- Yesterday I commented on Tesla Motor’s big announcement to produce cars in California over New Mexico. Today another big rumor is floating around that Tesla has reached a deal to sell batteries to Mercedez in their efforts to sell electic cars by 2010. With other big name auto companies believed interested in similar deals, one wonders if Tesla’s future may one day be mainly as a battery maker and secondarily a car manufacturer.
Tesla Battery Below
- Yahoo email freaking blows compared to Gmail. Most of the emails in my inbox are spam and a good 25% of non spam emails end up in the spam folder.
Emails I have had to dig out of my spam folder include 2 job offers, a reply email from a friend, a response from an Ohio State professor about a speaking engagement, and notification that I won an African lottery ….kidding.
Gmail on the other hand is pretty much balls on accurate. Yahoo is a crap shoot, and I am thinking of phasing out the account.
- I gave into the temptation to join Twitter tonight. I’ll recap my thoughts in it in a couple of weeks. Feel free to “follow” me at http://twitter.com/bkoo
- Finally wanted to give a look at how sweet Yardbarker is. There are a lot of cool fuctions and things we are doing, but what continues to amaze me is how easy it is for fans to interact with athletes. Below are some schreenshots of some exchanges between me and Chiefs WR Dwayne Bowe and Angels Pitcher John Lackey
If you watch ESPN ever so often, then you are well versed in Stephen A Smith. For those who know him, feel free to skip the video below and paragraph below
Stephen A on a typical tirade
Smith came to ESPN in 2005 and was tabbed as a rising star in sports broadcasting with columns with the Philadelphia Inquirer, his own national radio show, his own show “Quite Frankly” on ESPN, as well as appareances on a variety of other ESPN shows. He covered a variety of sports, but his bread and butter was basketball.
There was one problem though, Stephen A Smith earned the repuation “Screaming A Smith” as he always seemed outrage, agitated, and on the verge of major stroke. He bashed anything and everything and the schtick grew thin. Some enjoyed it but most including myself hated him.
Slowly he started coming back to Earth. His radio show and weekly column ended, Quite Frankly got canceled, and ESPN seemed to be limiting his role in NBA coverage. I am sure this didn’t sit well Mr. Smith, but the real dagger came when ESPN removed him from the stage of this past NBA draft and relegated him to interviewing draft picks on the side. Smith had spent the past 2 years as one of key analysts of the draft.
Smith’s demotion and general angry demeanor has been the talk of the sports blogoshpere for quite awhile, but recently I came across the organization known as Stephen A Smith Heckling Society of Gentleman that I wanted to share.
The backstory is short and sweet. A couple of buddies, / loud mouth wise asses (that’s a compliment), attended the 2006 NBA draft and videotaped various exchanges with Stephen A Smith. In particular they poked fun of the fact that Smith ate a copious amount of Cheese Doodles when off camera. Their jeers and impressions of Smith were ridiculously on target and quickly became a viral hit on youtube.
The following year, the same tandem guys (sobriety again in question), returned to the draft and once again jeered Smith. This time they added a new twist by chasing after players, pretending that a on camera sock puppet was Smith. The sock impersonating Smith was actually slapped by Joahkim Noah and was extremely affective and entertaining with numerous cliche sound bites like “I am Stephen A Smith, and everything I say is important” “Quite Frankly….” “HowEVER….”.
Oblivious to internet phenomena mocking him, Smith served up a gem by going on a tirade on his National radio show touting his love of Cheese Doodles. Once again the Stephen A Smith Heckling Society of Gentleman produced another classic youtube video.
With three popular videos produced, the guys once again took to it to mock one of the most annoying sports personality since Dennis Miller. Below are their efforts
All of the above is just another great and comedic example of web2.0/social media’s impact on traditional media. Tired of Smith, the two friends took a silly day at the draft and grew it to an internet phenomen. Smith has been demoted multiple times while the videos above have garnered almost a million views as well acknowledgements by Tony Kornheiser and Kevin Love.
While its hard to say that these videos played a role in Smith’s plight back to earth, social media serves more and more as the first line into emerging trends, opininons, movements, etc. These videos served as the centerpiece of the anti Smith general opinion that has relegated to a second tier ESPN personality. Their popularity only confirmed what most viewers and maybe even the ESPN brass already suspected :
Stephen A Smith needed to be taken down a peg or two and more importantly should seek therapy.
Props to the guys who have made it a priority in their lives to lead this movement. Also good to see they haven’t tried to monetize their viral hit, but have rather decided to plug a very worthy cause.
A co worker asked me if I wanted to live the blog the NBA Draft for Yardbarker. I jumped at the opportunity as I have never really “live blogged” anything.
I think I did okay, and the Yardbarker community gave me some good marks.
Awhile back I blogged about how the NHL’s television deal on Versus was a significant detriment to the league’s continued growth and success.
On the flip side, ESPN (the NHL’s former television carrier), was discretely stagnating its efforts in covering the NHL with no business incentive to cover the least popular of the the big 4 sports leagues.
Despite the exodus of NHL commentators and analysts to other networks, ESPN retained Barry Melrose who did his best to anchor and sustain ESPN NHL coverage.
But with no sight of the NHL returning to ESPN, Melrose decided to scratch his growing itch to return to coaching and is believed to be set to accept the Tampa Bay Lightning coaching vacancy tomorrow. Melrose has had success as a coach, and was most likely growing weary of ESPN’s half ass coverage of the NHL.
I’ll leave analysis of the effect of Melrose’s hiring to Tampa Bay up to the experts. However I will say with no live games, no nightly recap shows devoted to hockey (NHL 2night is gone), lesser coverage on Sportscenter, and now the loss of ESPN’s face of hockey coverage, “The Sports leader” should most likely add an asterisk to their byline excluding their diminishing NHL coverage from the ambitious statement.
Ohio State will be hosting its Senior Camp this weekend and will host some of the country’s best soon to be senior football players. This usually serves as a recruiting boost and there are rumblings of almost a handful of potential commitments in the works.
In particular look for some movement with the below players
What’s most impressive about the above list of kids is that the Buckeyes continue to make deep in roads out of state with recruits from Florida, Pennsylvania, and Illinois all rumored to be close to pulling the trigger. With success in these states in 2007, the potential continued success bodes well for future recruiting efforts.
Today on a wimb I did a Google News search on the Big Ten Network looking to see if they had mady any progress to strike a distribution deal with Comcast.
I found an article around noon with an update was iminent in the coming week. Fast forward to a couple hours later when I was visiting Yardbarker blog, Awful Announcing, to see that indeed the a deal had been finalzed bringing the Big Ten Network to basic cable in the Big Ten Region . The deal also means that the Big Ten Network will become avaiable on sports packages for those with Comcast outside of the Big Ten region.
The bottom line is that the agreement means “Just 40 percent of the homes equipped with cable or satellite dishes will be able to receive BTN in Ohio as things stand. That compares to the new totals of 89 percent in Indiana, 87 percent in Illinois, 83 percent in Pennsylvania and 79 percent in Michigan.”
The agreement is a HUGE win for the Big Ten Network which now has legitimate staying power as a cable network. Regardless if Charter or Time Warner pick up the network, BTN has enough distribution through ATT, Comcast, Dish, Direct TV and most likely Verizon Fios in the near future to survive the two remaining holdouts.
Let’s hope the NFL network is able to find similar success in the coming months as we approach fall.
Awhile back I wrote a blog ranking the 12 months of the year of how exciting they are to me as a sports fan. While June clocks in midway through the list, the second half of June followed by July and August are some of the most difficult times of the year to endure.
I got some cool Bucknuts stories in the pipeline but wanted to bring attention to some rather cool things going on in the sports world currently.
- As a casual golf fan, watching the US Open this weekend was a tremendous investment of my time. Battling a bum knee, Tiger had an epic Round 3 (see below, u ever see Golf fans go this nuts before outside of Billy Madison)
Rocco Mediate played a solid final round forcing Tiger to hit the shot below to force a 18 hole playoff. If he misses this putt Mediate would be your US Open Champion.
It only got better from there as Rocco actually had a 1 stroke lead on the last hole of the playoff. Tiger birdied the hole forcing a sudden death playoff where he eventually won his 14th major.
The 91 holes of golf which included the 18 hole playoff and 1 hole sudden death playoff took its toll on Tiger who’s knee injury is now forcing him to miss the rest of the 2008 season with major surgery required on his left knee. While golf can be somewhat slow, non physical, and for rich guys wearing collared shirts, this past tournament was an epic showcase of golf and Tiger woods at their best.
- The Celtics Lakers series had some good games but didn’t live up to all the hype. I invested on the Celtics to win in 6 games and was rewarded nicely. Yardbarker blogger Rajon Rondo did a tremendous job blogging a whopping 14x during the finals. Rondo won over a lot of fans with his insight into his finals experience which was capped with a stellar effort in game 6. Rondo lit up the box score with 21 points, 8 assists, 7 boards, and 6 steals in just 32 minutes. With an exciting style and willingness to be oepn about his life, its great to see Rondo rewarded for all his efforts.
-Finally tomorrow the Euro Cup starts its quarter finals with the first of 4 games over the next 4 days. International soccer is a rare treat, but I will be sure to try to check out all 4 games which will be televised midday depending on where you live in the US. If you enjoy soccer at all, be sure to check out these games if you can as they look to be fairly competitve, entertaining, with storylines to boot.
The best 2 games are on Thursday and Sunday. I’ll go with Portugal, Croatia, Netherlands, and Spain all advancing with Portugal losing to the Netherlands in the final.
All four games are on either ESPN or ABC and are outlined below.
Life has been hectic of late and will not calm down until next week. However, I hope to jam in 3-4 solid posts before the weekend. This one will focus on sports with hopefully some commentary on tech, entertainment, and commercials soon to follow.
- Rajon Rondo had a stellar weekend putting up 18 assists, grabbing 6 boards, while only having 2 turnovers. Even more impressive, Rondo blogged about the finals on Yardbarker 4x in the 24 hours before and after the game. Its great to see Rondo interacting with fans and sharing his thoughts and state of mind during such a compelling time of the year for him.
For those of you who don’t know my current employer, check out Yardbarker.com.
- The other interesting news of the weekend, was Big Brown losing in the Belmont. Big Brown actually finished last as his jockey eased off of him 2/3 into the race, fearing the horse was injured. Turns out no injury can be found. So what’s the deal?
Nobody really knows, any maybe nobody will ever know what really happened. However let me put forth this conspiracy theory (its a doozie, but I never concoct theories).
Below you will find the odds for the Belmont. Casino Drive, the horse Vegas picked second most likely to win, scratched as many suspected he would. With Casino Drive out, 8 of 9 the horses left were pretty heavy underdogs with only one horse having better than 20-1 odds. You can see where this is going.
Is it possible that someone got to jockey Ken Desormeaux, and explained him that if he could hold Big Brown back, that a mighty fortune could be made on one of the other horses. In fact the odds above are somewhat stingy as other betters cashed in on eventual winner Da’Tara at 40-1.
I haven’t heard this idea thrown around and am not saying it happened, but if there EVER was an opportunity to pull this, it would have been Saturday. The scenario of one front runner and a field of heavy underdogs may never be replicated to this degree again.
- The Euro Cup has started and has fairly entertaining thus far. Its nice to watch soccer at work or late at night. ESPN and ESPN 2 are televising a decent amount of games so tune in to watch the second most enjoyable soccer tournament.
- Finally, I wanted to chime in to keep your eye on the UFC this week. I am not an avid fan of MMA, but have slowly getting more into it as my friends are hooked like worse then Barkley on casinos.
This week UFC president is set to make a “mind blowing” annoucement. Lots of speculation that the company has been bought or at least reached a major network deal. It will be interesting to see as MMA continues to cross over to the mainstream while boxing wilts away to an afterthought on the national scene.
The outlook is bleak for boxing. I can’t think of anyone young who prefers it to MMA or even cares what so ever. If that doesn’t change, we may see boxing fizzle down to a third tier sport.
