TechGraphs News Roundup: 8/7/2015

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August 7, 2015

It’s a busy time for sports these days. The baseball pennant chase is heating up, NFL training camps are starting, the EPL is about to start another season, and the final PGA major of the season begins in just a few days. We can understand if you missed news, so here are all the sports-tech stories we found interesting this week.

Daily fantasy sites are making money hand over fist, but not everything is sunshine and rainbows for them. DraftKings is facing some class-action lawsuits, and the Boston Globe has some details.

SAP teamed up with women’s professional tennis a while back to provide in-game stats and insight to coaches and players. It seem that, now, coaches will be able to use these numbers — via an iPad — on the court.

Our very own (and very brave) Bradley Woodrum experimented with the meal replacement program from Soylent to mixed reviews. Well, Soylent is back with a new formula and a new ready-to-drink delivery method.

Microsoft partnered up with the NFL last year to provide Surface Pro 2 tablets to teams to use on the sidelines. It went … not as well as expected. But, the Surfaces are back for another NFL season, this time in their fancy Pro 3 form.

While on the topic of Microsoft, they also debuted a fancy new app for both Windows 10 and the Xbox One. At the heart of the new tech is something called Next Gen Stats, a hyper-granular replay system utilizing RFID chips embedded within players’ shoulder pads.

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EPL teams are getting their own emoji on Twitter this season. So … that’s a thing.

Finally, Disney’s Bob Iger had an interview with the Wall Street Journal in which he opined that ESPN will be a direct-to-customer product at some point down the road. We, of course, have figured this for some time, but it’s nice to hear that from a muckety-muck. No news on when that will happen yet, of course.

That’s all for this week. Have a great weekend, and 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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