TechGraphs News Roundup: 10/2/2015

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October 2, 2015

We are about to enter one of those wonderful convergences in sports next week. The baseball season is ending, and the playoffs begin on Tuesday. The NHL season begins on Wednesday. Add in the regular mix of NFL games, and we have a pretty busy week on our hands. Conversely, the sports tech world has been fairly quiet this week, but nevertheless, here are the stories we found interesting.

Non Sports PSA: Just in cases you hadn’t heard, there have been a couple of big data breaches this week. Some 15 million T-Mobile customer records were stolen thanks to a hack on the credit firm Experian. T-Mobile is offering free fraud protection for their users, so if you are one, make sure to sign up for that. Conversely, Patreon also got hacked, so if you use the crowd-funding site, make sure to update your passwords. This isn’t sports, but it’s pretty important so we wanted to pass it along.

A federal ruling involving the NCAA could perhaps open the doors for college sports video games to come back. There has been a two-year gap in releases of NCAA-branded video games, thanks in large part to these pending lawsuits. The reintroduction of the popular football and basketball games could still leave room for future lawsuits (hey, what can’t?), but the possibility is still there.

Do like to watch dudes punch other dudes in the head, but always wished you knew exactly how hard they were getting punched in the head? Well then, HBO might be barking up your tree. They just patented a technology that would place sensors in boxing equipment so that precise measurements of hits could take place. The plan would be to include hit metrics during broadcasts much like baseball or football broadcasts produce real-time stats during games. Quantifiable barbarism — it’s not just for the NFL any more!

Microsoft is using traditional prediction models along with your web searches and behaviors to help predict the outcomes of NFL games. Creepy? You bet. Accurate? Well … yeah. Check out TechInsider’s article for the full details. It’s actually fairly interesting in a Big Brother sort of way.

Sports-data aggregation company SportsRadar has reached a new agreement with the NHL to provide their statistics to third-party and media outlets. SportsRadar, based in my home town of Minneapolis, provides data for all kinds of sports to media, fantasy sites, and anyone else who needs real-time, play-by-play data. The NHL expects big things from this partnership, including new interactive and visual web elements. The NHL is already outsourcing their video to MLB Advanced Media, so it kind of makes sense that their real-time stats would be handled by a third party as well.

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Finally, Kotaku has a very interesting video about how the American team took home this big esports prize at the latest Dota 2 tournament. I don’t know much about esports (that’s why we keep David Wiers around), but I found the video informative nonetheless.

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





 

David G. Temple is the Managing Editor of TechGraphs and a contributor to FanGraphs, NotGraphs and The Hardball Times. He hosts the award-eligible podcast Stealing Home. Dayn Perry once called him a "Bible Made of Lasers." Follow him on Twitter @davidgtemple.

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