Pamplin Media Group – TFNW19: Sensors and sensibility – Portland Tribune

TechFestNW takes the temperature of the mediated world and unearths amazing solutions

Day one of TechFestNW brought together a mix of leaders from the sharp end of technology, trying to make their stories relatable to the rest of us.

The two standout talks of the day were both about sports. They worked because they didn’t rely heavily on tech or venture capital buzzwords such as disruption, A.I. and blockchain, and because they were about real-world things: athletes.

Greene

Columbia Consulting Group founder and CEO, Ralph Greene, is a branding expert who signed such greats to Nike as Tiger Woods, LeBron James and Kobe Bryant. He stated that people are inspired by the way athletes are always trying to better themselves. Now technology and data have made that process of improvement not just visible but entertaining, part of the story itself.

In his talk “How Tech Makes Us All Better Athletes….and Everyone is an Athlete!” Greene said, “The old way of prepping, when I played sports, was ‘practice, play, sleep, repeat.’ Since the 1990s they have been learning how to prepare themselves better. That changed dramatically as we got more hype around the ecosystem.” Now, for instance, we can use video and sensors to dissect the motions of a sport, scrutinizing every millimeter of a player’s movements.

Greene recalled that sharing film with other football coaches meant driving to Denny’s on a Friday night and handing over CDs. Before that, it was VHS and Super 8. It was a pain. Then the video-sharing app HUDL came along and it made hours of football footage searchable and taggable.

Roll tape

“It was focused on the elite first, then suddenly it quickly hit the mainstream. It went to 100 percent of high school football teams in just five years.”

Suddenly all the best players had a highlight reel with a cool rap soundtrack.

HUDL has expanded, with HUDL Technique, into other sports. (hudl.com/solutions/highschool/athletic-departments)

Greene also talked about some University of Washington doctors who were soccer fans but developed the VICIS soft football helmet which diffuses impact and reduce concussions. (The VICIS Zero 1 costs $950.) One hundred and twenty players in the NFL now use them and they are growing in youth sports.

Another tech he highlighted was the FitrWoman, a menstrual period tracker which suggests training and nutrition based on hormones. It started with marathoners but is spreading to other sports, where coaches say it reduces the awkwardness of conversations about periods.

Soccer and NASCAR ahead

Greene showed a garment made by Strive, a sensor management company, which puts sensors that look like electrical circuitry in compression garments. “This is biomedical transfer through the garment. It gives you so much data, such as fatigue levels.”

There are also Handful yoga pants and bras, and RunGum, a caffeine drink replacement for distance runners who “don’t want to pee at the starting line.”

In conversation, Kate Delhagen, founder of Oregon Sports Angels raised the question of who owns the data. This is not clear yet. What is clear I that athletes and coaches are becoming early adopters.

Greene told how the Dallas Mavericks use a blood biomarker analysis that helps cut down on flu and colds and helps recovery. “They haven’t got more wins with it, but the players are doing it.”

“Will there come a time when every athlete has a data scientist on their staff?” asked Delhagen.

Greene said maybe. Just look at NASCAR, where each car has a giant control room with monitors showing every aspect of the car’s performance in real time.

“That will happen for sports. It’s happening in Europe in soccer. Will the athletes or the team drive it? I’m not sure.”

Fluid memes

Ice hockey Olympic gold medalist Angela Ruggerio, now running the Sports Innovation Lab, a market research and advisory firm, introduced the ideas of the fluid sports fan. Teams get their revenues from four sources: tickets, sponsorships, merchandise and rights, but currently there’s not much talk about disruption, she said. Sports is supposed to be pure entertainment: 89 percent of sports fans say they prefer to watch a game live, not on a screen.

The age of the local fan (e.g., illustrated by a ‘Reds go pro’ poster from 1868) gave way to the global fan (the 1966 FIFA World Cup). Now children are fluid fans, following players across social media regardless of team (LeBron, Wayne Rooney), and having multiple online identities that may reference different teams.

Fluid fans are open to change (like followers of music or TV shows), they are empowered to choose, and they are continuously evolving.

“Suddenly, sports has competition from entertainment and video games. Fortnite, which is social, is doing something sports isn’t,” Ruggerio said.

One minor league soccer club in the UK, Forest Green Rovers, has a large online following just because it is carbon neutral.

Sports Innovation Labs recommends teams consider themselves media companies, and not just push media companies. They should build smart venues in entertainment zones, with creature comforts and good Wi-Fi, and they should do more in sponsorship and monetizing their assets.

Zonal marking

In the Sam Adams era there was talk of a Rose Quarter entertainment zone. She pointed out the Staples Center has revived downtown Los Angeles.

There will always be diehard fans who get the tattoo, but they will be the minority.

“Gen Z is constantly evolving, aligning themselves with values or with brands that look like them.”

Real-time legal sports betting will change things too, as stadia capture player data and feed it to bookies and the public. It may be that players own their private (biomedical) data but not their public data — what’s captured on video. It will be up to them, the unions the agents, leagues and owners to battle that one out.

One last thing: 8K television, which is coming to the Japanese Olympics, is amazing. “I don’t like figure skating but we watched some in 8K and we were clapping. We felt like we were in the venue,” said Ruggerio.

Preach

Adam Clayton Powell III calls himself a recovering journalist, always on the lookout for something new. He is fascinated with Africa. “They’re doing different things,” he said. “They have different assumptions.”

He has been visiting Africa two-to-four times a year since 1990, and Asia usually twice a year.

Powell is the Director of Washington Policy Initiatives for the University of Southern California and University Fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy. His talk “Tech for Social Good — How Africa and Asia are Leading the Way” uncovered some gems.

It is well known that Africa skipped the landline phase and went straight to cheap cell phones and very cheap cell service. (Its first self-made billionaire, Mohammed Ibrahim, made his name with the as the founder of Africa’s wireless carrier Celtel). Games are not common on phones, but practical apps are. One called iCow from Kenya sends SMS messages to help farmers run their dairy herds. There’s an iCow farmer library where they can share information, and “kalendas” telling them when to do certain things. It’s so useful it has spread to South Korea, which is as first world as a country can get.

SIM Farm

Another hit app is SIMpill, which reminds people when to take medication, call the doctor, make an appointment etc. There was 94 percent compliance during trials. Missed appointments fell from 30 percent to 4 percent just with these simple reminders.

CellScope, which was developed at Berkeley, is a high-quality microscope that clips on to a phone camera. This made it easy for even a lay person to detect a parasitic worm in Africa and oral cancer in India. We have not seen it in the U.S. because it is not an FDA-approved medical device.

With the app mPest a farmer dials a number, hold the phone up to the air for 30 seconds, sending the sound from their field to a database for analysis. The app texts back which pests it heard, both their chirping noises and by their wing sound patterns while flying. This helps the farmer know what insecticides to use; and the app can warn farmers miles away of coming plagues of pests. It’s like Shazam for bugs.

Asked about the downside of social media in developing countries, Powell agreed that bad actors are learning to interfere in elections. One thing that is common is that dissidents or challengers to the status quo are always cyber bullied.

Moo

The headliner Thursday was moovel U.S.’s Nat Parker, or as it’s known right now, “moovel North America (becoming REACH NOW)”. Parker is a local lad. He got his MBA from Portland State University, which was hosting the conference in its Viking Pavilion for the second year. He also lives part of the year in Berlin now, since Daimler owns moovel. (Parker started RideSherpa, which developed TriMet’s ticketing app and Hop pass. When it was bought by moovel the name changed, and it will change again soon to ReachNow, which is the Daimler and BMW’s care share business.

Living in Berlin he says is a transit lover’s dream. The tram comes every five minutes, and public transit seems seamless compared to the US. Parker recounted how he grew up on the Washington, D.C. bus and subway system, a latchkey kid who as launched into the system in second grade with a laminated card around his neck reminding him to sit near the driver and not to talk to strangers. Advice he ignored.

Parker made the point that he is more than just a transit booster, however. He wants transit to be disrupted the way healthcare and banking have been shaken up. He first heard about Dr. On Demand from his 74-year-old mom. She had just seen Dr. Phil talking about it on his show. It’s Dr. Phil’s son’s company. Parker was sick on the couch and appreciated the convenience of a Facetime visit with a doctor.

As he reminded the room, there are 83 million millennials in the U.S. and they prefer on-demand services.

Parker gave a short history of Glass-Steagall, CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations), Occupy Wall Street and the rise of fintech and e-investing. He sees transportation as the way cities live and breathe, and since soon 80 percent of the world’s population will live in cities, we had better figure out congestion. He added that 60 percent of users of TNCs such as Uber and Lyft say they would have taken public transit, and that the cars drive around without passengers a lot, “deadheading”, so TNCs are just adding to congestion.

German tech

He believes Daimler and BMW “can create a mobility power house.” You buy a plane ticket using one app — that of the airline, or maybe Expedia – rather than multiple apps for different airports. So too, he wants to see one app that handles mapping, rideshares like Lyft and Uber, car shares like ReachNow, bikeshares, electric scooters, bus, train and so on. He calls it Ubiquiticks.

One app to rule them all is going to be hard to deploy, because there are a “spiderweb of different transit authorities and they are held back by system integrators who make a sh– ton of money by perpetuating the system.”

His call to action was to oppose a bill in Salem which he says will preempt cities so they can’t innovate around transportation, fight the expansion of freeways in the Rose Quarter and instead push for high capacity rapid transit, and attend the Business For a Better Portland’s “Transportation as Liberation” evening on Tuesday, April 9, 2019.

Yes, they can

Finally, Allison Clift Jennings, CEO of Filament, gave a cogent description of what blockchain can and can’t do, but her most startling comments came when she was asked about being a trans woman in Portland tech. She said when she went from being seen as a straight, cis, white, American male (“I was the apex predator”) to being seen as a female, queer, white, trans woman, she lost three of her four privileges (“and there are a thousand others”). What surprised her most was how males would talk past her to her (cis) male colleague even though she is still the CEO.

“Our investors and partners have been gracious. Visibility is the strongest form of activism. I was a rabid advocate of meritocracy, but it’s not a positive thing now and should only be considered good if we start from same starting line.”

Joseph Gallivan
Reporter, The Business Tribune
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