sports

After attempts to "crowdsource" the purchase of a soccer club, it was obviously just a matter of time until the concept of crowdsourcing--the act of outsourcing a job or task to a group of people--would be applied to the actual game.

The Israeli team Hapoel Play65 Kiryat Shalom, a shared project of the online backgammon room Play65 and the Israeli social network for sports fans Web2sport, prides itself on being the first Web 2.0 soccer club in the world.

The club has begun experimenting with a wisdom-of-the-fans approach that allows the team's supporters to monitor … Read more

As an apparent consolation to fans who still come out to watch their perennially poor home team, baseball's Kansas City Royals will install the largest high-definition LED (light-emitting diode) screen in the world next year, according to the team.

Provided by Daktronics, the screen will measure 100 feet by 85 feet, will feature 1,800 lines of resolution, and will be mounted in the outfield and capped with a golden crown, the team symbol.

The installation will take place prior to the beginning of the 2008 season, instantly putting Kansas City's Kauffman Stadium ahead of former screen size … Read more

READY, SET, GO!

The RS800 has been designed for serious endurance athletes and competition runners. The system provides an unprecedented amount of feedback on body performance and enables the planning, tracking and analysis of training to an exacting level near before realized.

The Polar RS800sd Running Computer is a complete system for planning, monitoring and analyzing your training. It provides an optimum combination of features for elite level athletes and their coaches. With the new Polar WearLink transmitter W.I.N.D., the Polar RS800sd? is part of the world's first integrated training system together with adidas running gear. … Read more

Video cameras acting as an express lane to YouTube are gaining in popularity. First there was the Flip, now comes the VHoldr.

The VHoldr is smaller and pricier than the nifty Flip Video camera, but it sets itself apart by enabling hands-free operation. The VHoldr is a ruggedized, weatherproof video camera that is palm-size, but intended to be worn and not held. It's meant to capture video on the go, say, while you're speeding down a snow-covered mountain, bouncing over mountain bike trails or engaging in any other extreme sport of which you'd like to see the … Read more

We're cursed: Every year we learn of the best summer products just when the weather is turning. (Unless we're in San Francisco, where summer and winter are interchangeable all year long.)

This year we learned belatedly of the perfect MP3 cooler to go with our MP3 barbecue. Now we get word of the "Hov Pod," a personal hovercraft that can reach speeds of 45 miles per hour. Actually, according to BornRich, this gem can be used in all four seasons, able to "smoothly navigate across all sorts of terrain including water, mud, sand, snow, ice … Read more

The Lightning GTS, an all-electric sports car coming from England next year, will go 0 to 60 in four seconds, the company says.

But what I like is the '60s styling and the Union Jack license plate.

The car is one of several relatively new entrants into the electric auto market. They can be roughly divided into three categories: sports car specialists (Tesla Motors, Lightning, Lightspeed) and the sedan makers (Zap, Miles Automotive, etc.) and economy cars (Riva, Think). Some will make cars for different categories. Established companies like Nissan, of course, are tinkering at this too.

Right now, Tesla … Read more

This weekend Jacked.com is launching the first stages of its service. The easiest way to describe it is like a souped-up Netvibes you can use as a reference while watching live television programming. The service is rolling out its features slowly, beginning with a partnership with Notre Dame and NBC Sports to serve up real-time content for Notre Dame's football season which starts on Saturday. NBC is billing the service as "Play Action." You can visit the site now, but there won't be anything on it until game day.

Jacked is linked up to what you're watching on TV, so say you're watching the game, and a player scores. Jacked's smattering of Web widgets will pull up the player's stats, photos, related news stories, a comparison chart of that play to others, etc. The idea is to save you from having to track down player, team, and historical information on your own, and serving it up automatically.

The widgets are powered by a group of underlying technologies that scan through live TV content and grab bits and pieces of information from its metadata. Combine that with things like optical character recognition, and you've got lots of information to work with. The result is an impressive array of widgets, that--when viewed during a live broadcast--will pull up information and related content seconds after it happens.… Read more

The word "performance" seems to be thrown around a lot in the automotive world these days. With increasing expansion and competition within the luxury sport sedan category, manufacturers are eager to drop statistics about horsepower, torque, zero-to-60 speeds, and other numbers to woo (and maybe even slightly intimidate) potential buyers. But specifications alone can't convey the true spirit of a car; as Aristotle said, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. So it makes sense that the ideal road test subjects the car to a wide range of variables: twisty turns of varying camber, … Read more

When News Groper, an entire site full of "fake celebrity" blogs in the vein of Fake Steve Jobs, launched earlier this summer, some people (myself included) thought it would have a rough time making a name for itself on the Web. There's so much online comedy already out there, and after the rise and fall of Fake Steve, I thought the blog community would've had enough of celebrity satire (celebritire?)

Now, however, it looks like News Groper may have had its big break--MSNBC reporter Alex Johnson mistook one of its blogs for real, and quoted it … Read more