency: sleeping in. Recognizing that most actual baseball games occur in the afternoon or at night, the Bombers are looking to sync their players’ biological clocks with regular-season patterns by starting daily spring training activities closer to noon, rather than adhering to the near-dawn-patrol regimens to which the sport historically has been accustomed. This could be bad news for the rest of the AL East, whose batters the New York bullpen already was effectively putting to sleep last year. (Yes, you can hit me with your pillow for that one.)

February, with the Super Bowl and arrival of books like the Baseball Prospectus and Hardball Times Annuals, ostensibly signals the yearly end of football and beginning of baseball. We know that, like rust, the NFL is a probably corrosive force that never sleeps, however, a reality to which inane tweets and sports-talk-radio discussions this week about the NFL combine likely have alerted you. Something of interest for our readers, though? The emergence of virtual reality in professional football scouting. STRIVR Labs is bringing its VR technology to the combine in order to test quarterbacks’ adeptness at reading defensive schemes. Overkill? Maybe, but it definitely seems more on-point than the latest combine subject du jour: QB hand size measurement.

As for that other brand of football, fans of Italian soccer can look forward to the results of a newly announced partnership between STATS, LLC and European Broadcast Development that promises to deliver “advanced performance data to the clubs and media partners of Serie A TIM, the highest tier of Italian football.” This will reportedly include use of the SportVU tracking technology that has been revolutionary in advancing NBA analytics, among other tools.

Technology indeed has been a boon for better analysis and understanding of the dynamics at play in professional basketball, but you may not be surprised to learn that one NBA player, Steph Curry, is breaking the computer: “The Golden State Warriors guard has gotten so good at draining shots that historically have been statistically improbable that the NBA 2K [videogame] team hasn’t found a way to virtualize his skill set without compromising the realism of the game as a whole. ‘To be completely honest, we are still looking for ways to better translate his game into NBA 2K,’ gameplay director Mike Wang told Forbes.”

On the home front, advancements in exoskeleton technology are allowing those suffering from spinal injuries a chance to walk and run again. One such person — Charleston, South Carolina resident Adam Gorlitzky — had been a competitive runner and basketball player before he lost the ability to use his legs in a motor vehicle crash. His goal now that he’s acquired a ReWalk Exoskeleton: complete the 10k Cooper River Bridge Run.

Our goal is to keep you appraised of the latest and greatest in sports-tech news. In order to complete that goal, we provided you with the content above. As you now contemplate weekending, please remember to be excellent to each other.

Salutations, dear TechGraphs readers. Those “X Days Until Pitchers and Catchers Report” tweets are actually starting to get relevant again, as baseball season is actually on the horizon. Stay tuned to TechGraphs for additions to our Retrosheet series, plus some other fun things. In the meantime, here are the news stories we found interesting this week.

If you haven’t heard already, MLB.tv is cutting its price by $20. It’s all part of a class-action lawsuit regarding blackout restrictions that was settled earlier this year. Click the link to learn more about how to watch your favorite out-of-market team even when they are in your neck of the woods (spoiler: it will still cost more money).

Speaking of; now that MLBAM has purchased the rights to stream NHL games, the folks at Puck Daddy wonder if the same restrictions will be enforced.

We’ll have more about the daily fantasy landscape next week, but between divisions being shut down, partnerships being dissolved, and investments getting devalued, it’s not been a great few weeks for the big hitters in the market.

The Super Bowl was streamed live, and CBS claims that the venture broke a bunch of records. That doesn’t mean the rollout went flawlessly, however.

How much data does a stadium in an already-tech-savvy town offer up to fans during the Super Bowl? Somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 TB.

The Raptors are teaming up with IBM’s Watson platform for a computational approach to talent analysis, and presumably to get better at Jeopardy!

A bionic knee brace is being brought to market and holy crap does it look equal parts awesome and terrifying.

Helmet company Riddell is in hot water after claims that their equipment help prevent concussions turned out to be false.

Jealous of the fact that your iOS-using friends were the only ones who could design and buy Nikes on their phones? Well, fear not, Android user, your wishes have been granted.

That’s all for this week. Have a great weekend, and be excellent to each other.

Hello, fair TechGraphs readers. I tried to come up with something witty for the intro, but this is already a little bit late, so I’ll cut right to the news stories from the sports-tech world that we found interesting this week.

A late-comer, but probably the biggest news of the week: the payment processor for DraftKings and FanDuel is cutting ties at the end of February. If you’re a halfway-decent coder with some experience in API work, it might not be a bad idea to float them your resume.

The Super Bowl is a little more than a week away, and Wired has a nice look at all the crazy cameras we’ll be experiencing on TV.

If you are going to see the big game in person, check out this primer on the wireless tech employed by Levi’s Stadium.

Also in time for the Super Bowl, EA is releasing Madden 16 for free on EA Access on February 2nd.

On the subject of Madden, Polygon looks at how the game deals with teams changing cities.

My friend and former FanGraphs contributor Jack Moore looks at how how the MLB media streaming landscape might change (or not) in upcoming years.

They’re going to put esports on real, actual television this year, and David Wiers is ecstatic about it.

In the vain of Periscope and Meerkat, Facebook is giving live-streaming access to everyone (with and iPhone). Now, when you can’t make it to a game, just make sure to befriend someone who can. Watching from the stands on your cellphone is just as good, right?

Periscope countered this news with an announcement that you’ll be able to stream on its service using a GoPro.

I don’t think I’ll ever get too deep into esports, but I can very much see myself plopping down on the couch to watch some drone racing.

Apparently the whole snafu with Surface tablets at the AFC championship game is being blamed on some bad cabling.

And finally, details are starting to come out about MLB The Show 16. I’m going to buy it either way, but the improvements mentioned are certainly welcome.

That’s it for this week. Have a great weekend. Be excellent to each other.

Greetings, fair readers. The NFL has it’s championship Sunday this weekend, the NHL All Star Game (love it or hate it) is right around the corner, and we’re still waiting for a couple big signings in Major League Baseball. It’s an exciting time for sports fans, though the sports-tech world had a bit of a quiet week. It’s a post-CES lull for sure, but nevertheless, here are the stories that we found interesting from this week.

The biggest news this week came from Facebook, which has launched a new platform for engaging with a sporting event and other fans. Titled Facebook Sports Stadium, it’s a little mix of Twitter, an ESPN mobile app, and an engagement-measuring tool. Knowing Facebook, it’ll certainly get a couple face lifts along the way, but it’s an interesting tool for non-Twitter people out there that still want to discuss the sport they are watching on TV.

Another big story comes from MLB which settled a lawsuit concerning their blackout policies. As of this writing, all the details are still a little fuzzy, but it looks like the price of the overall MLB.tv package will be lower (yay!), and there will be an option built in for fans of out-of-town teams when said team comes to play in said fan’s town. It’s a developing story, and we’ll keep an eye on it.

Just today, UEFA announced that it will be instituting goal line technology in upcoming tournaments. David Weirs tells me this is a good thing.

Samsung is rumored to working on a smartwatch/shirt sensor combo. It’s an interesting idea. A smartwatch for the every day activities that can be paired up with a body sensor to collect more granular data during workouts.

Kirk Herbstreit, a wealthy sports announcer, got butt-hurt about a non-wealthy basketball player trying to get paid for his likeness and causing a cancellation of a video game series that cost Herbstriet a job.

Hoverboards are dumb and dangerous, and probably more dangerous when 200 lb. testosterone machines are riding them. That’s why the Carolina Panthers banned players from using them.

Wired has a nice story on the overall influx of technology in football.

Video-streaming service Ustream has been acquired by IBM. Ustream hasn’t dabbled too much in sports as of yet, but if their partnership can bring forth a series product (and given IBM’s history of corporate partnerships), we could see that technology being utilized by leagues in the not-so-distant future.

That’s all for this week. If you’re on the east coast, good luck with your shoveling. Be excellent to each other.

2016 already has seen more than its share of changes, so we welcome you back to the regularity and predictability of the TechGraphs News Roundup with this collection of sports-tech stories we found interesting this week.

The 2016 Consumer Electronics Show wrapped up on Saturday. We covered the highlights in last week’s Roundup, but the good folks at Baseball Prospectus assembled a nice summary of some of the baseball-specific applications showcased there. (And don’t miss our own Bryan Cole in the comment section with a video clip of Shaq O’Neal wiping out while testing a baseball swing analyzer.)

Speaking of the future of baseball, the trial in Garber v. Office of the Commissioner of Baseball, a class-action lawsuit against MLB over the league’s television-broadcast policies, starts on Tuesday, and Nathaniel Grow has a preview of the arguments.

While CES featured a number of audio companies promising future development in the wireless headphone space, two, Earin and Bragi Dash, already have retail-ready wireless earbuds. As this thorough review explains, truly wireless earbuds still have some hurdles to overcome, one of which is the fact that our dumb human heads are full of water, an unfriendly medium for the transmission of wireless signals. While it’s apparent that this technology remains in the developmental phase, it will be interesting to see whether it has uses beyond personal fitness and entertainment, such as for communications between football players and their coaches.

Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert, among others, has backed Courtside Ventures, a Detroit-based $35 million venture capital fund targeting early stage sports technology and sports-centered media startups. Early indications are that the group is interested in virtual reality and analytical data.

Way back in September, we were one of the first site to tell you about Pylon Cam, which since has become the star of this (NFL and college) football season. After its special seat at the table during ESPN’s multi-platform broadcast of the college football national championship game, it should come as no surprise that CBS will be incorporating the technology into its Super Bowl 50 coverage. Also included: a 360-degree replay view courtesy of thirty-six cameras mounted on the stadium’s upper deck and a camera providing viewers with the on-field perspective of certain players, such as the quarterback.

It seems as if companies make these types of claims every week these days, but a company called VCIS just unveiled a new style of football helmet that they say reduces the threat of head injuries. Putting a dual-shell design into an attractive helmet is no easy task, but th high price ($1,500 a pop) might be a hindrance. VICIS hopes to have the helmets for sale before the coming football season.

Speaking of football, if you happen to fall in the very narrow spectrum of people who don’t care about the Super Bowl, but happen to have a Google Cardboard headset lying around, you’ll be happy to learn that this year’s Puppy Bowl will be broadcast in VR.

Finally, today is the deadline for nominations for the 2016 Sports Technology Awards. If your proposal, development, technology, or product in one of about a dozen categories is good enough, you could earn a trip to the awards ceremony in London this April. Past winners include the All England Lawn Tennis Club (known to most Americans as Wimbledon) in the “Best Technology Partnership” category for their partnership with IBM, something we’ve documented here.

That’s all for this week. Have a mindful Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend, and please be excellent to each other.

Greetings, fair TechGraphs readers. Here’s hoping you all had adequate holidays. Let’s ring in the new year with all the sports-tech stories we found interesting this week.

The ringing in of the new year also means the coming of the Great Silicon Gathering known as the Consumer Electronics Show, or CES. Wearables and fitness trackers were a big theme at CES last year, and that theme appears to have carried over to the newly-christened 2016. We’ve done our best to keep tabs on all the announcements. We probably missed a couple, but here’s the general low-down on what’s coming:

Misfit is bringing a fitness tracker that actually kind of looks nice. They are also developing earbuds — yes, earbuds — that will help track your activity. Fitbit is branching out to the smartwatch market. So is Casio. And PC maker Razer. HTC is going to sell an all-in-one package that includes a scale, a fitness tracker, and a heart rate monitor. Garmin is looking to release a Google Glass/HUD device specifically designed for cyclists. They’re also coming out with a GPS watch with its own heart rate monitor. Vert is coming out with an update to their already-interesting jump tracker. A French company called In & Motion has developed a vest for skiers that will work like an airbag to to prevent injuries. Oakley is working on a pair of sunglasses with a Siri-like fitness coach built right in. And Under Armor is pairing up with IBM’s Watson super computer to develop new kinds of health and fitness tracking.

Meanwhile, a few non-CES stories came across our desk as well.

Activision has bought Major League Gaming. Fans of esports can expect to see more tournaments that should include more styles of games.

The UFC 2 video game will be coming out in March. Those interested in virtually beating the crap out of each other should mark their calendars.

Because the job of a golf club R&D team is never done, Callaway is getting into bed with Boeing to make faster drivers. No word yet on whether the 2017 model will come with optional jet engine attachments.

That’s it for this week. Have a nice weekend, and be excellent to each other.

Welcome back, fair TechGraphs readers. Here’s hoping your fantasy football wishes turned into caviar dreams and you all made your respective playoffs. Unless you play DFS, in which case this week was less important — if you don’t live in New York state, that is. More on that later. In the meantime, here are the sports-tech stories we found interesting this week.

We might as well start with the big news of the week. A while back, New York’s attorney general said that daily fantasy sites — most notably DraftKings and FanDuel — constituted gambling. Since gambling is still illegal, said attorney general  took DFS to trial. On Friday, the judge granted the injunction. Then, the appellate judge overturned that ruling. The overruling doesn’t put DFS in the clear in New York forever, they are just allowed to continue doing business until the legality of their operations are further discussed. Nothing is certain yet, but it’s some temporary good news for DFS players in New York.

Polygon goes over some of the HUGE numbers that October’s League of Legends tournament drew in terms of online viewers.

EA appears to see the writing on the wall, as they recently announced that they have opened an esports division.

While netting isn’t necessarily the cutting edge of technology, they can play a big role in keeping fans safe. Because of this, MLB has recommended that all teams increase their use of netting to increase the safety of spectators in the stands.

New Balance is working on a very cool idea that allows runners to 3D print the soles of their shoes to better fit their specific feet and running style. It’s still in R&D at this point, but it’s an excellent use of the emerging technology.

Yahoo has released a new app that serves as a sort of TV Guide for Internet streaming. While it doesn’t include sports yet, it’s fairly easy to see that getting implemented soon enough (or another company picking up where Yahoo is leaving off).

The Cowboys ran into a little bit of tech trouble on Monday Night Football. Because of the way NFL rules work, this in turn (and fairly) meant the Washington Professional Football Team also had tech trouble.

Showtime is trying to get people to watch boxing in a VR environment. You yourself can try it for free. The bout already happened, but the it seems that just showing off the technology is the main point of the demonstration.

That’s it for this week. Have a great weekend and be excellent to each other.