We wrote about Twitter’s collaboration with a startup called Snappy TV and Turner Broadcasting that allowed the NCAA to tweet out highlight clips from March Madness throughout the annual college basketball tournament, with the clips sponsored by AT&T and Coke Zero, and a Twitter spokesperson confirmed Monday that the ESPN clips will appear in a similar manner inside Twitter Cards. The report indicated that Twitter will be selling advertising specifically around the sports clips that are tweeted out.

The company announced major updates to its Cards technology in early April that allowed for more types of content to appear in the tweets and more app promotion for third-party apps cross-posting to Twitter. The key to Cards is that a user never has to leave Twitter to view the content the Cards contain — everything is viewable directly in stream, which encourages users to stay on Twitter’s website.

My colleague Mathew Ingram and I have written about Twitter’s transformation over the past year or so to become more of a media company, and Twitter’s partnerships with television, music and video outlets are numerous. There were rumors of deals with Viacom and NBC, a partnership with Nielson to measure user activity around television, the launch of the Twitter #music app and following music entertainment show.

For Twitter, all of this content could make tweets more engaging for users who become captive audience members participating in live events. But perhaps more importantly for the company, if it’s gearing up for the IPO everyone expects, video provides an excellent platform for advertising and big brand partnerships that could make Twitter a lot of money.

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Unfortunately, much of the action will happen while most of us are at the office. Luckily, key events will once again be live streamed online: CBSSports.com and Masters.com will stream more than 90 hours live from the competition, with action unfolding on a total of four live channels, and ESPN will stream parts of the Masters online as well.

• Streaming on CBSSports.com and Masters.com will start Monday at noon E.T. (9 a.m. PT), with daily live streams of key events continuing until Sunday, 4/14. Golf fans can find a complete schedule of the daily events on Masters.com.
• iPad users will be able to tune through the official Masters Tournament iPad app.
• iPhone users get the same experience on a slightly smaller screen through the official iPhone app.
• Android users can download the official Masters Tournament Android app on Google Play.
• ESPN will stream live coverage of the Par 3 Contest, First Round and Second Round Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, respectively. Live streams will begin at 3 p.m. ET, and are available both through on ESPN3 as well as WatchESPN on the web as well as mobile apps and the Xbox 360. However, these services aren’t available to everyone; ESPN3 is only available through participating ISPs, while WatchESPN requires a pay TV account with a participating provider. Check ESPN’s website for details.

Want to learn more about watching live sports online without paying for cable? Then check out our e-book Cut the Cord: All You Need to Know to Drop Cable.

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When he headed off to college at the University of Pennsylvania, Kulkarni tried out for the team. He was 5-feet, 9-inches and weighed 130 pounds. He didn’t make it.

But Kulkarni would find another path to basketball success. He never got to don a Dallas Mavericks or Houston Rockets hat on draft day, but he did get a shot to hobnob — and impress — Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey at this year’s MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.

Kulkarni technically studied computer engineering and entrepreneurship but, he joked when I asked the question, “I like to say basketball.” Even though it doesn’t appear on his transcripts, there’s no denying he did his hardcourt homework.

No budget, no problem

Although he didn’t make the varsity basketball team, Kulkarni did play junior varisty ball at Penn — and in doing so spotted a golden opportunity. Penn is the ninth-winningest college basketball program of all time, but it’s no longer a powerhouse and, Kulkarni noted, Ivy League schools simply do not fund athletic programs like some other Division I universities do. There wasn’t a whole video department dedicated solely to processing and analyzing game film. Kulkarni watched the head coach prep for games largely by himself, poring over film to find a few shining examples of good or bad plays that could serve as teaching points.

And then a lightbulb went off for Kulkarni: There must be a whole lot of small colleges and high schools suffering from the same problem. So, in 2008, he launched Krossover.

The company’s flagship service is pretty self-explanatory. Coaches upload their game film after each game. Krossover’s team of hundreds of college students gets to work breaking it down. When the coach wakes up, the last night’s game is online and he can examine just about anything he wants — statistics, individuals plays, where on the field or court most of the action took place. It quite literally analyzes everything that’s quantifiable, and in some cases visualizable, by studying game film. (You can experiment with it yourself here.)

Krossover’s shot chart.

That’s really cool if you’re a high-school or lower-level college coach — and Kulkarni said more than 1,000 of them currently use Krossover — but it’s probably not going to impress too many professional or big-time college coaches. It’s certainly not going to impress the sports-stats superstars that flock to the MIT conference every year. To reach this audience, Krossover needed something new.

Are you smarter than Kevin Durant? (Hint: No)

Hence the startup’s latest idea, an iOS app for testing people’s on-the-court sports knowledge, called sIQ (or sports IQ). Kulkarni said the inspiration for sIQ came while watching Krossover board member and then-head of analytics for the Oklahoma City Thunder NBA franchise Ben Alamar talk about the differences in brain activity between weekend warriors and professional athletes. The biggest is that while wannabe pros make conscious decisions about what to do next, professional athletes just react — they see and they do without hesitation.

Can Kevin Durant do this? Source: Krossover

When you’re measuring someone’s sports IQ, the faster and more-accurately they react, the smarter — in theory — they are. Kulkarni’s first question to Alamar upon hearing this: “Can I take this test and if I do better than Kevin Durant can I get a 10-day contract?”

Funny, yes, but also telling about the mentality of guys who watch a lot of sports — and, like Kulkarni, might still play a lot — and hold out hope in the back of their minds they’re in some way on par with professional athletes. Kulkarni had a hunch the app would go over well at the MIT Sloan event, which is full of, as he described them (and, by proxy, himself and me) “a bunch of sports nerds who probably can’t play worth a damn but know everything about sports.” They could settle a lot of bets over who’s a smarter athlete by watching plays unfold on an iPhone, then when video pauses, predicting the outcome.

So, he told one his developers to take two weeks earlier this year and get something ready for the conference, which took place the first week of March. While there, the Krossover team met Daryl Morey, a former Wall Street quant turned Houston Rockets general manager — an extreme version of Moneyball inspiration Billy Beane in that Morey has no basketball experience and relies almost solely on numbers to make his decisions. He loved the app and quickly dragged over Dallas Mavericks owner (and entrepreneur and investor and blogger) Mark Cuban to play with it. At NBA All-Star Weekend in February, ESPN basketball columnist Bill Simmons played sIQ. Poorly.

By contrast, when Kulkarni gave sIQ to a 15-year-old basketball phenom at the gym where they both play, the kid got the highest scores Kulkarni had ever seen. And not only did he answer correctly, his average response time was about 1 second — about 4 times faster than the guys at Sloan were able to respond.

The fact that it works, as evidenced by the teenage natural’s performance, has some NBA and NFL executives already spotting an opportunity in sIQ. Professional teams — including Alamar’s new employer, the Cleveland Cavaliers — are testing it out as a method to gauge college players’ sports IQs as part of the draft preparation and to train players to react better by using with the app as a way to predict what will happen next in any given situation.

Maybe, Kulkarni suggested, sIQ could become part of the highly publicized NFL Combine and replace the controversial Wonderlick test for gauging draft prospects’ intelligence. It should almost certainly provide a more-compelling platform for high-school coaches trying to get their athletes to study game film.

The positive feedback has Krossover building sIQ as a platform rather than as a just an app. Yes, sports fans will be able to download it and test their IQs, but the company also hopes to build versions specifically for applications like testing and training real athletes. It will start off in basketball, but sports like football, volleyball, soccer, wrestling, boxing and maybe even mixed martial arts are on the horizon.

Taking analytics from the front office to the field

And whether or not sIQ turns out to be the game-changer Krossover hopes it will be, the company seems to be on the right path. Sports analytics is becoming a huge business, but primarily in the front office where executives are trying to figure out who they want on their teams and how much they’re willing to pay. Handicapping the annual NCAA March Madness basketball tournament is a popular pastime, too. (As evidence of how hot the space is right now, Kulkarni said Krossover has raised $4.5 million primarily through angel investors — including some professional athletes — who want to get in on what they see as a sexy business.)

Statwing breaks down the NFL.

However, as I noted when profiling Statwing recently (its full-time-statistician and part-time-sports-geek founders recently uploaded a trove of NFL data for people to play around with), the analytic mindset has yet to trickle down to the coach’s office in most situations and affect decisions such as what type of play to call in what situations. Aside from golf, perhaps, it certainly hasn’t made its way onto the field of play to actually improve players’ performance.

And that was Kulkarni’s major takeaway from the MIT Sloan conference this year: while teams and companies like his are collecting “an obscene amount” of data on every single aspect of nearly every single sport, they’re struggling to find ways to make sense of it.

“The thing everyone’s trying to figure out is: Is there a way for you to find the two or three or four things that will guarantee you a win or at least tip the scale in your favor at any given time,” he said.  “I don’t think anyone has cracked the code.”

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You probably think I’m being sarcastic, but I’m not. Statistically speaking, football teams should go for it more often, they shouldn’t run on third and long and they’re almost certainly better off going for two-point conversions. The guys behind Statwing laid it all out in a blog post on Monday. What’s more, they’ve uploaded an entire data set of NFL statistics to their service that users can play around with for free to analyze a huge number of occurrences and correlations.

From the blog. One of countless analyses available with the data set.

It’s all about democratizing data

Statwing, you might recall, is one of the “data for dummies” tools I highlighted in a January post about advanced analytics tools so simple anyone can use them. Right now, it’s one of the simplest there is. Here’s how I described Statwing then — although it actually performs more types of analyses:

“You upload data, check the variables you’re concerned with, and it plots their relationship. (It also can describe the variables by highlighting the sample size, minimum, maximum, mean, median and standard deviation.) Graphs are accompanied by explanations as to how strong the correlation is based on various statistical metrics, as well as the results of a linear regression model.”

Greg Laughlin (courtesy of his Twitter profile).

The ease of use is by design, says Statwing co-founder Greg Laughlin. “There’s a general zeitgeist that people should care about data now,” he told me during a recent call, but they don’t always know to get started or really even see how all the hype around data relates to them. Early on its existence, Statwing is trying to answer both of those concerns by building an easy-to-use service that also happens to teach users about statistics, and by offering up some interesting data sets for people to play around with.

The latter part is easy, but valuable. Data sets like the NFL data or one about the Titanic’s passengers let other people into the data game and get them thinking statistically. They get people saying, “‘Oh, I grok that. I see how this interesting, I see how this is useful,’” Laughlin explained.

Building a data-analysis service that’s actually usable by mere mortals is a bit tougher. At its core, Statwing relies on a rules engine that considers the type of data uploaded and the types of variables (a maximum of two right now) a user wants to relate to each other. It can handle between 10 and 15 different analyses right now depending on how one defines them, Laughlin said, but at any rate they’re the ones used most often.

He credits Cloudera co-founder and Chief Scientist Jeff Hammerbacher (with whom, along with Greylock’s DJ Patil, I’ll be doing a fireside chat at Structure: Data on Thursday) with helping Statwing decide to make the rules engine the service’s core.

That has been a wise decision because it lets lay users get what they need out of the service without worrying about the underlying functions. Statwing has users that never click the “advanced” tab that shows the statistical breakdown, Laughlin said. They just use the service, essentially, as a faster way of making charts than using Microsoft Excel, and the headline stating whether or not there’s a statistically significant relationship is all the info they need.

“That’s really exciting for us,” Laughlin said. “… It’s giving them the power of stats without them having to think about it.”

Just one view of how Statwing presents results.

Paying the bills with bigger users

Of course, a startup can’t survive on free and unsophisticated users alone, so Statwing is ramping up its money-making efforts. For example, it has “just turned on the paywall in a really light way” by “maybe” charging really heavy users, Laughlin said. In the future, though, Statwing wants to add support for more variables and larger data sets (there’s a 5MB limit right now), and perhaps build in some predictive analytics.

“That kind of analysis is really powerful, really extensible,” he noted.

As the service grows, Laughlin sees the ideal paying user being someone who currently has to use statistical-analysis software like SPSS or R, but who doesn’t really go beyond the basic functions. That type of user has real business need for the software, he explained, but they don’t need all the complexity and arcane statistics dressing that comes along with that that type of product.

Some people don’t want advanced analytics democratized, Laughlin added, because they think people can’t ask the right questions. On the contrary, Statwing’s theory is that most people just struggle with the logistics of cleaning and formatting data and then knowing the terminology associated with the business questions they want to ask.

Back to football …

But forget business users — when will football coaches start caring about statistics?! Maybe not any time soon. Laughlin said a friend of his who works on the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference sees a lot of interest in analytics from the higher levels in sports organizations, but noted that anecdotal evidence suggests most coaches aren’t too interested in letting data influence their decisions too heavily.

Think of a situation like fourth down and goal on the two-yard-line as akin to a CIO choosing between Oracle and some new whizbang database. Nobody ever got fired for buying Oracle, and nobody ever got fired for kicking a field goal.

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But maybe sports facilities — and really anyone that wants to deliver a service — be it online music or a few hours of entertainment during a national sporting event — should start thinking about their infrastructure and their resiliency. After all, our infrastructure isn’t getting any younger, and consumers certainly aren’t getting any more patient.

That was the point of a blog post Amazon Web Services Distinguished Engineer James Hamilton wrote a day after the game. Hamilton offered up a few smart solutions for power outages. At least one of them — using diesel generators to ensure redundancy — makes great financial sense for something like the Super Bowl.

Two bus-sized 2.5-3 MW generators should be more than enough to back up the power supply from the Superdome’s utility, Entergy, Hamilton wrote. Each generator costs less than $1 million, Hamilton wrote, and can be rented for less. Add in switchgear, uninterruptible power supplies and a one extra generator for good measure, and the cost comes in at less than $10 million. Hamilton continues:

“Looking at statistics from the 2012 event, a 30 second commercial costs just over $4m. For the price of just over 60 seconds of commercials the facility could (be) protected against fault. And, using rental generators, less than 30 seconds of commercials would provide the needed redundancy to avoid impact from any utility failure. Given how common utility failures are and the negative impact of power disruptions at a professional sporting event, this looks like good value to me.”

Hamilton also suggests in the post that facility operators frequently test equipment, use automated recovery, use more utility breakers to decrease the amount of a facility an outage could wipe out and simply steer clear of sites in fault zones altogether. In short, big facility operators might want to think more like the cloud guys.

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Check out our ultimate guide to watching Super Bowl XLVII live online and mobile devices below:

• CBS Sports will live stream the Super Bowl XLVII on its website in its entirety starting at 6 p.m. ET (3 p.m. PT). The stream will feature multiple camera angles, DVR functionality, real-time stats and curated tweets. Also notable: This will be the first time ever that a network is going to stream the entire halftime show, including Beyonce’s performance.
• Verizon mobile and FIOS customers can also catch the action on NFL Mobile, which is available on Android and iOS devices. But beware: An NFL Mobile subscription costs $5 a month.
• NFL Gamepass streams the Super Bowl to viewers from outside of the U.S.
• Hulu offers videos of many Super Bowl ads in its Adzone.
• YouTube has teamed up with Adweek for its Ad Blitz, offering Super Bowl ads, an animated GIF generator and more.
• Getty Images is going to publish photos of all the Super Bow action as it happens on its Facebook page.
• Intonow will allow viewers to vote on Super Bowl ads in real time. The Yahoo-owned second screen app, which is available for iOS and Android, also integrates with Animal Planet’s Puppy Bowl, promising live polls, video extras, exclusive photos, a real-time meme generator, and of course a puppy overload.
• Ustream proves that there is more than one puppy bowl, after all: The site is streaming Rescue Bowl, featuring adorable shelter dogs, starting Sunday at 2p.m. ET..
• ConnecTV will offer live chats during the Super Bowl as well as the half-time show featuring talent from a number of CBS affiliates as well as YouTube darling Michael Buckley. The second-screen app is available for iPhones and iPads as well as Windows and OS X PC.
• GetGlue will offer exclusive stickers for viewers who watch the Super Bowl ads, and it’s partnering with Hulu to bring videos of the ads to its site.

We will add links to additional apps and sites to this list in the coming days.

For more on how to watch sports and other TV programming without paying for cable, check out my ebook Cut the Cord: All You Need to Know to Drop Cable.

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Delving deep into the world of computer science might sound like overkill, but professional football is big business in America, and an analytic edge off the field might be just as important as athletic or strategic edges on the field. Heck, it might help create them.

The cult of gut instinct and the human eye

The New York Times highlights the current state of statistical reliance among NFL teams in an article on Sunday. The  NYT’s Judy Battista reports that teams are finally beginning to hire statisticians and take statistical analysis seriously in limited areas — but there’s always a disclaimer. Football is such a variable-rich and complex game, her sources claim, that the human eye and human intuition will always be best at assessing certain things.

As one anonymous source put it when discussing the difficulty of evaluating players before the NFL draft: “At the end of the day, the tape is going to be our first choice. They have to look good on film.”

His point and those of others with whom Battista spoke are fair. For example:

• Offensive line play can be difficult to gauge because the line is a five-person unit designed to work well together, not as a collection of individuals.
• How do you statistically assess a middle linebacker who doesn’t make a lot of tackles but who’s always in the mix and disrupting the offense?
• When it comes to calling plays, there might be limited data on any given situation (e.g., a particular down and distance to go from a particular spot on the field), and the outcomes might be very much influenced by the players on the field in each of those prior situations.

This is a lot different than in a sport like baseball, NFL analytics expert Tony Khan told Battista, where it’s much easier to break down statistics to an individual level and make Moneyball-like decisions about given players and circumstances.

Maybe that’s why there’s an innate anti-statistic bias among many NFL executives, as well as those in other leagues. Dashiell Bennett at The Atlantic uncovered a lot of disbelief about the statistical analysis of major sports leagues even at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in March. “[T]ime again,” Bennett noted, “… when a reasoned and ably researched idea was presented, we heard some variation from those in the crowd of ‘That’s interesting, but…’.”

How machines can inform human knowledge

However, companies of all sorts are increasingly using machine learning algorithms (and related techniques) to detect patterns and correlations among complex datasets, and there’s a growing number of software products hitting the market that either incorporate machine learning or are built entirely upon it. It stands to reason that NFL teams might consider giving these techniques and technologies a chance, too.

Machine learning seems ideally suited to analyzing football data because of the complexity of the incredible number of variables that teams have to consider. Rather than requiring human beings to hypothesize and test, for example, how a mix of player statistics, combine performance, situational data and weather affect a given outcome, the algorithms can step up and find out whatever variables actually matter most.

Source: Google

And all that game-film analysis NFL teams like to do? Well, if teams were inclined to spend their hefty profits hiring data scientists and systems engineers, perhaps they could replicate Google’s results in video recognition in order to automate some portions of the film analysis that costs coaches untold hours. Instead of detecting cats or human bodies, perhaps algorithms could uncover patterns in gameday videos that humans either can’t see or don’t even think to look for.

(The Atlantic‘s Bennett also highlighted a nascent motion-tracking technology called SportVU (that’s not machine learning, but still very interesting) that analyzes player location on sports fields and the movement of the ball in order to help players figure out where they want to be in any given situation.)

At this point, coaches, general managers and other football experts come into the picture to impart their own expertise on the information provided by their computers. Maybe they decide, for example, that a player’s salary isn’t really worth much weight despite a strong correlation uncovered by the algorithms between how much the players on the field are paid and the percentage of fourth downs converted. Or perhaps they instruct the engineers to recalibrate the video-recognition models to ignore officials and referees when analyzing film.

It’s the same technique that companies such as ZestFinance use in order to make their machine learning efforts more accurate. As ZestFinance Co-Founder and CEO (and former Google CIO) Douglas Merrill explained to me recently, his company was able to significantly increase the accuracy of its credit-underwriting model by applying “human artistry” to add context or prune the results after its machine learning algorithms had analyzed some 70,000 variables.

Even if NFL teams don’t go crazy building computer science divisions and predictive models, machine learning could almost certainly provide some new information on which coaches and others can apply their considerable subject-area expertise. Even the source who espoused to NYT’s Battista his reliance on game film also acknowledged, “Ideally, you want the objective and subjective to match up.” Good NFL teams have the latter figured out; machine learning could help them get a better handle on the former, too.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user B Calkins.

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It is buying German sports portal operator Sportal, as part of its ongoing effort to build out its global audience.

Perform already bought Spox.com and Mediasports in Germany last year. Sportal.de claims 800,000 unique monthly users, and operator Sportal GmbH already provides content and services for  Spiegel, Süddeutsche, RTL/sport.de, Motain and Sportal Media gruppe Switzerland

Perform did not disclose an acquisition price to the London stock Exchange. Sportal did €1.4 million in revenue in 2011, Perform said.

Perform  raised £72.5 ($116.26) million in its London IPO float in April 2011, since when it has:-

• Taken full ownership of the Watch&Trade online sports betting service.
• Taken control of soccerway.com publisher, Holland’s Global Sports Media.
• Bought Germany’s Spox and Mediasports for up to €16 million.
• Offered €120 million for sports data group RunningBall
• Snapped up Turkish sports websites mackolik.com and sahadan.com.

Perform’s most game-changing deal happened prior to the float, when it bought Goal.com.

Company execs have benefitted from being public now. Last week, Perform made more shares available, so that they could reap windfalls. Co-CEO Simon Denyer made £4.1 million, co-CEO Oliver Slipper made £1.2 million, CFO David Surtees made £1.7 million.

Denyer and Slipper sold around five percent of their total holding. Denyer also gave shares worth £1 million to the charities Richard Thomas Leukaemia Fund, Great Ormond Street Hospital and WorldVision.

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Pac-12 Networks launched this summer with one national and seven regional TV networks, which are complemented by a strong online presence. Its Pac-12 Now website offers authenticated pay TV subscribers live access to 850 games, and the new Pac-12 iOS app makes that same content available on the iPad as well. Dedicated iPhone and Android apps are set to follow this fall.

However, Aufhauser told me that the current iPad app — with its live video feeds, stats and all other kinds of bells and whistles — is very much a first step. Next up are plans to extend the content even further. Around 1,500 events from the Pac-12 Conference never make it to TV, and that’s where broadband and mobile video could fill an important gap.

Of course, sports fans don’t just want to sit back and watch events the way you’d watch a Saturday night movie. They want to feel like they’re there, and the Pac-12 is thinking about ways to make that happen. That means bringing social features to the app, and thinking beyond the couch potatoes. “We bring millions of people into stadiums to watch games live,” said Aufhauser. At the same time, countless others watch the games on their TV, their PC or their mobile device, and there’s no good reason why the folks in the stadium shouldn’t be able to interact with friends who stayed home. “Those experiences can be tied together,” said Aufhauser.

Yes, you got that right: Pac-12 Digital wants fans in stadiums to spend more time on their smart phones. That’s where the company’s Silicon Valley roots shine through. Aufhauser previously helped Justin.tv with their e-sports initiatives, and the entire team is located in the Bay Area with deep valley roots. “I like to describe it as a big startup,” said Aufhauser about Pac-12, adding: “We are not looking at what the SEC is doing. We are looking at what YouTube is doing.”

That’s also why the company made a conscious decision to hire folks with a tech background as opposed to a sports background, explained Aufhauser. “It’s about creating great content and about creating great technology,” he said.

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That game was watched by 30,000 baseball fans across the globe. Those 30,000 fans have turned into millions of fans across the world and that little experiment is now a mega-million dollar business. Since its launch, the service has broadcast 1.5 billion live video streams and has accumulated a total of 3.7 million subscribers.

Today in order to succeed, services need to go beyond the web. And ubiquity means being on multiple devices.  Like, Netflix, MLB.tv, got that right very early in the game. MLB Advanced Media is one of the more progressive online services as it has evolved with the times, adapting to viewing behavior of its customers. When broadband speeds increased, MLB.tv increased its online video quality. When tablets became popular, it created apps for the iPad and later for Android devices including the Kindle Fire.

As popularity of Roku and Apple TV grew, they made apps for those platforms as well. It is on XBox live and is slowly making its away to all sorts of connected devices. For 2012, MLB.tv is streaming 1.1 million live video streams per day. So far in 2012, MLB.tv has seen 27.3 million mobile live video streams. In the first week of 2012 baseball season, MLB saw 3 million downloads of its At Bat 2012 iPad app. At present there isn’t a professional sports league that holds a candle to MLB’s online arm.

From a personal perspective, during the baseball season, I don’t think I can last a single day without MLB.tv. Being a participant in a fantasy baseball league, I use the service and its advanced features to keep an eye on some of my players. (I am second to last this season, but can’t blame the streaming service for my picks and their injuries.) I can safely say, had it not been for MLB.tv, I wouldn’t have been an early (perhaps earliest) cord cutter. I hope these guys keep making baseball more fun in years to come.

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