Gadgets, Web Developement, and General Technology now with more "Magic Buckets of Goodness™"

Well a week later and I have finally recovered from the whirlwind trip to CES 2010. This was a great experience and one that exposed me to the insane energy in the consumer electronics space. The clear winner was 3d tvs but still a gimmick in my opinion. The glasses that you need to ware to get the real experience make this a non-starter for many people. Not to mention the masses don’t want to upgrade their tv yet again. The magicjack GSM femtocell was a quite winner but they are going to run into all kinds of FCC issues I suspect with this device. CES 2010 had a record 120,000 attendees this year which you noticed trying to make your way through the amazing LG booth. CES is something every geek has to do at least once but I am not sure I would do this more than every few years at the most.

It’s the next big, cool, hip thing. Simply put foursquare is a location based tool/game that let’s you see where your friends are and earn badges for all sorts of challenges.

So why the fascination? I can do this via txt, email, twitter, facebook, right!? Not really. It’s the location piece that makes foursquare unique. I know exactly what business my friend is in and not just some confusing GPS coordinates or a dot on a google map. Bars are beginning to use this as a tool to bring in crowds with notes like “the mayor drinks free.” What is the mayor? This is the fun part. The person that visits the location the most is automatically awarded the mayorship. Don’t worry that isn’t the only award there are tons of badges you earn for all kinds of things like the gym rat and school night when you are out past 3am on a week night.

Grab the iPhone app and see what all the cool kids are talking about.

I was fortunate to attend the Web 2.0 Summit last week in San Francisco. This was an amazing event that allowed me to get to know some of the most senior folks in the technology industry.

The big trends discussed over and over again at the Summit were mobile, social, and open standards. The highlight of the event was hearing Tim Berners-Lee talk about his creation, the world wide web, and that he sees a huge opportunity for someone to do for data what he did for documents.

Barnes & Noble announced, this past week, their new e-book reader to compete with the Amazon Kindle. A couple under-reported key things about the nook.

1. The nook runs on Google’s new Android operating system. This doesn’t sound like a big deal at first but when you realize this is the first non-cellular consumer device to officially run the android operating system it IS a big deal. Just another example of Google taking over the world. Android is open and the idea that at some point, this device could be extended by open source developers is very cool.

2. Sharing! When I asked the wife if she wanted a kindle the first thing she said was “I can’t share books with my friends, forget it.” Sharing is the killer feature of the nook. I remember when I first got a ReplayTV and sites were spinning up around sharing shows via the features built into that device, it was huge. We will see the same with the nook and the LendME feature.

Bottom line competition is good for any business and this new war between Amazon and B&N will only help drive both products to a better price point and push features faster and further.

I got to witness Marissa Mayer’s announcement first hand at the web 2.0 Summit this past week that Google will begin integrating Twitter posts into search results via a new deal with Twitter. This is the beginning of Social Search having some weight and I am sure an extremely lucrative deal for Twitter. In addition she demoed a new Social Search function that will be released in Google Labs in the next few weeks which will be opt in to start. This will allow you to see social results from your friend network in a one-box style format when you preform a Google search.

The real news is that “Real-Time” is now the focus of the industry. Some would argue this has been the focus for years but only a few of us would actually go to twitter to figure out what is happening in real-time. With the also announced news, at the Web 2.0 Summit, that Microsoft’s Bing is integrating Facebook and Twitter feeds the social search arena has been opened to everyone. Think about all your friends and family that depend solely on search. They will now begin seeing results on what is happening right now instead of waiting for something to get popular enough over hours or days for it to begin showing in any of the search engines. This also has the potential to dramatically decrease the focus on major news outlets on the web.

More to come on real-time as we see it unfold…

CNN Launched their redesign today, an all around improvement for sure.

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One of the most interesting things is the newly centered CNN logo. This indicates a renewed focus on their brand and design wise looks great. This site still looks extremely clean even with the addition of the red header instead of all white like the previous version. The content is in a three column layout, framed in light gray boxes that give it some structure but doesn’t detract from the core of the site, content. The new site doesn’t appear to give a huge focus on specific vertical screen real-estate either which naturally forces the user to scroll without thinking twice. This is a simple but great achievement giving more flexibility for the content programming of the page.

Technically they have made some improvements as well. The page is fast coming down in around three seconds. It’s also leveraging assets from a CDN but that is nothing new. They can still make some improvements here with long live TTLs on images to improve browser cache-ability as well as minifying css and js assets.

All-in-all great work by the Turner team, congrats.

How do you rework a staple of ESPN.com? Simple, give the fans what they want. Continuous improvement, deliver data to fans faster and create a flexible platform. These core elements were the focus of the redesigned front page and interior scoreboards.

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Page One Scoreboard Features:

Auto Updating: Previously only when the page would refresh would the scoreboard data reload. With the new version the score and clock stream in as the data is available.
One click access to most relevant game links: In the three major game states, pre, in, and post the most relevant game links are available with a simple hover action.

Personalized: If you have a favorite team selected via personalization corner that team’s game will move to the front of the list of game modules and highlight yellow.
Show the most number of games possible: It was critical to provide a view that allowed the most number of games visible at any time.

Special Event Treatment: As you saw this weekend we have greater flexibility to provide a way to message our fans on sport holidays.

Back-end feed aggregator: Remember those auto updating scores? A new feed aggregation mechanism allows us to combine multiple sport feeds into one allowing up-to-date score data within any sport tab you select.


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Interior Scoreboard Features:

Update faster: With a change in architecture all new redesigned scoreboards received, on average, a 20% improvement in the time to deliver data to the fan from when we receive it.

Scoreboard Calendar: A new calendar showing clearly what day you are on, how many games occur on that day, and simple navigation to move to past or future weeks.
Key dates: One of the most requested features was a clear view of special events within the season, now reflected in the key dates area and denoted by a highlighted red style within the week calendar.

More Scoreboards: Another staple form scoreboards past that was brought back based on fan feedback, the ability to switch to other scoreboards easily.

Consolidated tools: The scoreboard tools allows us to feature all the other utilities throughout the site related to the current scoreboard in view.

Team Logos: On non-college scoreboards team logos were added to allow the fan to quickly spot the team they are looking for. Logos coming to college sports soon.

Personalized: If you have a favorite team selected via personalization corner that team’s game will move to the top of the list of game modules and highlight yellow.

Continuous improvement: The flexible design and change in front end architecture allows for more flexibility as fans needs change and additional features are developed.

Please welcome our newest member of the Gamecast family, NHL. This product replaces our shot chart and provides an amazing live in-game experience as well as a post-game view.


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Check it out via http://sports.espn.go.com/nhl/scoreboard and look for the Gamecast links!

Features:
Scores, player stats, game clock, out of town scoreboard are all live updating, no need for page refreshes

Show locations on the rink of all:
Goals | Shots | Penalties | Hits | Blocks

Filter all events shown by type and period
Mouse over an event to get more information & player statistics
Power play highlights of rink + play by play
Period + Game summary gives a quick summary of stats during the game/period
Available at all points during a game by clicking on the clock

Live play by play text of all events
Viewable by period, or all at once
Roster data shows live game + season stats
Quick links to show
Last goal(s)
Last play(s)
All goals