HDR turned off:

 HDR turned on:

Even though soccer and pubs go hand and hand we at the Sounders decided to help educate the casual fan about the top soccer pubs in Seattle and test the growing geolocation market using a branded trip on Gowalla.  

By checking in to 11 pubs using Gowalla fans can win exclusive merchandise for the Sounders FC and Seattle Bank and interact with fellow supporters in a new way.

Visit some of these links for more information on the new promotion: 

• Sounders: Press Release | Promotional homepage
• Puget Sound Business Journal: Sounders FC hopes to score with World Cup frenzy | Sounders grab for share of World Cup glory
• Techcrunch: 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa: The Ultimate Guide To Digital Delight
• Gowalla: Trip home | MLS goes out with Gowalla

SoundersFC.com is nominated for Seattle Weekly's 2010 Web Award for Seattle's Best Online Sports Presence.  Some great judges so it would certainly be an honor to win.

Scott Thomas: Designing the Obama Campaign from 99% on Vimeo.

Great conference video from Scott Thomas on designing the obama campaign.  I was specifically intrigued by the form designing technique tips.

I bit the bullet and ordered the Nexus One and decided to use it exclusively for a week and see how I liked it. My thought process was that in a worst case scenario, I would hate it and would have to return/sell it, with the best case being that I would love it and begin to use it as my everyday phone.  In the end I certainly did not end up hating the device, but did choose to sell it and stick with the trusty 3GS.

Usage Background

Couple of notes on usage.  First of all, I have an iPhone 3GS already therefore I used my sim card from that phone during the week of usage.  The card worked like a charm with the only disappointment being that 3G was not supported.  Calls, EDGE data and wifi connections all worked great.

I primarily used the device while traveling in Philadelphia for a business trip, therefore relied heavy on mobile internet, maps/GPS and phone calls.  

Pros

• Widgets - being a first time Android user I loved the widget concept.  Have interactivity on panels is a great feature.
• Screen - The OLED screen was beautiful.
• Camera - The 5 MP camera with LED flash was a nice touch.
• Nav - Built-in turn-by-turn navigation was easy to use and one of the better GPS units I have operated.
• Build quality - Had a very sturdy feeling in your hand.
• Multi-tasking - Being able to run multiple apps was great; however eventually you will notice a slow down and app crashes with too much running at once.
• Gallery browser - I was surprised at how I loved the gallery browser application.  It displayed photos in a refreshing way and not simply a re-hash of iPhone apps.
• Soft buttons - The 4 soft buttons along the bottom were useful to always have present.  Haptic feedback was also nice.
• Google integration - A very deep integration with all Google apps, including Voice, Gmail and Picasa.
• Voice entry - I didn't think I was going to like it, but being able to use a fairly accurate voice entry proved to be very useful.

Cons

• Android - with all the great things Android has, it was surprising unstable and laggy.
• Smoothness - Nearly all motion seemed slightly jerky compared to the iPhone.
• Keyboard - I found the virtual keyboard to be very inaccurate, especially buttons towards the edges.
• Scrollball positioning - the scroll ball on the bottom is nice to have, but it seems positioned to low and too close to the bottom edge.  Felt awkward in the hand.
• Apps - There are certainly a lot of apps available, but the apps I use everyday were not available (i.e. Dropbox) and the ones that were available seemed much less functional and clean as their iPhone counterpards (i.e. Facebook and Evernote).
• Exchange - The phone supports exchange for email and contacts, but does not include calendar integration.
• Music player - it sucks.  There is just no other way to say it.
• iTunes support - I use music on my phone everyday and the fact that there is no iTunes support is a killer to me.  Using DoubleTwist and other alternatives are ok, but are very lacking.
• Memory - For over $500 you think they could have put in more than 4 GB.
• No visual voicemail - the lack of integrated visual voicemail was annoying.  Obviously you can use Google Voice, but that would require a phone number change.

Final Conclusion

At the end of the day my decision to sell the device and stick to the 3GS was due to three factors:

1. Exchange support - Not having calendar sync seems to very surprisingly overlooked.  Most people who use Exchange use it in a work environment, therefore calendaring support is essential.
2. Music playback and iTunes integration - One of the main reasons I switched to an iPhone in the first place was I was tired of carrying a phone and an iPod around, consolidating into one device was amazing. After a week of using the Nexus One I had the feeling that I would be moving back to two devices as the music player was so poor and the iTunes integration was non-exisistant.  
3. Apps - As mentioned above the app options were too limited and the apps available seemed to lack polish.

You can read the full Q&A here.  A second entry was also added outlining what other business can learn from our "democracy in sports" philosophy.

The article discusses our use of Ez.com for the Seahawks and Sounders FC, a service I shared a month ago.

To read the full article visit: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704471504574445502831219412.html

The main reason we decided to try out this product is to have our own branded URL shortner.  We have seem too many circumstances where a tweet is re-tweeted, but the link is changed to another site or where it is hard to distinguish which links are ours.  Secondly, it also allows us to create very detailed reporting for corporate partner promotions (i.e. contest or sweepstakes) and team promotions (i.e. third-party ticket ads or viral marketing campaigns).

The service itself is pretty cut in dry, setup took less than 10 minutes:

• Setup custom domain(s) - we love it because we can manage several different brands with different custom domains
• Paste in URL to shorten or use bookmarklet to create shortened URL
• Copy shortened URL to desired service

Once the URL is in the wild the service offers a slick click stream view that outlines every click in near realtime, individually, or via aggregate data.

Some interesting features are:

• The service allows you to choose either 307 or 301 redirects
• Ability to create notes to help you remember which link is which
• Referrer information
• IP information for each click
• Browser identification
• Basic statistics charting
• Bot tracking
• Total vs. unique clicking information
• Keywords from google, twitter or facebook searches
• API
• Ability to create custom alias
• Multiple administration accounts
• Downloadable stats
• Multiple custom domains (the killer app for us)

Overall I am loving the product and would highly recommend it; however, I would like to see a better geo charting (right now you have to click on each click to where a click comes from), better views for conversation tracking and most importantly integration from third-party applications.

Sports is a competition

Unlike other industries sports is built upon competition and coaches and front office management will do anything possible to protect a competitive advantage.  Take the fine in San Diego for Cromartie's bad food tweet.  To the outside observer this looks to be an over reaction by the Chargers, but since Antonio certainly has other NFL friends that the Chargers' front office may try and sign in the future, something as simple as bad food could be a reason to give another team a leg up in signing an athlete, potentially resulting in not improving a position, and therefore less wins.

Another example is the NFL Draft.  Say a draftee mentions on a social media that a specific team was going to pick him.  Now say a team later in the draft who wants this same draftee reads the post and trades up to obtain the player.  The original team that told the draft pick he was going to be drafted by them, now has lost a player that they have spent months, in some cases years, grading and scouting which yields a direct impact on the performance of a team.

Trading analog dollars for digital cents

This phrase applies directly to leagues wanting to prevent sporting events from being covered live on the internet.  Take the NFL's multi-billion dollar television deal that now includes streaming of games on DirectTV and NFL.com.  If any person or business had billions of dollars coming to them from a valued partner wouldn't you want to fight on their behalf to protect the revenue source?  Given the rule of thumb that it is 10 times more expensive to obtain a new customer than keep a loyal customer, I would say yes it make perfect business sense.

Sure someone streaming the game on UStream or Justin.tv is not going to create a major impact on the overall viewership, but when the next renewal period comes and online video is more relevant the NFL, using common business sense, would much rather get a high dollar deal from an established partner instead of low-dollar deals from several social media sites.

Sports journalism is loosing standards

If you talk to any veteran sports journalist the number one criticism they would provide you about the new breed of sports journalist is that rather than providing verified news, the new sports reporter wants to be the first to break a story and in many cases it is like throwing spaghetti at a wall; they just hope something sticks.

With uncontrolled social media this problem is compounded.  Say a players tweets during the game that he wants a bigger part of the offense/defense.  It is very plausible an untrained journalist would immediately take this tweet to mean that the player is unhappy with is current team and a media firestorm will begin, a definite negative for any team.  It is possible that the journalist is correct, but unless you ask the athlete what exactly he or she meant by the tweet, you really don't know what the whole story is.  In most cases 140 characters is not enough to draw a conclusion on.