It’s a brave new world my friends.
There were more tweets sent in a single day during the Olympics last week than there were during the entire 17-day competition in Beijing in 2008. In 2010, during the Vancouver Winter Olympics, there were around 307,000 mentions of the term Olympics during the opening weekend of the event, as opposed to 3.5 million this time around. And we may not even be… → Read More
There’s no such thing as bad publicity. A source tells TechCrunch that mainstream news coverage of the temporary suspension of an NBC Olympics coverage tweeter / hater gave Twitter’s signup rate a boost. The same source revealed that the debacle led to internal communication within Twitter, describing the scandal as having a silver lining: “A good thing”.
Why? Well, Twitter needs user growth… → Read More
If you’ve grown sick of these NBC/Olympics stories, too bad! We have nearly two weeks of Olympics and their respective tape delays left. I don’t even want to count how many hours of delayed Ryan Seacrest that is.
Here is a wild, EXCLUSIVE, Olympic story that could only be found by top-notch journalists with Internet connections and Twitter accounts (where could we find people with those… → Read More
We’ve been pretty outspoken about NBC’s coverage of the Olympics. From what looked like a good start full of social media promise, the broadcaster has failed to deliver the most crucial element of all: a large, unfettered river of live sports content from the event itself, available to anyone, not just cable subscribers (coverage here, here, and here). It’s been getting a lot of grief on… → Read More
If you’re like me, you never real got into spectator sports. Maybe it was the jock-induced swirlies or maybe it was the pointlessness of ball-based games, but I couldn’t give two shot puts about the Olympics. Thankfully, there’s the Olwinpics Blocker from FFFFF.at. → Read More
Just in time for the 2012 London Olympics, Samsung, one of the games’ official partners, has released a Union Jack-bearing Olympics-edition Galaxy S III, a little something special for Londoners enjoying one of the oldest and most revered sporting traditions on the planet.
Unfortunately for everyone who isn’t on the Queen’s team, the phone doesn’t actually support the Olympic games as much as… → Read More
Voula Papachristou, Greece’s triple-jump champion, was barred from competing in the London Olympic Games by the Hellenic Olympic Committee after an offensive tweet on Monday.
She tweeted, “with so many Africans in Greece, at least the West Nile mosquitos will be eating food from their own home.” → Read More
As if the rules at the 2012 London Olympics didn’t sound draconian enough, the organization has banned personal Wi-Fi hotspots from the games, thereby ensuring that people will just tether their phones in secret and surf the web like the champions they are.
This follows hot on the heels of prohibitions from sharing Olympic news via social media. Can we all just agree that this isn’t about… → Read More
On the heels of a deal with Facebook to promote Olympic conversations on NBC’s Facebook page, the broadcast network today is taking one more step to improve its social standing during the big sports event. It is linking up with Storify, the social-media “story creator”, to put streams of real-time Olympic content, curated by NBC journalists, across Today.com as well as NBC’s 10 owned TV station… → Read More
Community encouragement service LifeKraze has launched its iOS app and announced a campaign, dubbed “Mission: Inspire,” with twelve Olympic athletes to inspire users.
LifeKraze lets users post 160-character messages (with photos and links, if they want) about their day’s accomplishments; they each have 300 points per day to award to other users. These points can then be redeemed for… → Read More
In one week, the Olympics kick off. When you think about it, they aren’t so different from our startup world. How many pitches have you heard that include the phrase “dream team?”
If you had to compare the startup world to one sports league, what would it be? I’d argue the NBA, where the best players leave school early to start their pro careers and work to join dynasty teams with other… → Read More
With the Olympics due to start in just over a week, the International Olympic Committee has finally taken the wraps off a new social media hub, apart from its main website, for athletes and fans to cosy up to one another. It will include integrations with leading social media sites like Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook, foursquare and Google+, along with some content created on the site itself. The… → Read More
The two-week countdown to the Olympics is on, and the big broadcasters are getting their ducks in line for how they will be streaming, tweeting, sharing, and generally filling your digital life with their own twists on the global sporting event. The latest development comes from the BBC, which today released the iOS and Android versions of its Olympics apps featuring text commentaries, news… → Read More
Facebook and NBC are expected to announce a partnership today for the London Olympic Games. In short, Facebook users will be reminded to watch NBC’s coverage and NBC viewers will be reminded to join the conversation on Facebook.
On the surface, it looks like a straightforward marketing partnership where Facebook gets web traffic plus promotion on TV, while NBC gets a more engaging viewer… → Read More
Last week, Facebook staked out its claim as a prime destination for people looking for this summer’s Olympics coverage online. Today, the BBC threw its hat into the social media ring, too — it’s putting its sports coverage into a new Timeline app. The app, which is only accessible by UK users, is in beta form (pictured here) and live already: people can currently access streams of Wimbledon. That… → Read More
A lot of Londoners (me included) haven’t been able to get tickets to the London Olympics this summer. But we’ll all get something else, Facebook announced today. The company is launching Explore London 2012, a dedicated page for athletes to communicate with fans and provide their own personalized updates around the event, including medal wins and their own photographs as well as status updates. → Read More
Don’t copy that pole vault! According to the London 2012 Olympic “conditions for ticket holders,” you are not allowed to take pictures or video of the events nor are you allowed to “exploit” any video on social networks.
Images, video and sound recordings of the Games taken by a Ticket Holder cannot be used for any purpose other than for private and domestic purposes and a Ticket Holder may… → Read More
Mayor of London and Top Gear slowpoke Boris Johnson is trying to make London one of the most wired cities, just in time for the Olympics. During a recent conference, Johnson announced a plan to install wifi hotspots in “every lampost and bus stop.” → Read More
It was no surprise that the Olympics was a ratings blockbuster for NBC. The network’s ratings more than doubled during February Sweeps, up 105% from last year, according to Nielsen and RBC Capital Markets research. The interesting footnote, however, is GE’s cross-platform success on the Web and mobile. According to RBC Capital Market’s latest report, “Media and Entertainment: 1Q10 Preview &… → Read More
The coverage of the Winter Olympics on NBC has been painful to watch. In addition to the tape delays which ruined the outcomes for anyone paying attention to any other news, sports or social media outlet other than NBC, there are a lot of other complaints. In between the hard-hitting reports of polar bears in the Canadian North and life among the lumberjacks, NBC did manage to squeeze in some… → Read More
NBC is driving people on the Internet crazy by tape-delaying coverage of the Olympics until primetime. Okay, maybe it’s only driving Henry Blodget crazy, and everyone on Twitter.
Well, not everyone on Twitter—68 percent, according to a recent reading I took on Twitter Sentiment. Roughly two thirds of Tweets about the NBC Olympics are negative. Some examples of the venting occurring on… → Read More
Sky Sports HD, anyone? The Western economies may be slowing, but the past summer’s sporting events, including Euro 2008 and the Beijing Olympics, have boosted HDTV’s profile in Europe. Both events generated a “surge in the penetration of of High Definition technologies throughout Europe.” So says DEG Europe, which is a sort of HD lobby there that tries to convince consumers that… → Read More
The Great Firewall of China strikes again! Chinese authorities have blocked access to iTunes because several Olympic athletes downloaded a pro-Tibet album. As an ignorant American, how China handles its business re: Tibet isn’t any of my concern, but blocking iTunes while the Olympics are still ongoing seems unsophisticated to me. Why play into the perception that you’re a… → Read More
NBC has turned to Denon with help on the audio control for this years Olympics. As it turns out, this is the fifth straight Olympic games that Denon has been involved with. The AV company suppled NBC with their top of the line gear for work in post-production. Denon’s flagship audio/video receiver, the AVR-5308, plus a DVD-1940 are installed in the Executive Board Room, while two AVR-2808… → Read More
The Hong Kong LEGO User Group used some 300,000 LEGO blocks and 4,500 LEGO people to recreate some amazing scenes and venues from the Beijing Games. Hit the jump for some views of the Water Cube, table tennis, beach volleyball, and more… → Read More
There is a nausiating amount of ’08 Olympic video coverage this year, and all we really want to watch is a little Table Tennis. There is so much video recording that for every 24 hour day, there is 212 hours being recorded onto massive media servers. Seagate hooked NBC up with 20 Omneon MediaDeck servers that hold a total of 500,000 gigabytes, or 500 terabytes, for the task. Plus, while the… → Read More
This isn’t soooo bad, I suppose, but apparently about 55 seconds of the opening ceremony for the Olympics this year was rendered as computer-generated imagery, or CGI as we like to call it 95% of the time. While I was all set to slam my broken-hearted fist down on my desk, screaming “How could you?!! You bastards!!!”, it turns out that the part that was computer generated actually did happen… → Read More
Just noticed this graphic as NBC took a commercial break during Olympic coverage. Can’t wait to watch the upcoming “SWIMMMING” events. Nice work there, NBC. You’d fit right in here at CrunchGear. As we always say, “Proofreeeading, schmroofreedninng.” → Read More
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