For years, the National Football League offseason was a period defined by information asymmetry. While front offices sat behind “glass walls” in war rooms, armed with proprietary Next Gen Stats and sophisticated modeling tools, the average fan was left to navigate a fragmented landscape of mock drafts, cap calculators, PDF guides and Twitter rumors.
The intersection of professional sports and cloud computing has enabled leagues and organizations to accelerate innovation. However, the partnership between the PGA Tour and Amazon Web Services Inc. is currently entering a new phase: the hyper-personalized era. This week the golf world descended upon TPC Sawgrass for THE PLAYERS Championship, to watch Cam Young take the title. AWS and the PGA Tour are using the event to debut a suite of technologies that doesn’t just track the ball but interprets the game.
In the world of professional sports, “data-driven” is often a term tossed around to describe basic box scores. But for the National Football League, the last 10 years have represented a fundamental shift in how the game is measured, analyzed and even played. This week, as the league reflects on a decade of its Next Gen Stats or NGS platform, the story isn’t just about football — it’s an excellent example of how cloud-native infrastructure and machine learning can transform an industry in real time.
Cisco Systems Inc. held its second annual AI Summit this week, with a star-studded lineup of artificial intelligence celebrities. Unlike most vendor events, the Cisco AI Summit was designed to be a “meeting of the minds,” bringing together the “builders of the AI economy” to help the industry move past the hype and address the practical realities of a world being reshaped by AI.
I’m a big fan of any technology that makes our lives easier. One example of this is Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology, which I consider to be the easiest check out experience available today. Customers tap their credit card on a reader, walk in a store, pick up whatever they want and then, as the name suggests, just walk out of the store and everything is charged to your account.