Author: Staff (Page 7 of 29)

      Proliferation of daily fantasy sports games

      September 30, 2013 /

      Brandon Weeden_IMG_8207

      Did you capitalize on Brian Hoyer starting for the Cleveland Browns once Brandon Weeden got hurt? Or have you been riding Peyton Manning’s incredible performances so far this season. You might think I’m referring to typical conversations for fantasy football, but with the explosion of daily fantasy sports games, millions of dollars are legally changing hands as websites and now even apps try to capitalize on these games of skill. This has completely changed the landscape of sports betting as players now have the option of risking cash on daily fantasy games as opposed to the traditional method of picking games against the spread. Now with SideDraft being added to the Apple app store we might see the games become even more popular.

      The key revolves around the notion that picking lineups in a fantasy game makes these games “skill” games that are not prohibited by various state and federal laws. With the popularity of fantasy football and other sports, these new sites just add the cash element and suddenly we have a new niche exploding around the web. The key difference from a game point of view is that you pick different players each week, so you’re not stuck with a crappy like regular fantasy football if you have a bad draft or have key injuries on your roster.

      Most of these games have salary cap of course, so you’ll pay a price for using Manning or someone like Adrian Peterson. The key is finding cheap bargains who can have big games, like Hoyer of course. Even veterans like Philip Rivers of the San Diego Chargers can help you win, as he’s having a huge year but wasn’t in great demand in typical fantasy leagues.

      These games can be just as addicting as regular gambling or regular fantasy football, so the popularity isn’t surprising. I am surprised however that some lawmakers have tried to stop everyone from having so much fun.

      Apps, Entrepreneurs, Gadgets, Games, Mobile, New Media

      Death of 3D TV

      July 30, 2013 /

      Is anyone really surprised by this? 3D television was always overhyped, and now we’re seeing companies like ESPN officially giving up on this failed experiment.

      Nails are being banged into the coffin for 3D television. On Wednesday, Disney (DIS) said it would discontinue its 3D channel by the end of this year. Television manufacturers always saw sports programming as the way to persuade people about 3D, just as adoption of HDTV was driven largely by NFL fans. The fans weren’t persuaded. Three years into ESPN’s 3D push, the company said the whole thing wasn’t worth the effort.

      3D has always been a technology that television manufacturers wanted to sell a lot more than anyone wanted to buy. For the last several years, 3D televisions have been trumpeted as the future at such events as the Consumer Electronics Show. But even with all the energy the industry could muster, only 20 percent of LCD televisions sold had 3D capability. Even this is probably an overstatement of how much interest there is in the technology, because it sure looks like a lot of people who buy those televisions never put on those glasses.

      The quality of TVs these days is amazing. But, they have also become commodities. That doesn’t mean we won’t see innovation in the future, but at this time manufacturers have to realize that their hopes for a new replacement cycle fueled by 3D televisions wil not materialize.

      Gadgets

      Twitter keeps screwing with my email notification settings

      July 8, 2013 /

      Twitter email notification abuse screen shot

      I hate it when awesome social media services like Twitter get so big that they become desperate to drive more growth. It’s one thing to keep improving the user experience, but it’s quite another to manipulate settings in a lame attempt to drive more engagement.

      Twitter keeps messing with my email notifications across my various business accounts. I don’t want my email inbox flooded with useless email notifications from Twitter, so I shut them all off. But the folks at Twitter keep adding more reasons to send you an email, like “Someone shares a Tweet with me” and “Someone from my address book joins Twitter.” Naturally, their default option is to have the box checked, so even if you wipe all the email options clean in your settings, Twitter keeps adding new reasons and then checking them so you get more emails.

      Enough. Please stop. This is just ridiculous. Please add an option at the top that let’s me tell you I never want to receive any emails from Twitter.

      New Media

      Facebook phone finally announced

      April 4, 2013 /

      Mark Zuckerberg has announced the new Facebook phone as you can see in the video above. The phone will be based on Android but it will be laid out differently with the home page of the phone being devoted to people rather than apps.

      Let’s see if this takes off. Not everyone wants the world to see who is on their Facebook “favorites” list on their phone home page. I can see plenty of drama with girlfriends, etc.

      Apps, Gadgets, Mobile, New Media, Social Media, social networking, Video

      « Older posts Newer posts »

      © 2026 Linked and Loaded

      Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑