Erik Linask : Sports Technology
Erik Linask
writer

A Look at Some Numbers

A look at the results from a few companies. EarthLink announced 2Q2013 Results: Revenues for 2Q2013 is $313.4 million, "which is...

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Tech Leaders Brin, Zuckerberg and Bezos are Changing Everything

In the last few years there has been an incredible display of tech leaders transcending the status quo and jumping into new...

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If there's no "mobile" in your video development strategy, you're losing revenue

I’ll be speaking at the upcoming IT Expo West show in Las Vegas on August 27, where one of the topics...

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Axis Communications Uses APIs and Low-Light Tech to Differentiate

One constant in business has been the ecosystem can be more important than the product. As an example, if a person is...

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Jetman: A Rocket Powered Human Can Fly

Iron Man fans everywhere rejoice as it is now possible to fly with rocket power and a wing strapped to your back....

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Grandstream UCM6100 PBX - Security & GPLv2 Disaster?

Last week I wrote Grandstream UCM6100 PBX - Yet Another Aastra & snom Disaster? I was looking at it from a partner...

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Six Degrees of Mobile Data Plan Innovation: Loyalty-Based Plans

In this sixth installment of the Six Degrees of Mobile Data Plan Innovation blog series, Alcatel-Lucent’s Rich Crowe (@rhcrowe) examines loyalty-based mobile data plans. With loyalty-based plans, subscribers get rewards for keeping up active relationships with mobile network operators. Operators can use these plans as the basis for retaining subscribers, encouraging increased spending and data usage, or forming mutually profitable partnerships with retailers.

RAISE the bar

Airlines offer them. So do hotels, credit card companies and, yes, mobile network operators. “They” are loyalty programs that reward customers for making frequent purchases. Airlines, hotels and credit cards tend to stick to the script, offering free flights, nights and merchandise. Mobile network operators have no such script. Today, operators reward loyal customers with voice minutes, text messages, accessories, ringtones, discounted device upgrades or even dining, shopping, travel and spa services. As mobile network operators’ business models grow more data-centric, the creative use of mobile data will become essential to ensuring that their loyalty-based plans remain relevant.

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To Hell with Gift Registries: How's Thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?

June 17, 2010

Here's a quality I admire in others: being difficult to buy gifts for.   It speaks to a kind of selflessness - to lack the conceit of those who, unasked, share their wants and preferences. Give me this person: someone whose colleagues, spouse and siblings couldn't tell you what he or she materially desires.                                                              My wife Marie possesses this selfless quality. In an early confidential moment about a decade ago - while we were living (separately; Catholic) in her native Dublin, I recall, Marie's older sister Sue frowned at me during the first week of November and declared with an exasperated shake of the head: "Marie is impossible to buy for."   No such problems here.   The past two years, I've been specific in the weeks leading up to Christ's birthday and my own: Get me the Oxford English Dictionary set and Slingbox. (Given Web access, I can now deliver the etymology of any word in our language while watching "The Office" on my DVR.)   Not only am I selfish - I'm also hypocritical, because I find gift registries totally obnoxious.   Isn't thinking of your gift recipient part of gift-giving?

I'm in Love with the Girl from Oil Star

April 20, 2010

I met my wife one year after moving to San Francisco, in 1999, when she began working as a waitress in the bar and restaurant where I worked as a barman. She was out for the summer on a J-visa from Ireland, between her second and third years of university in Dublin, her native city.   For our first date I met her on Market Street and guided her onto a bus that carried us to Candlestick Park, to see the Giants host the St. Louis Cardinals on Orlando Cepeda Day.   We were two of 50,435 at the park. It was July 11. A young J.D.

Bowling for Jesus, or Bowling against Judas?

April 1, 2010



When I was 17, a few high school friends decided that it was cool to bowl, and five or six of us began frequenting the Rip Van Winkle Bowling Lanes here in Norwalk, Conn.   It's never been clear to me just how that bowling alley got its name. I'm reminded of Sunday afternoons in the living room as a kid, my father drowsing at full length on the sofa, two inches of ash suspended magically from the end of his Marlboro Red, while the late great, bespectacled southpaw Earl Anthony let it fly on ABC. (A six-time PBA Player of the Year, Anthony was the first pro bowler ever to earn more than $100,000 in a single season - take that, Roy Munson.)   My pals and I tossed the occasional turkey, but for the most part we were more gutter than gobbler. Back then, the bowling alley's bar was notoriously lax with respect to the federal drinking age, and we often spent most of our outings playing Golden Tee and sipping the drinks of newly indoctrinated alcoholics-to-be - pissy beer, amaretto, margaritas and kahlua.

Michael Jackson-Type Drag Queens and the World Cup 2010 on Mobile Devices

February 18, 2010

  Here's how Wikipedia defines "seasonal affective disorder": a mood disorder in which people who have normal mental health throughout most of the year experience depressive symptoms in the winter or, less frequently, in the summer, spring or autumn, repeatedly, year after year.   That part about having "normal mental health" most of the time notwithstanding, it's an affliction from which my father and I both suffer.   His own "SAD," as it's known (how cute), worsened considerably when my dad moved to Sweden after remarrying a native Nordic. They'd been living in Manhattan when their first child was born, a girl named Heather, and a year later the three of them moved to Stockholm and another kid was born, a boy named Patrick.   Dad's letters and electronic missives from Sweden take dark turns in the winter months. Now that he's divorced again and living on his own, they are full of morbid self-analysis and disdain.   But back in the happy days of his marriage to Nina, my ex-stepmom, his "SAD" thoughts often were directed at her.   One of his best lines came when Patrick was just a toddler, during a rant about Nina's bossiness and how she and Swedish culture generally exact a sort of spiritual castration of males. He wondered how Patrick would develop ...

Uncle Bill's Playboys and Why I'm Psyched for the 'New' Super Bowl Shuffle

January 20, 2010

Remember 1985?  
 That summer, Butch Wynegar caught 102 games for the New York Yankees, backed up by Ron Hassey and Juan Espino.   The 1985 Topps baseball card set featured a baby fat-faced Mark McGwire on a special "USA Team" Olympics sub-set that also included Shane Mack and Oddibe McDowell.   In 1985, my sister Rachel and I used to watch "Family Ties" and we had no idea that the mom would come out of the closet a quarter-century later (the actress who played her, that is, though I never sensed a real closeness between Elyse Keaton and her wimpy husband Michael).   Back in 1985, Aunt Karen and Uncle Bill were still married and my brother and I looked forward to our family outings to their country home in Bangor, Maine, because it meant we would visit our cool cousins, Kit (who would become a big "Knight Rider" fan - shocker) and Morgan (now a snowboarding instructor).   It also meant that we'd have access to uncle Bill's considerable "Playboy" magazine collection.                                                              There were other fun things to do in the Bangor. In the early years at the house, there was a beautiful golden retriever named K.B. (Karen/Bill). Our grandparents (Aunt Karen is mom's sister) lived up there toward the very ends of their lives - and Pop-Pop, for a short while, had a handsome German shepherd dog called "Champ" who scared the life out of me.

Who Needs Instant Replay When You Have My Father?

November 23, 2009

  Though each of them took place more than 25 years ago - before the rise digital television, Flip camcorders or the great Thierry Henry controversy that's still dominating international sports headlines - the two most important on-field events in my life require no instant replay.   I remember them perfectly well.   They involve two of the times that my dad, straight after his work at the auto shop and still wearing his grease-encrusted "Dinan Auto" work shirt and pants, rushed onto a playing field in our quiet Connecticut town to defend the honor of one of his sons.   The first time it was my older brother Terry's. The 10-year-old had become embroiled in an argument near second base at Gamble Field, one of two little league diamonds at Mead Park in New Canaan, Conn. I was sitting among the spectators in the little aluminum grandstands - among the well-to-do men in polo shirts, khakis and loafers and their long-haired wives, varicose vein embolisms giving courage to short shorts that, the way they were crossed on the open grandstands, led to exciting, confused thoughts in my own 8-year-old mind.   Among them and my dad. Marlboro Red dangling from his face (he would switch to Marlboro Lights in my teenage years, and finally, after re-marrying a Swedish woman whose idea of lunch was cucumber slices and yogurt, to a pipe), dad stood a little apart from the grandstand crowd, gazing intently at my brother, a natural shortstop who early in his career had a habit of "pushing" rather than throwing the ball to first base.   At some point in the game it happened - Rob Ardigo rounded second base and collided with my brother somewhere between second a third. A fight ensued, and one of the coaches emerged from the bench to where the two boys stood tussling.

Hagler-Leonard, Yanks-Phils and My Beloved DVR

October 28, 2009

Puberty, a futile attempt at Rogaine, 150 pounds and three cavities ago - when I was 12 - my inability to awaken from a deep sleep led to one of the most traumatic events of my life.   It was Monday, April 6, 1987, and at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, Sugar Ray Leonard and Marvin Hagler were preparing to enter the ring for the World Middleweight Championship.   You remember the backstory: the beloved Leonard had been retired for a few years, and the shaved-headed Hagler was at the top of his game - a killer in boxing trunks.   At the Dinan household in New Canaan, Conn., the fight warranted a rare expenditure on Pay-Per-View - itself a technological marvel at the time. My father boxed as a middleweight in the Marines, and one of the early sporting lessons he taught my brother and me (also a traumatic event) came one summer afternoon out in the yard when he refereed a three-round bout between us. 

My mom had bought the boxing gloves at Schatzo's store in her hometown of Belmar, N.J., where we were all visiting her parents. Her own father was a boxer, a middleweight and champion of his barracks in the U.S. Army.   The fight with my brother was a draw.

Chicago Bulls, Blackhawks Turn to CRM to Boost Sales

October 1, 2009

  New York Knicks fans like me - those of us who came of age in the 1990s - will always rank Reggie Miller of the Indiana Pacers at the top of our "clutch player" lists, as well as our "most antagonistic relationships with Spike Lee" lists.   Who could forget Game 1 of the 1995 Eastern Conference semis? The Knickerbockers cruising to a 105-99 lead with 18.7 seconds remaining . .

ESPN, NBA-Turner Venture Pursue Fantasy Basketball Super-Site

September 28, 2009

I'm planning next year to serve as commissioner in a fantasy baseball league whose owners will include relatives, friends, colleagues and my brother-in-law Bill, a guy I sometimes feel bad for.   Not that his wife isn't great. My little sister is what our mom would call "a great gal."   But Bill - like me - gets hooked on gadgets and computer games sometimes, and my sister has demonstrated little patience for that.   A few years back, I bought Bill a pocket-sized electronic chess game whose beeping drove my sister absolutely insane.

ESPN Pursues Local Sports Coverage Online

September 14, 2009



I met my buddy David Fine nearly 25 years ago, when the two of us came up as swimmers at the New Canaan YMCA here in southwestern Connecticut.   Dave, more than I, would form part of a core group of guys that would emerge as one of the state's elite men's teams about a decade later, as a group of 16- to 18-year-olds - from New Canaan as well as surrounding towns - peaked late in high school under the direction of an insanely dedicated coach, Rich. The club would send more than one swimmer to what was popularly known as the "Junior Olympics," including a relay team.   We practiced from 5:20 to 7 a.m. every weekday morning, and then again from about 3 to 6 p.m. every week night, with a grueling 6 to 9 a.m. practice on Saturdays, for which Ludeman saved his most sinister set creations.

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