Personalizing Sports Highlights
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For many, college football isn’t a sport, it’s a passion. Imagine if such fans could hop on a computer anywhere in the world and handpick video clips, sort statistics and track individual players for their team's recent games. Well, that’s exactly who the software and marketing folks at Praja Inc. are trying to feed.
This football season Praja unveiled its Internet-based ActionSnaps!, a technology designed by Ramesh Jain, Praja's president and CEO, and a group of other young graduates who cut their engineering teeth at UCSD's Visual Computing Lab. ActionSnaps began real-life beta testing three months ago at the University of Michigan, where Praja's chairman and cofounder, C.K. Prahalad, is a professor in the graduate school of business administration. The first game to get the ActionSnaps! treatment was the university's season opener against Notre Dame.
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This month contracts will be announced with the University of Notre Dame, the University of California, Kansas State University, the University of Nebraska and Oklahoma State University.
Although the company is in discussion with other schools, it will limit to 11 the number it takes on this year. A push for professional sports teams is expected next year; indeed, talks with several already are under way. This is all happening rapidly. Only in March did Praja settle on sports as the subject on which to train the technology it had spent two and one-half years perfecting and licensing.
The system is not simply replaying video clips on a computer. Terry Hicks, Praja's business development manager, explains it uses "smart" software to sort through feeds from up to 12 camera angles and pick the best four for storage and later playback. ActionSnaps! is designed as a richly featured highlight service, not to serve as a comprehensive record of a game. The 50 video clips saved from each game average eight to 10 seconds in length. "If you want to watch the whole game again you will videotape it," says Hicks. But that videotape is static, too, in that it can’t easily be arranged to show every interception. And it can’t contain, for example, clips from a coach's press conference or other new information that can be added after the game.
The potential college football audience for ActionSnaps! is vast. Of the country's 100 million college football fans, 50 million have computers. Of that group, about 5 percent, or 2.5 million, fit into the "avid" fan category. Those avid fans better have good computers.
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ActionSnaps! requires a minimum of a Pentium 266 with 48 megs of RAM, 64 megs recommended. (A Macintosh version is under development.) The connection to the Internet should be at least 28.8 kilobytes, the faster the better, especially for the initial software download. Of course, many of those avid fans also work in businesses where high-powered computers with fat Internet connections are common. "God forbid they connect at work, too," says Hicks, laughing. For more information, check out www.praja.com.
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Using The Web To Watch Your Child At Day Care
By use of the Internet and cameras, KinderView is building a company based on easing the anxieties of parents with children in preschool or day care. Run by Reneé Naert and the first offshoot of Tom Grafton's Cyber-Signs Inc., the Kearny Mesa firm has developed a software viewing package called Kids 2.1 that allows parents to log in through the Web for a window into their child's classroom. While not full-motion video, the images are generally refreshed every three to four seconds, allowing a clean look at classroom activities.
In this relatively new business arena, the company’s primary competitors are Kindercam out of Atlanta and Watch Me in Texas. KinderView seeks to separate itself via its software, written by David Boodman, executive vice president of the parent company; and by keeping the bulk of the computing power on its site, rather than at the schools. "Our servers are located centrally on our premises, not at the day-care centers which would be a nightmare for operations access," says Grafton. "The day-care people don’t know the NT operating system."
KinderView has 12 centers under contract. It charges the centers for hooking up and running the system. The schools then either bill the parents who sign up a monthly fee or build the cost into each student's tuition. Among KinderView's clients in San Diego is the Scripps Exploring Academy in Scripps Ranch.
Cyber-Signs was started by Grafton about two years ago and is stocked primarily with UCSD graduates. Naert joined the 14-employee company a year ago, bringing with him the unique perspective of an individual who has a doctorate in computer sciences and also, along with his wife, owned a day-care center. "My main claim was I could change two diapers simultaneously while feeding two 3-year-olds," he says.
While angel-funded KinderView is Cyber-Signs' first commercial effort, Grafton says the viewing technology company has other ventures under development. The company has opened an office in Washington, D.C., and is seeking a contract with military day care and hospital operations and to provide a viewing service for military personnel at sea. Other divisions will target nursing homes and corporate day- care centers, where the rich fiber networks in modern buildings could allow employees a purer video-like view of their children.
Security, of course, is a big concern at KinderView. Parents get passwords that are changed periodically. And the passwords are only good for their child's classroom. Also, the digital encryption system that kicks in before the feed leaves the classroom is three times stronger than the standard and has an encoding key that changes every 15 minutes.
Grafton says the goal with KinderView within three years is to have its cameras in 10 percent of the nation's 100,000 day-care centers. For more information check out www.kinderview.com.
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