July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

RANCHO PALOS VERDES, Calif. — The new San Francisco 49ers football stadium might prompt people to rename the team the “Silicon Valley 49ers.”

That’s partly because it’s located in Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley and about 40 miles south of the NFL team’s nominal hometown. But it’s also because the stadium will be loaded to the uppermost seats with a vast quantity of electronics and networking gear provided by Sony.

“We want to be a software-driven stadium, not a hardware-driven stadium,” said 49ers owner Jed York while speaking onstage today at D11, a tech conference organized by All Things D. He was joined onstage by Kazuo Hirai, the president and chief executive of Sony.

“We want to build out the infrastructure so you can plug into the stadium any way you want,” York said.

Source: http://www.newsantaclarastadium.com/

A rendering of the new 49ers stadium in Santa Clara. Via  the stadium‘s website.

For example, while you’re in the stadium, you can connect to its wireless network using your smartphone or tablet to watch the game via any of the many 4K (high-resolution) video cameras installed throughout the facility. You could pick a point of view that offers a better vantage point than your seat, you could watch closeups of the plays, or you could conceivably tune in to players’ helmet cams.

Or if getting background info is more your thing, you might choose to look up stats or background info on various players.

All of these activities will be done with the fans’ own hardware, so Sony isn’t building tablet interfaces into the seats. Or you can just leave your phone in your pocket and watch the game the old-fashioned way.

“You create your own experience when you’re in the game,” said York.

The 49ers are also promising that the stadium infrastructure will help fans find food choices within the stadium or potentially connect with other fans via social media. It plans to offer people the option of getting digital tickets or paper ones, and it will even provide routing assistance to help you find the best travel route to the game before you even leave home.

Hirai said that Sony has done similar installations with other stadiums, but not to the same level. He said that the technology would work with many different manufacturers’ phones and tablets, not just Sony’s. And he emphasized that it wasn’t just about blinging out the stadium with as much tech as possible.

“It’s not about putting in physical cameras and screens, it’s about the experience,” Hirai said.

“We want you to bring your own smartphone, your own tablet into the game, and have the back end that just works,” York said.

The stadium will be open for the 2014 season and will host Super Bowl L in February 2015.

Despite Sony’s large involvement, the stadium won’t bear its name. Instead, it will be called Levi’s Stadium — the clothing company bought the naming rights earlier this year.

Check out more views of the new stadium.

Photo: Jed York, CEO of the San Francisco 49ers, appearing on a Sony display at D11. Credit: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Football, or soccer as we know it, has a passionate following around the world ranging from shirtless men with painted faces cheering in UK stadiums to Indian school children kicking a ball down the street.

The Football App has raised $13 million to capitalize on this fervor.  Many football fans are frankly, obsessed, and this product lets them indulge their passion whenever they want.

The app aggregates data, media content, and services like ticketing from various sources and merges them into a ‘one stop shop’ for fans. Claiming to be ‘the world’s leading mobile football community,’ the company has over 3.5 million monthly and up to 1.5 million daily active users who use the app to access live tickers, rankings, team statistics, news etc… about their favorite teams.

The Football App already has a major audience in Europe, and said up to one hundred thousand new users join a day across 155 markets. This financing, led by Earlybird Ventures, will help the company scale to accommodate this growth, especially with the upcoming 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Funds will also be used to add in new social features and release complementary products “around the greatest sport in the world.”

Downloading the app is free on iTunes, Google Play, and Windows store. The content covers over 100 leagues in 6 languages and the company hopes to expand this to 400 leagues and 40 language by the end of the year.

Growth of this speed and magnitude, as well as soaring rates of user engagement, is something every entrepreneur (and their investors) lust over. There are vast resources, companies, and products dedicated to achieving this type of traction. Marketing schemes, advertising campaigns, search engine optimization, social media analytics, referrals, and media attention, it seems, pale in comparison to sheer, simple love of the game.

Photo Credit: Ronnie Macdonald/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

This year’s Super Bowl is the first time that the NFL is offering free, advertising-supported Wi-Fi to its fans. But in order to protect the precious (and enormous) Wi-Fi network they’ve set up to handle nearly 30,000 people, officials are checking your wireless devices at the door, according to Ars Technica.

In partnership with Verizon and Cisco, the NFL created a beefed-up Wi-Fi system intended to sustain the entire crowd of Super Bowl spectators Sunday. It’s equipped with directional signals to make sure the Wi-Fi isn’t wasted on the empty space in the dome part of the Superdome, and it’s designed to withstand the thousands of streaming videos, stat checks, and blog posts viewers will undoubtedly interact with during the game.

But some of your devices could interfere with that signal — namely, any Wi-Fi connected cameras and laptops that are being used for private Wi-Fi networks. The NFL is checking all these devices, keeping in mind that some people — like the press — need their devices. If you’re found with what the NFL calls a “rogue” Wi-Fi device, the league is quarantining that puppy. Or staffers might change the channel on your Wi-Fi to ensure it doesn’t interfere.

Furthermore, the NFL is monitoring the network like a hawk. If it sees any funny business, such as a connection that’s throwing off part of the Wi-Fi, you could be asked to shut down that device.

If you’re headed to the Super Bowl, I wouldn’t worry about your phones. Surfing the Internet on your mobile devices is the whole reason the NFL set this up. But you should be wary of the Internet itself. The Wi-Fi is an open, free, password-less network, begging to be tapped into by some actual “rogues.”

Don’t use any financial or sensitive apps or send any private messages if you’re connected to the Wi-Fi. It might not just be the NFL watching your every move.

New Orleans Superdome photo: Infrogmation/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The Super Bowl is the most watched event in the nation. And thanks to the almighty power of the blessed Internet, this year’s gameday is easier to follow and participate in than ever before.

We’ve devised a comprehensive gameday strategy for football fans and all their friends and family members.

1) Watching the big game online

Desktop: If you can’t get to a television screen, CBS Sports is doing you a solid by streaming the entire broadcast on its website for free. Pregame programming begins at 8 a.m. PT (11 a.m. ET), with the game itself kicking off at 3:30 p.m. PT (6:30 p.m. ET). The CBS Sports website may actually provide a better experience than the traditional TV screen, as you can view the game from many different angles, check out a livestream of social activity, and play with several interactive features. But if, for whatever reason, you’re not a fan of CBS, then head over to the official NFL Network website to catch a free livestream of the game. If you live outside the country, though, you’ll be forced to purchase an NFL Game Pass to watch the Super Bowl.

Mobile: Can’t get to a television or desktop computer? If you’re Verizon customer, don’t worry. The wireless carrier/FiOS broadband Internet company is providing a Super Bowl livestream via its free NFL apps for iOS and Android to anyone with an NFL Mobile subscription ($5/mo.).

2) Watching the commercials online

You have a few options for keeping track of all the seemingly memorable Super Bowl commercials online, with many shortened or rejected versions of them already available for viewing online. I prefer to use the Hulu AdZone to watch the commercials, but YouTube’s AdBlitz is also a good option. Either way, watching the commercials online means you can skip the annual offering from GoDaddy, which is usually tasteless and degrading to women.

3) Second screen apps & services

Team Apps: Because most of you will be constantly glancing at your smartphone or tablet throughout the game anyway, this year’s Super Bowl comes with a handful of official mobile apps intended to enhance the viewing experience. Both the Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers have applications available on iOS, Android, and BlackBerry that will give you game news, short replay videos, photo galleries, player interviews, statistics, and other goodies.

Super Bowl event app: This year the NFL is providing those attending the game with a mobile app to make the most of their undoubtedly expensive experience. It has a map feature showing nearby restaurants, music, ticketing information, etc. And if it’s anything like the 2012 version, it will include some useful features for people who aren’t at the game too.

4) What to watch at halftime: Beyoncé or puppies?

Musical Performance: This year, CBS Sports will be providing a livestream of the Super Bowl’s halftime show, something that wasn’t available to online viewers in the past. That means you now have the option of watching Beyoncé try to entertain rambunctious football fans. If that doesn’t appeal to you, here’s another option:

Puppy Bowl: I’m not sure who at cable network Animal Planet was responsible for making an entire halftime show devoted to puppies playing with balls in an adorable dog-sized football field. But it’s back again this year, and with a new partnership that will vastly improve your viewing experience. Animal Planet has teamed up with Yahoo’s IntoNow application to give you an easy way to share and caption a large volume of adorable puppy screenshots via its CapIt feature (a meme generator). You may remember that I thoroughly praised IntoNow for its ability to make the 2012 presidential debates far more enjoyable. This will be more of the same, except this time you’ll actually stand a chance of getting everyone in the room to agree that your tweets are indeed awesome. For now, check out some game predictions using puppies, courtesy of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon:

5) Gameday Grub ideas

Foodily: Sure, you can definitely get away with ordering a few extra-large pizzas and opening a bag of chips, but why not go all out? I did a quick scan of some of the food startup blogs and was shocked to find that many of them had a pretty meager selection of Super Bowl food posts. Foodily, however, comes through, offering up not one, but three different posts that cover snacks, cocktails, and overall food. If you don’t like any of those selections, you can always search the site for more.

Yummly and Allrecipe: If you want a good recipe for regular game snack food, Allrecipe has collected a handy list of the most searched-for Super Bowl food. And if you have no idea what constitutes Super Bowl food or what the average football fan wants to eat, check out Yummly’s very extensive post on the subject using data from its own site.

Foodie iPad app: If you’re looking for a more directed crop of recipes, Glam Media’s cooking/food site Foodie has released a Foodie Recipes iPad app that highlights 40 game-day suggestions.

Seamless & GrubHub: If you hate cooking, or even leaving the confines of your house to pick up food for your guests, you can always use delivery services like Seamless or GrubHub to order from a ton of local restaurants.

6) Other miscellaneous Super Bowl-related apps, services, and content

Madden NFL 13: The EA Football game franchise is featuring a Ray Lewis pre-Super Bowl speech video on YouTube that’s available to watch now.

Xbox Live’s Sports Hub: A collection of Super Bowl-related content from a variety of Xbox media partners, including Hulu, Maxim, iHeartRadio, CrunchyRoll, and DailyMotion.

StatMilk: StatMilk has put together an interactive web infographic that compares statistical data of the Ravens and the 49ers. It’s actually pretty cool if you’re super into sports stats.

Swipper Bowl: Social startup Swipp has created a Swipper Bowl app that helps frame the discussion sports fans will likely be having via social media during the big game. To use it, you’ll need to connect with Facebook.

Football Party Game App: This is an iPad app/web app that lets you and a group of friends (wherever you are) to play a game of trivia during the Super Bowl. I’m not a fan of “pub quizzes” or trivia nights, but I have an exhausting list of friends who love it. It will, however, set you back $5.

TOK.tv iOS app: This app lets you chat with four other friends not in your general vicinity during the big game. It’s basically a Google Hangout that’s devoted to live sporting events. The TOK.tv iPad  app is free and available in the iTunes store.

7) Avoiding the heck out of the actual Super Bowl

Hey sports haters and hermits, did you think we’d forget about you? Nope. Here are a few cool things you may want to know going into Super Bowl Sunday weekend (the thing that will render your Twitter feeds useless for much of Sunday evening).

Netflix Free weekend: Did you know that Netflix is letting anyone with an Xbox 360 + Xbox Live membership access its vast library of streaming videos for the whole weekend? If you didn’t, and you don’t already subscribe to Netflix, you now can catch up on old episodes of Star Trek, classic Disney cartoons, and marathon through the first few seasons of Vampire Diaries. Hulu Plus is also enabling free access to its Xbox Live app for the weekend.

House of Cards: In addition to the Xbox Live weekend promo, Netflix is also debuting its first super huge original TV show, House of Cards, which is said to be on par with the quality of HBO’s original programming. The good thing about Netflix, as opposed to the cable networks, is that you won’t have to wait 13 weeks to finish the first season. Netflix is releasing the whole thing today.

HBO Go: Again, the Super Bowl is so powerful that HBO made the decision to release the latest episode of its hit series Girls one day early (Saturday, Feb. 2). I can’t imagine that anyone who’s a die-hard Lena Dunham fan would be upset about missing the Super Bowl, but regardless, we all benefit.

Did we miss anything? Let us know in the comment section, and we’ll be sure to add it.

In what appears to be an inevitable move, Electronic Arts has released a new version of its Madden Football game built specifically for mobile devices and social networks.

The latest installment of the franchise, Madden NFL 13 Social, is available on iPhones, iPads, and Facebook today. The video game mega-developer bills it as a “complete” turn-based multiplayer game experience for people of all skill levels, however Madden Social focuses entirely on offensive plays. It’s also a football game, so most people who download it know what to expect.

Madden Social offers touch-screen controls to move your players in the iOS versions, while the Facebook game gives you the option of choosing offensive strategies and watching the results via a simulated engine. It also lets you toggle between iOS and Facebook versions. That means when you’re sitting in a traffic jam playing on your iPhone, you can pick the game up again later at home via Facebook or iPad.

Players can set their team lineups through an auction house system to assemble a custom roster of NFL players. Madden NFL 13 Social uses a card-based management system that’s similar to the Madden Ultimate Team for consoles. Various portions of the gameplay grant you coins that you can use to buy new stuff to improve your team. I’m sure this will also eventually give way to an option to purchase more coins using real money or Facebook credits.

Madden Social is available for free via Apple App Store or through the official EA Madden Facebook page. Check out a gallery of screenshots from the game below.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

DirecTV and Sony have come to a new agreement to bring the NFL Sunday Ticket programming package to PlayStation 3 owners this season.

The satellite TV provider first offered a deal to bring the pro football package to the console last season as an extension of its regular $199 programming. However, anyone that wasn’t able to get DirecTV service was eligible to sign up for Sunday Ticket. Much like last year, DirecTV isn’t expected to verify whether you’re unable to get the package through a DirecTV provider — leaving cord-cutters free to get live streaming NFL games.

NFL Sunday Ticket costs $300, which is $40 less than last year. The one big difference is that DirecTV is requiring the full amount upfront, which I doubt will defer many cord cutters. The availability of live sports content is what keeps most people paying for their expensive cable or satellite TV service, and this is especially true of the NFL. If that price is still too high, NBC is live streaming some NFL games for free via its website, regardless of if you’re a regular cable subscriber.

The Sunday Ticket app will be available to download on the PlayStation Store on Tuesday. Let us know you plan on taking advantage of the offer in our comment section below.

Via AllThingsD

As the San Francisco 49ers fumbled their shot at a Superbowl appearance on Sunday, you could almost hear the Monday-morning quarterbacks warming up their complaints.

It’s no different in Silicon Valley, where the competitive sport is tech business instead of slamming heads together. Just like in football, anyone who’s not on the field has a strong opinion about how each play should have gone down. That’s especially true for the plays that end badly.

Take Research in Motion, for instance, which this week announced that its two CEOs, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, would be stepping aside. Everyone in California, where software is king, has been chortling about how slow RIM has been to wake up to the new reality. To be honest, we’ve been shaking our heads about RIM for over a year now. At a panel I spoke on at CES earlier this month, the moderator asked us whether Microsoft should buy RIM. My answer was “Why?” I honestly couldn’t think of any reason why Microsoft would benefit from that acquisition.

But it’s easy for me to say that Lazaridis and Balsillie have driven the company down the wrong road. If I were in charge of RIM, what would I have done differently? It’s not easy to see where the company went wrong. Sure, its PlayBook was a brain-dead attempt to make a captive tablet, and the product managers who dreamed up the idea of a tablet that can’t do email or contacts should be fired. But the PlayBook didn’t kill RIM. Nor did the lack of a touchscreen phone, as the company’s Storm line has been delivering an innovative touchscreen experience for several years now.

If anything, the thing that killed RIM was simply that it was RIM. Its entire value has been built upon the tight integration of its hardware, software, and a data network that was, until recently, the fastest, most reliable and most secure way to get email via a mobile device. The company couldn’t replace any piece of that tightly-integrated vertical stack (switching to Android, for instance) without bringing the whole edifice down. And as long as the business was generating cash, it would have been fiscally irresponsible to do so.

Similarly, it’s easy to mock Yahoo for being behind the times, slow to figure out where its true value lies, and stupid for outsourcing its core search technology. As I write these words, Yahoo hasn’t yet released its earnings (scheduled for Tuesday of this week), but I would be flabbergasted if the company showed anything other than a depressing slide in most of its important metrics. And yes, there are some obvious places where Yahoo needs to improve: Eliminating a huge number of underproductive middle managers, for starters. (As the old joke goes, “How many people work at Yahoo?” Answer: About half of them.)

But Yahoo, for all its faults, has an enormous audience, 700 million strong by some estimates, and a wide array of compelling products. Many of those customers are regular users who come to the portal every day for news, entertainment, or to connect with their friends through services like Yahoo Groups. Sure, many those products are probably built on top of 15-year-old code, haven’t been updated since the day Yahoo acquired them, and are ugly as sin, but they still work pretty darn well for their core audience.

Anyone who tried to turn Yahoo into the next hip social network company, a la Foursquare, would instantly alienate its core audience (suburban parents) and drive a stake through its revenues.

So what would you do if you were in new CEO Scott Thompson‘s chair? The path forward is not as obvious now as it will appear three years from now, in hindsight.

Plus, the whole idea that giant companies get too slow and stupid to adjust to the times is just naive. In reality, it’s the classic innovator’s dilemma: A company with a huge, proven revenue stream is not going to sacrifice it in order to make a bet on unproven future revenues.

It reminds me of the pundits who smugly talk about how massive companies can’t adjust to the new times because they misunderstand their true value. Railroad companies couldn’t manage the transition to the automobile-centric world, these experts say, because they didn’t understand they were in the transportation business. Similarly, newspapers are dying because they failed to understand that they’re in the information business.

Bull.

Railroad companies are in the “laying track and sending trains along it” business. Similarly, newspapers are in the “putting ink on newsprint and throwing it on your front porch” business.

Both were fantastically profitable businesses, while they lasted, because they offered virtual monopolies. When new technologies chipped away at those monopolies, the companies had no incentive to invest in the new technologies because to do so would be injurious to their fat profit margins. It’s only when the monopoly runs out and the company is hanging over a cliff that it makes sense to change its way of doing things, and by then, it’s too late.

So what should companies like RIM and Yahoo do? What should Kodak have done before it hit Chapter 11 last week? How about HP, whose many hapless CEOs helped send the company from Silicon Valley cornerstone to local embarrassment in little over a year?

If you have the answers, let me know. I’ll compile the best responses into a future column.

Photo: Aspen Photo / Shutterstock.com

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

For the first time ever, NBC and the National Football League have agreed to live stream the Super Bowl online and on mobile phones in February, the two organizations announced today.

The Super Bowl is the most-watched television program around the world each year, and commanded 111 million viewers for the last game, so it’s a huge deal to see its distribution move from analog to digital. With many users choosing to “cut the cord” and get rid of cable boxes in favor of computers, NBC and the NFL likely saw value in bringing the games online and to mobile devices to reach an even-bigger audience.

The two organizations also said they would live-stream NBC’s broadcasts of wild-card playoff games and the Pro Bowl, on top of the Super Bowl. The games will be streamed at NBCSports.com and NFL.com through the SNF Extra web app, which features “HD broadcast, DVR-style controls, additional camera angles, in-game highlights, live statistics and interactive elements.”

NBC and the NFL started live streaming select football games in 2008, but this is the first time the organizations have agreed to show playoff games online. NBC claims Sunday Night Football streams average between 200,000 and 300,000 viewers, while 21 million watch the games on TV, indicating that the TV ratings aren’t being affected significantly.

The phone presentation will be much more limited in scope than the traditional desktop streaming presentation. Only Verizon smartphones running the Verizon NFL Mobile app will be able to watch the Super Bowl and playoff games on their phones. NBC and the NFL did not specify which phones in the Verizon lineup include this application.

This year’s Super Bowl will take place in Indianapolis on Feb. 5.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Football, the season for pigskins, tailgates and letters painted on stomachs, is among us  OneLouder, the maker of Tweetcaster, is gearing up for game time with a new free mobile app launched today. It’s called Sportcaster and isn’t based on stats from ESPN or commentary from John Madden. Instead, it’s based on Twitter’s API. Using a custom built back-end engine, the app pulls tweets from coaches, players, dedicated sports media and others to give fans up to the minute action happening on the field.

“You’re way behind if you’re not looking at [information] on twitter. Twitter is breaking news,” Evan Conway, president of OneLouder, told VentureBeat in an interview.

Twitter is realtime. It’s 140 characters, there’s no fluff, and it’s what’s happening now. Sportcaster, which is now available on Android devices and the iPhone, taps into Twitter’s application programming interface (API). You can choose to see streams based on a particular game. Narrow the coverage further by specifying a particular team, or whether you want updates from coaches, players or media only.

“If you want a score or a game recap, that’s kind of yesterday’s app,” said Conway. Despite this, Sportcaster does allow you check schedules and scores that are aggregated through licensed content.

What’s great for sports fans is you don’t need a Twitter account to reap the benefits of quick, brash and entertaining play-by-plays. Conway noted 95 percent of the population knows of Twitter, but only 13 percent use it, a stat he found here. According to him, a good majority of these people not using Twitter are sports fans. The app doesn’t discriminate if you’re not a Tweeter.

The sports space is a dense one, however, with big wigs like ESPN, network sports programing and Twackle by Sports Illustrated, which have their own apps in the App Store. Conway even admitted saying, “Everyone is an indirect competitor.”

But not everyone taps into the collective knowledge of people on the ground. Sure, reporters are on the field, getting interviews, but tweets originating from the horse’s mouth are uncensored, unedited and probably make for an interesting retweet, if you choose to connect your Twitter to the app. It also lets player watch for tweets specifically associated with Fantasy Football to help them decide on trades and who to bench before the weekly deadline arrives.

So the app is cool. But with Twitter sloughing off third party apps, is OneLouder concerned with life in the Twitter API ecosystem?

“I’d be more concerned about Tweetcaster than I would about [Sportcaster],” he said. Tweetcaster is OneLouder’s iPhone app competing directly with Twitter’s.

“Sportcaster, in my opinion, does exactly what Twitter wants developers to do. Twitter came out and said 5 different ways they want devs to use their API and one of them is to aggregate their streaming content in interesting ways.”

Conway sees his app as a combination of technology, art and filtration that play into Twitter’s strengths. In fact, he suspects that Sportcaster will attract people to sign up for Twitter. He even sees Twitter’s user base growing from 13 percent  of the population aware of Twitter to 25 percent or more and says, “If they cut that off, that will be the beginning of the end.” But he also accepts that the ecosystem is the way it is.

“I don’t believe [Twitter] has been evil doing this,” he explained, “They’ve been a bit clumsy, kind of knocking devs over along the way, but as long as they open their API’s and let us compete, then that’s just kind of the nature of the beast.”

In the future, Conway plans to expand Sportcaster into new sports verticals, such as basketball and further fleshing out their college sports offerings. A Sportcaster iPad app is also in the works.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

No this isn’t Fantasy Funding, sports news site Bleacher Report raised a $22 million round of funding yesterday.

Bleacher Report is an online sports publication trying to take on the big boys of sports media like ESPN and Sports Illustrated. The company publishes content primarily from contributors. Since launching in 2008, B/R has seen a growth spurt. The company hired a new chief financial officer, Drew Atherton, who came to the company from consumer portfolio website United Online. The company has also reached north of 20 million monthly unique visitors and started the “Fab Five,” a departure from the all-contributor content model.

The Fab Five include Dan Levy, Josh Zerkle, Bethlehem Shoals, Dan Rubenstein and Matt Miller, who are Bleacher Report’s newest lead writers. They will cover national sports, the NFL, the NFL draft, the NBA and college football.

This year the Bleacher Report also took on new chief executive Brian Grey who previously worked for Yahoo and Fox Sports.

Oak Investment Partners led the round with existing investors Crosslink Capital and Hillsven Capital.

“It has been a long time since we have seen this type of growth in the sports content space with an independent multi-sports media company competing and surpassing some of the giants,” said Fred Harman, managing partner of Oak Investment Partners in a statement.

Bleacher Report will use the funding to hire employees on its content development side as well as further examine its delivery of that content. Going forward, the company may incorporate video and mobile options for readers who want B/R on the road.

Bleacher Report was founded in 2008. The company manages upwards of 1,000 featured columnists and 7,000 contributors whose work is syndicated to a number of external publications such as USA Today, NBA.com and the Los Angeles Times.

He rushes out onto the court. It doesn’t even feel like a video game. It feels like I’m sitting with my friends watching this game while it’s on live television. Somewhere out there, Jordan is laying a beat down on Magic Johnson, the Lakers’ point guard and top player. I don’t, at any point, feel like I’m physically playing basketball.

“The point of our games is not re-enacting throwing a football, but the spirit of the sport and letting gamers fulfill their sports dreams,” said Andrew Wilson, Electronic Arts’ sports game guru. “These are real players, they are real events and there is real angst — we want to re-enact reality.”

What’s more, sports games have an unrecognized role in driving forward innovation for the entire video game industry. That’s why you should take them seriously, even if you’re a sports-hating nerd who would rather pick up a BFG than a basketball.

I pissed off a few people for making a snarky comment about people complaining about the release of yet another Madden and NCAA Football game from Electronic Arts at the company’s summer games showcase last week. It’s perfectly understandable that someone would complain about the release of yet another sequel that — at face value — doesn’t seem to include new content or innovate at all. To most people’s eyes, the games seem like a roster update and a slightly better graphics and physics engine. But those people are missing the point of sports games.

Take NBA 2K11, for example. The game re-enacts some of basketball’s finest moments, such as Jordan’s famous shrug after he drilled his sixth three-point shot in the first half of game one against the Portland Trailblazers in the 1992 NBA finals. The same is true for other sports games. As a University of North Carolina graduate, I’m a Bulls fan by default. But I was way too young to appreciate that series back in ’92, when Jordan was at his peak. I was 5 years old at the time. This video game helps me relive an experience I missed the first time around.

The games feature hundreds of hours of commentary. And it isn’t from a generic commentator for a sport — sports games makers pull in the same commentators that show up on ESPN and CBS for live sports games. Clark Kellogg and Doris Burke, two well-known reporters in the sports field, show up in games like NBA 2k11. The games feature commentary that really feels equivalent to a live sports game.

“When I look at the various people out there criticizing the franchise, they’re not sports fans, and that’s okay because there are a lot of people who are,” Wilson said. “If you ever ask a sports fan, there’s a reason the sports category is one of the top categories in games — it makes up around 20 percent of the game industry.”

Most of the heckling I took from that comment came from gamers saying that they should simply go out and actually play football. But these sports video games aren’t designed to replace that experience. The act of playing a sport is something that binds us together as human beings. Games like soccer and tennis transcend nations, ideologies and religion — they are games we all feel a deep connection to, and physically playing that sport will never be replaced.

And, after all, you wouldn’t want to feel like you are defending Johnson when he drives the lane for a lay-up a hundred times in a game.

“Having an Andy Roddick serve coming at you probably isn’t that fun — you wouldn’t even be able to see it most of the time,” Wilson said. “The idea is not to ever face something as dynamic or ominous as an Andy Roddick serve, but give you something that feels like an Andy Roddick serve.”

Sports games are a main source of revenue for Electronic Arts, so a lot of the innovation in terms of graphics and realistic physics happens in that department and trickles down to other games, said David Tinson, director of relations for EA Sports. Electronic Arts, for example, uses the collision engines originally built for Madden in games like Battlefield 3, Wilson said. Each year, those teams build and re-build physics and animation engines for their in-game characters, and then other games reap the rewards of those engines.

“Physics and animation in our very core games has been driven by sports games since the inception of the technology,” Wilson said. “That physics and animation had to be in a sports game, for many years shooters didn’t need it.”

The same goes for artificial intelligence. Shooters are becoming more realistic so it becomes more important that non-playable characters start making decisions like normal human beings. That started with games like Fifa, where the company had to design artificial intelligence that would make 22 players on a pitch behave like real human beings and make realistic decisions, Tinson said.

Those teams also pioneered the “once-a-year” cycle that many companies like Activision-Blizzard now employ in their largest franchises, Tinson said. The teams spend longer than a year working on the game, and they rotate as to which year to release games. For example, Call of Duty: Black Ops and Modern Warfare 3 are both Call of Duty games released one year apart, but they both had development cycles longer than one year. Activision-Blizzard is able to do this because they have multiple Call of Duty teams.

Again, these video games aren’t supposed to exactly replicate the act of watching a real sports game or going out and playing a real sport. I’ve added videos below of one of the greatest moments in basketball history, including both the real thing and a representation of it in a video game. It’s not the same thing, but the video game does a great job of capturing the emotion and feeling of that game. For video gamers, that makes it a window into an important piece of sports history.

So, to the folks I pissed off a little while ago: I’m not saying you have to start liking sports games. But realize what they contribute to the industry. It isn’t simply Football Roster Update 2012 or Next Sports Game 2012 — they are new games, just like every other genre. And they bring something new to the table, too.

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