Embracing March Madness
New York — March Madness is taking over at small companies that are letting employees watch the NCAA basketball tournament while they work. Staffers at the marketing company Phelps will be able to keep an eye on the games at their desks or on conference room TVs. CEO Joe Phelps said his 86 employees are hard workers, often staying late or completing projects on weekends, so he’s fine if they work a little less hard during when games...
Future Cord-Cutters of America
San Diego — On weekdays in the Larsen household, Kirsten, 12, and Soren, 15, get up early and park themselves on the couch before school. But they do not turn on the TV. Instead, the youngsters each pull out their respective phones and fire up YouTube to get a dose of videos, essentially acquiring the information they need to know before encountering peers. Say hello to the future cord-cutters of America. Not only is cable becoming...
Watching Sports on Virtual Reality: Not Ready for Big Time
I took a step into the virtual future of sports recently. I’m glad I got to look around, but it didn’t take long before I was ready to high-tail it back to the real world. The Golden State Warriors season opener against the New Orleans Pelicans became the first ever sporting event to be live streamed in virtual reality video to the public. In a small room in the bowels of Oracle Arena, some fellow journalists and I took turns using...
Solid Growth for Wearable Devices
In the three months leading up to the April release of the Apple Watch, the wearables market continued to show strong growth. The worldwide wearable device market recorded its eighth consecutive quarter of steady growth in the first quarter this year, with vendors shipping a total of 11.4 million wearables, according to research firm IDC. That was a 200 percent increase from 3.8 million in the year-earlier quarter. “Bucking the...
