Geek Gestalt

The legacy telecommunications network at the San Francisco Giants' AT&T Park required an entire wall of switches and wires. New for 2009, the team has rolled out a VoIP system that will save it $355,000 a year, nearly enough to pay for a backup infielder.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET Networks)

SAN FRANCISCO--Could changing phone systems pay a big-league baseball player's salary? To hear Bill Schlough, the CIO of the San Francisco Giants tell it, the answer is a definite yes.

Last winter, the team migrated to a new $1 million-plus VoIP telecommunications system from ShoreTel for its ballpark, AT&T Park, abandoning its legacy system, which--ironically--was provided by AT&T. According to Schlough, the old system cost $490,000 annually, while the new setup for the 457 phones at the ballpark run the team just $135,000 a year.

Given that the minimum salary for Major League Baseball players this year is $400,000, the resulting annual savings of $355,000 is almost enough to pay for a backup second baseman or a rookie relief pitcher.

San Francisco Giants CIO Bill Schlough explains that the team's new telecommunications system, a VoIP setup from ShoreTel, takes up just a single rack in the back of the its telecommunications hub.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET Networks)

In all seriousness, though, the Giants implemented the new system at the behest of the team's former owner, Peter Magowan, who, in late 2007, sent a memo around wondering why the club was paying more for its telecommunications infrastructure than any other team in baseball. Now, it is in the final stages of implementing what it hopes will prove to be a cutting-edge system that will allow it to improve customer service, as well as customer tracking, and make it simpler to make changes within its internal network on the fly.

One visceral example of how the new ShoreTel setup is a generational step up from the Giants' old AT&T network is deep in the ballpark's bowels, in what is known as the MPO, or minimum point of entry, its telecommunications infrastructure hub. There, the old system's sets of switches and wiring take up an entire wall. But now, its VoIP setup is doing its job from a single rack in the back of the room.

And beyond the cost savings the new system provides, Schlough told a group of reporters gathered Monday night for a discussion of the ballpark's technology, its integrated software for the first time allows the team to do a much better job of proactively identifying callers to its season ticket customer support line and allowing service representatives to see, even before picking up such a call, a set of information about the customer, including whether they've used their tickets to recent games or whether they've sold them on StubHub.com. Previously, Schlough said, the reps would have no idea who a caller was until the conversation had commenced.

The system also provides benefits throughout the Giants' baseball organization, said team employee Lena Boswell. She explained that coaches in the Giants minor leagues are required to file a detailed report to the parent club after every game, and said that the ShoreTel system allows those coaches can now record a single message and distribute it automatically to everyone that needs to get it.

At more than $1 million, the Giants' new phone system is certainly pricey, but Schlough said that given the annual savings, he expects it to pay for itself in just three years.

The Giants Digital Dugout offers fans a series of features, including a food finder, and a quickly-updated collection of video replays.

(Credit: San Francisco Giants)

But the phone setup isn't the teams only major recent technology investment. The Giants have also coughed up big money for things like a state-of-the-art high-definition video scoreboard, as well as hundreds of HDTVs that were installed around the ballpark.

All together, Schlough told CNET News, when large capital expenditures are included, the Giants spend between 2.5 percent and 3 percent of the team's total annual budget on technology. He did not say what the dollar amount of that annual budget is, but its safe to say it is in the high eight figures or low nine figures, since its payroll alone is $82.6 million and it has an annual debt service of at least $20 million on the privately financed AT&T Park, which opened in 2000.

Wi-Fi and the iPhone factor
For years, meanwhile, the ballpark has offered its customers free Wi-Fi. In fact, it was among the very first to do so in all of professional sports. And for years, using it meant toting a laptop to the park, something which usually did not sit well with hard-core fans.

But Schlough said that the iPhone and iPod Touch era has changed things irrevocably for the ballpark's Wi-Fi system and has inspired the team to offer customers a set of services unlike that available in any other park.

He said that the iPhone debuted the same weekend as the Giants hosted the 2007 Major League Baseball All-Star Game and that since then, usage of the park's Wi-Fi network has gone up 537 percent.

At a game on April 21, in fact, he said, 1,289 fans connected to the network. And one thing that has changed dramatically since the advent of the iPhone and iPod Touch is when fans are using Wi-Fi. In the early days, Schlough said, usage was almost exclusively during weekday day games, a function of the many businesspeople who came to games with clients.

Now, however, he explained, the usage pattern has shifted dramatically, and the lion's share of the usage is during night games.

During the 2008 season, Schlough said, there were usually an average of no more than 600 people using the ballpark's Wi-Fi network on any given date. "This year, there were more than 1,000 right out of the box," he said.

"This year," he added, "everybody has a phone in their hand everywhere they go," including the bathrooms.

Customers who do log on to the Wi-Fi network at the park are now able to use an innovative and exclusive system called the Giants Digital Dugout. This offers fans two big benefits.

The first is a "food finder," which can direct fans to the closest concession location for the exact kind of food or beverage they want, and the second is a collection of video replay highlights that includes, within three minutes after it happens, any controversial call by an umpire.

Among the video replay highlights available from the Digital Dugout is this one, slugger Barry Bonds' 756th home run, which broke baseball's all-time career record.

(Credit: San Francisco Giants)

In Major League Baseball, unlike other sports, ballparks are not allowed to show replays of controversial calls on the scoreboard. So Schlough worried that too much attention to the video replay feature of the Digital Dugout might force the league to shut the Giants' system down. Short of that, though, it is an attractive feature, and well worth bringing an iPhone to the park.

It's features like that, however, that are inspiring fans by the hundreds, if not thousands, to get online at the ballpark. But in the early days of the Wi-Fi network at AT&T Park, it was mostly reporters and photographers logging on.

In fact, said Schlough, newspapers that were able to run photos in their morning editions the day after former Giants superstar slugger Barry Bonds hit his 660th career home run late in a night game on April 13, 2004, tying his godfather, Willie Mays, for third place on the all-time list, owed a debt of gratitude to the park's Wi-Fi.

"Without it," Schlough said, "they wouldn't have hit (their) deadlines."

On June 22, Geek Gestalt will kick off Road Trip 2009. After driving more than 12,000 miles in the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast over the last three years, I'll be looking for the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more in Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and South and North Dakota. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. And in the meantime, join the Road Trip 2009 Facebook page and follow my Twitter feed.

Playfish's 'Who has the biggest brain?' was one of several iPhone applications launched at SXSWi this week. But for each company, there were never any guarantees that the apps would launch in time, given that Apple has been famously unconcerned with developers' event-oriented deadlines.

(Credit: Playfish)

AUSTIN, Texas--Given that you can't walk more than a couple feet at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival here without stumbling into someone tapping away on one iPhone application or another, it's easy to forget that just a year ago, there was no such thing as an official iPhone "app."

But now, of course, iPhone apps are one of the hottest technology segments of all. And since SXSWi is ground zero for cutting edge social media and the people who are often the earliest adopters of such technology, a series of companies have used the conference as the launching pad for their own apps for Apple's ubiquitous smartphone.

That the companies--FourSquare, Audioboo, Playfish, Whrrl, and Facebook--chose to launch their apps here is noteworthy, not least because it's well-documented that Apple isn't particularly interested in app developers' deadlines, and for the most part, any success that those developers do have in getting their apps out in time for events seems to be a whole lot of luck.

That's not to say, however, that Apple is entirely unconcerned with developers' needs. In some cases, knowing people inside the company seems to help. But still, after talking to some of the people behind the apps launching here, it appears that the best chance a company has in getting an app out in time for something like SXSWi is getting started on the project well in advance.

FourSquare managed to get its iPhone app up on Apple's App Store the night before SXSW began.

(Credit: FourSquare)

Over the last few years at this tech-centric conference, Twitter has been the most used social media tool, with thousands of geeks spending incredible amounts of time typing out 140-character updates on what they're doing, where they're going, what interesting panel they're in, or where wine video blogger Gary Vaynerchuk is giving out cases and cases of wine.

This year, however, many have found that there is a serious case of Twitter overload, and so people have been looking for alternative solutions to getting word out to their friends about what's important to them at the moment. And that's why it was so important to the founders of FourSquare, a brand-new social media service, that their iPhone app be available to SXSWi attendees.

"We were getting worried about" the app not being launched in time for SXSWi, said Naveen Selvadurai, a co-founder of FourSquare, adding that he and his partner, Dennis Crowley, felt that "if it didn't go live at SXSW, it would be a bit of a disaster because everyone would have to use SMS."

And that, of course, would have been its own nightmare for FourSquare given that AT&T's service--which is what iPhone users are relying on--has been spotty at best. Fortunately, the FourSquare app did go live at 11 p.m. last Thursday night, just hours before SXSW officially opened.

But Selvadurai said that there simply had been no way to know ahead of time whether the app would be added to the App Store in time for the conference. He and his team had submitted it to Apple on March 1, and then had heard very little about its status.

Audioboo had its iPhone app rejected twice in advance of SXSW but eventually managed to get it approved by calling on friends at Apple.

(Credit: Audioboo)

"You send it in and you just wait to hear back," Selvadurai said. "We were on the phone with them, asking about the status. 'What else can we do?' They said it's in their team's hands, and that there's nothing else they can do" to give better insight into the app's destiny.

"It's both frustrating and very professional at the same time," he said. "And I've heard that about Apple. They don't let too much information get out."

Apple did not respond to a request for comment about its policies regarding iPhone apps and the App Store.

For Mark Rock, the founder of a British company called Audioboo, getting his iPhone app out in time for SXSWi was also a major priority. The app, which is essentially the mobile front-end for the company's social audio blogging platform, and which is intended to be the "YouTube for the spoken word," launched Friday morning, the first day of the conference, said Rock.

But it was not always certain that it would be ready in time. Rock said that the app had actually been rejected twice by Apple, first for using a kind of button that Apple doesn't approve of, and then because Apple discovered that it was possible to record and broadcast swear words with the app.

"We got around that by doing a bit of moderation," said Rock. And finally, he said, the app was approved, and in time for SXSWi, because Audioboo "had some high-level contacts at Apple Europe."

Facebook launched its Facebook Connect service for the iPhone on Saturday at SXSW.

(Credit: Facebook)

Facebook makes news on the iPhone
Though SXSWi isn't known primarily as a venue for making news, Facebook certainly stole some headlines on Saturday with the announcement of its Facebook Connect for the iPhone. The service now makes it possible for participating partners to connect friends through their own iPhone apps. So, for example, users of the popular Urbanspoon app--which helps people find restaurants in specific local areas--can rate and share their thoughts on diners and such through Facebook directly on their iPhones.

Games are also a big part of the Facebook Connect program, and so one of the apps that launched at SXSWi was "Who has the Biggest Brain?" from Playfish. The game, which had already been popular as a regular Facebook application, now allows people to compete against each other using their iPhones.

And, lastly, Whrrl also used SXSWi as the logical venue for launching its own iPhone app, which is also part of the Facebook Connect ecosystem. Designed to let people "capture (their) experiences as they happen and organizes them into a lasting story for everyone in (their) life to share in and enjoy."

For these companies, getting the apps out in time for the conference was crucial, given that this small area in downtown Austin is completely saturated with many of the world's leading social media innovators and early adopters. Where better to get an app off the ground and build a huge amount of buzz with a minimum amount of effort?

Another app that is part of the Facebook Connect program is from Whrrl, a social notification service.

(Credit: Whrrl)

And the downside of missing the deadline? A loss of that free buzz, something that could only be replicated at a very small number of other events.

So what was FourSquare's backup plan?

Selvadurai said that even if people hadn't been able to get the app, they could still have used the service on the mobile Web on the iPhone, though that obviously would have been a less-than-ideal situation. And, short of that, they could have used text messages to interact with the service, and their friends.

Fortunately for FourSquare, that wasn't necessary, at least not as the primary option.

"We got super lucky," said FourSquare's Selvadurai, "that it was approved and that it would go live."

Update at 10:20 p.m. PDT, Sunday, March 15: Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that AT&T will add wireless capacity in downtown Austin to deal with the "unprecedented" demand.

AUSTIN, Texas--If there's one thing that's been made clear after two full days of the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference here, it's that AT&T clearly didn't get its network up to speed for the throngs toting iPhones around.

You could hear it being talked about everywhere: it was nearly impossible to call anyone inside the Austin Convention Center because the cell service was so poor. And because it seemed like nearly everyone at the conference has an iPhone, that meant that very few phone calls were going through.

Oddly, that didn't mean people inside the convention center weren't able to Twitter or IM or use the Web on their iPhones, or their iPod Touches. That's because SXSW really got its act together this year when it came to Wi-Fi. I've been to a ton of technology conferences over the last few years, including three previous SXSW gatherings, and I've never seen a stronger, more consistent Wi-Fi setup.

Even in Saturday's SXSW Interactive festival keynote address by Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh, with about 2,000 people in the room, the Wi-Fi service was strong. Very impressive.

But AT&T's network has not been nearly as impressive, and that's a shame. I suppose there's a reason, but it would seem logical that the company could have put in the effort to ensure that the thousands and thousands of people at SXSW--which may constitute the highest concentration of iPhone users anywhere on Earth--could get good cell service. Alas, that wasn't the case.

Still, people seemed to be able to communicate with their friends anyway. Among what is probably the most accomplished group of interactive media professionals in the world, that shouldn't be surprising. But the grumbling about AT&T could still be heard everywhere you went.

Okay, I admit it: I want an iPhone.

I'm surrounded by them these days, it seems. On the bus. On the streets. At work. Everywhere I go, I see people pulling them out and the gadget hound in me is suffering a little bit.

Since the iPhone came out, and since Apple announced the iTouch, I've been parroting a standard line when anyone asks when--not if--I'm going to get one: I say, either when the iPhone is available on Verizon, my carrier, or when the iTouch has a 60 GB hard drive. Whichever comes first.

But, I feel my resolve weakening. I met some friends for breakfast yesterday and one was fiddling around with his iPhone, showing his collection of photos, and it looked so good. I started thinking, "Well, $175 isn't that much to pay to cancel my Verizon service."

But then I realized that before I would ever even think about switching to an iPhone, I'd need to know if AT&T's EDGE network works at my house, which is not in the best service area as it is.

So I said to my friend with the iPhone that I really needed someone with an iPhone to come to my house and find out what the reception is like since there's no way I'm spending all that money if I can't get online using AT&T's network, Wi-Fi or no Wi-Fi.

In essence, I need someone to come by and test the service for me.

Another one of my friends at the breakfast said that he, too, had been wanting the same thing.

And it suddenly struck us that there's a golden business opportunity here, borne of Apple's unfortunate decision to marry their lovely device with AT&T: iPhone Buddy. They'll come check service at your home or office and let you know whether switching is right for you.

Obviously, this is kind of silly, but what the heck? I know there are a lot of people who want iPhones but are outright suspicious of AT&T. But since most of us don't have the tech chops to unlock the phones, we're stuck with what Apple's offering us.

And in spite of ourselves, we still want one. It's sad, but there it is.