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Racing & Technology Archive

This Includes Racing

“We are plainly witnessing a restructuring of the media businesses, but their suffering isn’t unique, it’s prophetic. All businesses are media businesses, because whatever else they do, all businesses rely on the managing of information… The increase in the power of both individuals and groups, outside traditional organizational structures is unprecedented. Many institutions we rely on today will not survive this change without significant alteration, and the more an institution or industry relies on information as its core product, the greater and more complete the change will be.” — Clay Shirky, “Here Comes Everybody”

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“People take information and build knowledge. When you give them new information they will create new knowledge, absolutely and without question.” — Bill James, NYT

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And here, Gary Vaynerchuk explains how tech 2008 looks like hip-hop 1985. What we find revolutionary now will be ubiquitous and mainstream in 10 years:

Posted in Racing & Technology on April 4, 2008

Now Playing on Hulu

TVG. The racing network has launched a broadband division and uploaded a selection of evergreen trainer and jockey profiles and handicapping clips to the favorably-reviewed video site, which attracted a bit of buzz at SXSW when it was announced Monday that the site would come out of private beta this week. You might be thinking this is no big deal, but Hulu is no YouTube. Content isn’t user-generated, it’s original programming from NBC Universal and a raft of other providers — including the NHL, NBA, and Fox — and despite some shortcomings — such as no downloads or international access — the site is a pretty remarkable web service, pointing the way premium on-demand video is going online and offering significant potential for attracting an audience to racing — so long as the content is compelling.

Posted in Media/TV/Film, Racing & Technology on March 13, 2008

What Racing Needs …

More geeks, more technologists, more entrepreneurs, more people thinking deeply and creatively about programming, experience design, usability, prediction markets, social networks, mashups, content distribution.

Racing needs a start-up culture.

Posted in Racing & Technology on March 4, 2008

Moneytrack

I just finished reading “Moneyball,” by Michael Lewis, the surprisingly engrossing story of how the Oakland A’s used statistical data to build a winning team. Like a lot of other racing fans, I have an overlapping interest in baseball stats, and I find it fascinating to follow another sport also afflicted with a sclerotic power structure, dominated by people who believe they know everything about their fans and how to put on the show or market their data. The result, a collective failure of imagination leading to a management culture more interested in brand caretaking than innovation, opens up intriguing little niches, exploitable market inefficiencies. In the late-1990s in baseball, the inefficiency was in statistical analysis; in the mid-2000s in racing, the inefficiency is in technology, which no one has quite figured out yet.

What the industry also hasn’t figured out is the benefit of making charts and statistics widely, easily, and freely available. Baseball has been pushed along by the growth of fantasy games, as well as the game’s stats nerds, and the obsessive and intelligent analysis of baseball data in both pursuits can be credited with — I think it’s fair to argue — keeping the sport in the mainstream even during during dark days such as the 1994 strike and the ongoing steroids scandal. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to conclude that racing could be similarly buoyed if it removed the hassle of finding any information at all about races run more than a week ago.

Related: Over on Handride, Patrick picks up on the news that Intel is producing chips that will substantially improve online video quality, sees a glorious opportunity for the industry.

Posted in Racing & Technology on November 15, 2007